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The Education of the Young Artist
While Michelangelo and his biographers downplayed the significance of his early training in the Ghirlandaio workshop in Florence (1487–90/91), research aided by scientific imaging techniques continues to uncover important connections to the creative processes of his late 15th-century predecessors. The Florentine workshops of the Ghirlandaio family, Andrea del Verrocchio, and the brothers Antonio and Piero del Pollaiuolo were places of stimulating collaboration (and rivalry), professional networking, shared knowledge, efficient delegation of labor, high productivity, and impressive technical development.
This section presents works by Michelangelo's teacher Domenico Ghirlandaio, a virtuosic draftsman in metalpoint, black chalk, and pen and ink, and by some of Michelangelo's contemporaries, such as Francesco Granacci -- a lifelong friend who studied with him in the Ghirlandaio workshop. There, Michelangelo learned various techniques of drawing and of painting in tempera and fresco, as well as general procedures for designing compositions. Also on view is Michelangelo's fabled first painting, the Torment of Saint Anthony.
Although Vasari emphasized Michelangelo's break with the immediate past, the biographer celebrated the young artist's study of works by Giotto, Masaccio, and Donatello -- the great masters who represented the earlier, heroic era of Italian art. Michelangelo's earliest surviving drawings, seen here, from the mid-to late 1490s, are inspired copies after these artists and the ancients. |