Michelangelo: Sculptor, Painter, Architect by Charles Sala; 1996. Softcover

On the morning of 14th July 1564 eighty painters and sculptors paid their last respects to an artist who had deeply marked his time with the stamp of his genius - Michelangelo Buonarotti. Although exemplary, his life was a long saga of hope and disillusionment played out against the background of tragic events: power struggles in Florence, the sack of Rome, the breaking up of Christianity, the disenfranchisement of the Italian city-states. Michelangelo considered himself primarily a sculptor, yet his painting was one of the crowing achievements of the Renaissance, and he claimed the aesthetic freedom that became the condition for modern art: freedom from artistic convention and from the constraints of patrons; freedom to follow the dictates of his own creativity. He undertook mammoth projects that matched his ambition and ability, and insisted on carrying them out alone: the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the tomb of Julius II, the Last Judgement. Whether sculpture, painting, architecture or poetry, there is no major field of artistic endeavor that has not been durably marked by his genius.