Existing comment:
The Heroic Male Nude and the Battle of Cascina
Michelangelo's encounter with the monuments of ancient Rome between 1496 and 1500 fed his artistic ambitions for large-scale work. The language of his disegno matured with his work on two commissions: the colossal marble David in 1501 and a large mural composition soon thereafter. The 29-year-old Michelangelo was charged with painting the Battle of Cascina on a wall of the Great Council Hall of Florence's Palazzo della Signoria in the summer of 1504. The project brought him into face-to-face competition with the much older Leonardo da Vinci, then his major rival in Italy, who had been commissioned to paint the Battle of Anghiari a year earlier. The artists prepared monumental cartoons, or full-scale drawings, for their respective murals, but the projects were abandoned by 1506–8. While neither cartoon survives, together they were called the "school of the world" by the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, because numerous younger artists learned their craft by studying and copying their compositions and individual figures.
In conceiving the Battle of Cascina cartoon, Michelangelo focused on the portrayal of the male nude in action, studied from life and from three-dimensional clay or wax models. His command of anatomy and its expressive possibilities was his artistic strength, as evidenced by the drawings related to the project gathered here. |