Michelangelo, God's Architect - by William E Wallace (Hardcover)

About the Book

"As he entered his seventies, the great Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo despaired that his productive years were past. Anguished by the death of friends and discouraged by the loss of commissions to younger artists, this supreme painter and sculptor began carving his own tomb. It was at this unlikely moment that fate intervened to task Michelangelo with the most ambitious and daunting project of his long creative life. 'Michelangelo, God's Architect' is the first book to tell the full story of Michelangelo's final two decades, when the peerless artist refashioned himself into the master architect of St. Peter's Basilica and other major buildings. When the Pope handed Michelangelo control of the St. Peter's project in 1546, it was a study in architectural mismanagement, plagued by flawed design and faulty engineering. Assessing the situation with his uncompromising eye and razor-sharp intellect, Michelangelo overcame the furious resistance of Church officials to persuade the Pope that it was time to start over. In this richly illustrated book, leading Michelangelo expert William Wallace sheds new light on this least familiar part of Michelangelo's biography, revealing a creative genius who was also a skilled engineer and enterprising businessman. The challenge of building St. Peter's deepened Michelangelo's faith, Wallace shows. Fighting the intrigues of Church politics and his own declining health, Michelangelo became convinced that he was destined to build the largest and most magnificent church ever conceived. And he was determined to live long enough that no other architect could alter his design."--Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

The untold story of Michelangelo's final decades--and his transformation into one of the greatest architects of the Italian Renaissance

As he entered his seventies, the great Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo despaired that his productive years were past. Anguished by the death of friends and discouraged by the loss of commissions to younger artists, this supreme painter and sculptor began carving his own tomb. It was at this unlikely moment that fate intervened to task Michelangelo with the most ambitious and daunting project of his long creative life.

Michelangelo, God's Architect is the first book to tell the full story of Michelangelo's final two decades, when the peerless artist refashioned himself into the master architect of St. Peter's Basilica and other major buildings. When the Pope handed Michelangelo control of the St. Peter's project in 1546, it was a study in architectural mismanagement, plagued by flawed design and faulty engineering. Assessing the situation with his uncompromising eye and razor-sharp intellect, Michelangelo overcame the furious resistance of Church officials to persuade the Pope that it was time to start over.

In this richly illustrated book, leading Michelangelo expert William Wallace sheds new light on this least familiar part of Michelangelo's biography, revealing a creative genius who was also a skilled engineer and enterprising businessman. The challenge of building St. Peter's deepened Michelangelo's faith, Wallace shows. Fighting the intrigues of Church politics and his own declining health, Michelangelo became convinced that he was destined to build the largest and most magnificent church ever conceived. And he was determined to live long enough that no other architect could alter his design.

Review Quotes

"[Michelangelo, God's Architect] offers a rich, lively, fascinating, biographical examination of the last two decades of Michelangelo's life. A period when he became the architect of St. Peter's Basilica and other buildings even as he continued to sculpt and draw . . . [A] superb book!"---Tyler Green, Modern Art Notes

"[An] immaculately researched book. . . . A riveting experience for lovers of any art form. . . . [Wallace] reveals here his masterly skills as a biographer."---Peter Marks, Washington Post

"Finalist for the Marfield Prize (The National Award for Arts Writing), Arts Club of Washington"

"In Michelangelo, God's Architect Wallace presents the artist's last two decades as the creative climax of a long career whose earlier phases Wallace has explored in previous books. . . . Wallace demonstrates in sympathetic, intimate detail what being an old, famous, phenomenally active artist entailed on a day-to-day basis in Renaissance Rome. . . . Wallace's Michelangelo is marvellously human. In some ways he remains the same artist I learned about at school. . . . But there's a more restless, modern consciousness breaking through - like an unfinished figure from the marble - in the way Wallace shows him confronting the fact that even the longest life is too short for completing all that you want to get done."---Michael Bird, The Telegraph

"In this well-written, informative book, William Wallace casts light on this often-overlooked period of Michelangelo's life, revealing his mindset as a man and an artist."---Adriano Marinazzo, Architectural Histories

"Including ample illustrations of Michelangelo's many works of art, this book reveals the active and inimitably creative life of the artist during his final years."-- "Choice"

"The strength of Wallace's work has been to place Michelangelo firmly within his milieu, not as some isolated genius living alone in squalor, but as a human being with strong feelings about friendships and family. . . . He brings the man alive."---James Stevens Curl, Times Higher Education

"To this aged Michelangelo, with his frailties, his frustrations, and his insoluble contradictions, William Wallace has devoted the latest and most poignant of his books on the artist. . . . When Michelangelo turned seventy, as he does at the beginning of Michelangelo, God's Architect, he had nineteen more years to live, every one of them spent at work. As dear friends died and his body weakened, he took on a remarkable series of huge, daunting projects, fully aware, as Wallace emphasizes, that he would never live to see them completed. In his deeply spiritual vision of the world, his own limits hardly mattered; God had called him, and he had answered. . . . Wallace, in turn, relies on his own experience to take bold risks as a writer, pushing the haphazard evidence that survives from sixteenth-century Rome to bring the city and its people to life."---Ingrid D. Rowland, New York Review of Books

"Wallace brilliantly evokes the day-to-day life of the project as Michelangelo struggled to resolve its many difficulties, which included dealing with the mechanics of the building operation, the calculations of the amount of travertine required, the quarrymen at Tivoli and the practicalities of transport."---Catherine Fletcher, Literary Review

About the Author

William E. Wallace is the Barbara Murphy Bryant Distinguished Professor of Art History at Washington University in St. Louis. His books include Discovering Michelangelo: The Art Lover's Guide to Understanding Michelangelo's Masterpieces; Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man, and His Times; and Michelangelo at San Lorenzo.