This course examines Italian Renaissance sculpture through works by Michelangelo, the period’s most paradigmatic and polarizing artist. An innovator across many arts, he nonetheless identified as a sculptor alone. Michelangelo’s proclivity for sculpture-especially in marble-invites us to reexamine his sculpture and practice from multiple vantages: its dialogue with antiquity, its challenge to painting’s primacy, its relationship to architecture, its conception of the body, its dialogue with poetry, its materiality, and its reception and reformulation by contemporary artists and theorists alike.
