Becoming Michelangelo: Apprenticing to the Master and Discovering the Artist through His Drawings

by Alan Pascuzzi

Overview

Michelangelo’s developing genius is revealed as never before by the man who became Michelangelo’s last apprentice—an American artist and art historian whose family helped carve Mount Rushmore.

Many believe Michelangelo's talent was miraculous and untrained, the product of “divine” genius—a myth that Michelangelo himself promoted by way of cementing his legacy. But the young Michelangelo studied his craft like any Renaissance apprentice, learning from a master, copying, and experimenting with materials and styles. In this extraordinary book, Alan Pascuzzi recounts the young Michelangelo’s journey from student to master, using the artist’s drawings to chart his progress and offering unique insight into the true nature of his mastery.

Pascuzzi himself is today a practicing artist in Florence, Michelangelo’s city. When he was a grad student in art history, he won a Fulbright to “apprentice” himself to Michelangelo: to study his extant drawings and copy them to discern his progression in technique, composition, and mastery of anatomy. Pascuzzi also relied on the Renaissance treatise that “Il Divino” himself would have been familiar with, Cennino Cennini's The Craftsman’s Handbook (1399), which was available to apprentices as a kind of textbook of the period.

Pascuzzi’s narrative traces Michelangelo’s development as an artist during the period from roughly 1485, the start of his apprenticeship, to his completion of the Sistine Chapel ceiling in 1512. Analyzing Michelangelo’s burgeoning abilities through copies he himself executed in museums and galleries in Florence and elsewhere, Pascuzzi unlocks the transformation that made him great. At the same time, he narrates his own transformation from student to artist as Michelangelo’s last apprentice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628729153
Publisher:	Arcade
Publication date:	05/21/2019
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Alan Pascuzzi is a painter, sculptor, and professor of art history who received a Fulbright scholarship to travel to Florence and apprentice himself to Michelangelo. He copied all 135 of Michelangelo's extant drawings from the period covered in his book from originals in various museums. He has been teaching Renaissance art techniques to students for more than a decade. He has appeared in TV documentaries on Renaissance art, including the BBC's The Color Blue and Inside the Mind of Leonardo and on 60 Minutes. He lives in Florence.

Table of Contents

Author's Note ix

Preface: What This Book Is xiii

Chapter 1 Did Michelangelo Have to Learn How to Draw? 1

Chapter 2 Wanting to Become a Master 7

Chapter 3 A Lofty Spirit: My Apprenticeship to Michelangelo 12

Chapter 4 The World of Renaissance Drawings 25

Chapter 5 Michelangelo's Early Apprenticeship 33

Chapter 6 Michelangelo, the Medici, and a Career Change 87

Chapter 7 Michelangelo Returns to Florence, 1501-1504 108

Chapter 8 The Drawings for the Battle of Cascina 128

Chapter 9 The Drawings for the Sistine Chapel, Part I 176

Chapter 10 The Drawings for the Sistine Chapel, Part II 230

Conclusion 271

Acknowledgments 276

Appendix 278

Glossary 282

Illustration Credits 289

Editorial Reviews

2019-02-03

What it must have felt like to be Michelangelo.

In this remarkable inquiry into artistic creation, historian, painter, and sculptor Pascuzzi offers two books in one: an illustrated history about how Michelangelo the man became "Il Divino" and an analysis of how a dedicated graduate art history student who had been fascinated with Michelangelo since he was a child "learned to make works of art like him as if he were my master." Pascuzzi gave himself a daunting task: make copies of all of Michelangelo's 135 surviving drawings. Unlike finished works, he writes, "drawings offer a much more intimate view of an artist." Inspired by Irving Stone's The Agony and the Ecstasy, he then studied Cennini's 14th-century art treatise, The Craftsman's Handbook, and the less-esteemed but useful The Art Forger's Handbook. Pascuzzi traveled to museums in the United States and Europe to copy them from the originals or exact photographic facsimiles using the "same materials, tools, and techniques as apprentices used in Michelangelo's day." Stepping back in time, Pascuzzi copied a drawing of animals Michelangelo completed as a 13-year-old apprentice in Ghirlandaio's prestigious Florence workshop. With Michelangelo's studies as his model book, "I let my eye and hand be guided by the master." Copying drawings Michelangelo made for his David sculpture, he noticed they "reflect a new level of pen-and-ink technique." Next up was a massive fresco, Michelangelo's first, for the Battle of Cascina. There was evidence of a "new fluidity in Michelangelo's drawing style," and Pascuzzi had a "myth-busting idea," that Michelangelo had himself copied from Leonardo da Vinci's drawings. The author's apprenticeship concludes with the drawings for the Sistine Chapel, a "true indication of his artistic maturity."

Whether or not this is a "new, revolutionary way of looking at [Michelangelo]," this revelatory book is a must for art students and those seeking new insights into his art.

Kirkus Reviews

"From the micro to the macro, a wonderful romp through Michelangelo's heart and mind!"—Terence Ward, author of The Guardian of Mercy: How an Extraordinary Painting by Caravaggio Changed an Ordinary Life Today

“A remarkable inquiry into artistic creation. . . . This revelatory book is a must for art students and those seeking new insights into [Michelangelo’s] art.”—Kirkus Reviews

"This wonderfully readable and personal account of Michelangelo’s early years reminds us that that becoming a genius requires work and unwavering dedication. Alan Pascuzzi, an accomplished historian and—equally important—a highly successful, sensitive, and insightful artist, combines a rare set of skills that permits him to tell the story of how an unlikely Florentine became the greatest artist of all time.Michelangelo did it. After reading this book, you too might feel the inspiration 'to create masters out of mere mortals like us.'”—William E. Wallace, Barbara Murphy Bryant Distinguished Professor of Art History, Washington University in St. Louis
 
 “Becoming Michelangelo is a riveting account of a process of discovery that no one has ever undertaken before.”—Ron Netsky, professor of art, Nazareth College

“Alan Pascuzzi tells the fascinating story of what happened when he started copying Michelangelo’s drawings and soon found himself virtually apprenticed to the master. Attempting to ‘become’ Michelangelo, he developed a unique appreciation of how Michelangelo himself became the graphic artist we recognize and admire today. General readers will appreciate Pascuzzi’s fast pace and down-to-earth tone, full of observations and insights that are sure to open the eyes of experts, too.”—Gary M. Radke, professor emeritus of art history, Syracuse University

From the Publisher