MICHELANGELO AND DAVID BERNINI

Michelangelo and David Bernini

Michelangelo and David Bernini

Introduction

The Renaissance was a cultural movement that seeks the renewal of man and his world, according to the models of the classical period. He turned to learn Greek and Latin perfected the Italian was relegated to the background. It was fashionable to be religious and therefore artists of all kinds, from the lyric poet to the simple goldsmith, were feted and honored. As the Middle Ages was a consistent view of God and an interpretation of life as a waiver and preparation for death, the Renaissance was an extreme love for the earthly life, beauty and nature.

Italian Renaissance painting exercised a dominant influence on subsequent European painting (see Western painting) for centuries afterwards, with artists such as Giotto di Bondone, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Michelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Titian.

David Bernini

Between 1618 and 1625, Bernini was commissioned to decorate the house with the sculptures of his patron, Cardinal Scipione Borghese. In 1623 - only 24 years yet - he worked on the sculpture of Apollo and Daphne, when for some reason he left this project to begin work on David. According to records of payment, Bernini in sculpture had begun by mid-1623, while his contemporary biographer, Filippo Baldinucci , states that he finished it in seven months.

Bernini is the theorist of human movement in sculpture, but not a movement in itself, but able to create feelings and show expressions. It is the living expression of energy and dramatic movement and the fighting spirit so characteristic of Baroque poetry. Bernini chose the moment that David is going to attack the giant Goliath, virtuous action, a body contracted, with muscle tension resolved in full at any time to release the sling. His David is human dimensions in all directions from anatomical proportions to printing dwarfed by his mortality, does not have the arrogance of Michelangelo, but the determination and it are here where lies its beauty (Giudici, 2006).

Description of the work

Bernini, following the pattern of the Baroque, the David portrays a moment before it cast the stone that kills the giant Goliath, catching him in a twist and an expression of effort with a maximum physical and emotional tension. Unlike the Renaissance vision (including Donatello, Verrocchio and Michelangelo 's David represents), Bernini's baroque vision processed in the movement, captures all the bodily expressions that show the effort reporting even the smallest detail, in a pose sinuous and plastic.

Michelangelo

Michelangelo's most-used tool was the serrated claw chisel, called the gradina. With this tool, Michelangelo was able to create both grooved and crosshatched textures on the form as he carefully carved the excess stone. Like the lines and cross-hatching that he used to create form in his two-dimensional drawings, the grooved textures that Michelangelo carved with his gradina helped define the form of the sculpture that he slowly and skillfully “released” from the stone. Sometimes these textures would eventually be filed and smoothed away as the work progressed but often, ...