William Wallace, a professor of art history at Washington University in St. Louis, is widely considered America’s preeminent authority on Michelangelo. In an array of scholarly books and articles written over the past 20 years, he has argued for a fundamental reassessment of the great Renaissance master’s personal and professional character. Through Wallace’s meticulously documented research and analysis, Michelangelo has emerged not as the isolated, brooding loner of legend, but as an entrepreneur of the arts, deftly negotiating complex networks of patronage and influence while directing a lively band of assistants, who were both his employees and his friends.
Michelangelo, redefined
This detailed portrait of the master brings to life the man but not his times
In his new book, “Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man, and His Times,’’ Wallace attempts to make these insights accessible to a wider audience, offering a manageably sized but richly detailed narrative of the artist’s life and career. This book is not without faults, but it is probably the best biography of Michelangelo in existence - more reliable than J.A. Symonds’s outdated, if elegantly composed, “The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti” (1893) and less doctrinaire than Charles de Tolnay’s five-volume “Michelangelo’’ (1943-1960), whose continuing utility as a work of reference is undermined, to a considerable degree, by a tendency toward egregious over-interpretation.
There exists no shortage of books on Michelangelo. He was the first artist in Western history to see his biography written and published during his own lifetime - specifically, the chapter devoted to him in Giorgio Vasari’s “The Lives of the Artists.” Longevity played a role in this singular honor. Vasari also profiled several of Michelangelo’s contemporaries - Botticelli, Leonardo, Raphael, et al. - but they had died by the time the book appeared in 1550.
Michelangelo was then 75 years old and could look back with pride on a lengthy and miraculous record of achievement: his early sculptural triumphs with the “Pietà” and “David,” the famed ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and the late-life fresco masterpiece of “The Last Judgment.” And yet the artist still had 14 more years of productivity ahead of him.
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