Product Description

Five hundred years ago Michelangelo put the first brushstroke to his most ambitious creation. As he started work on his vast fresco cycle for the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he began putting into pictures the awe-inspiring legends recounted in the Book of Genesis. But for the viewer looking up into Michelangelo's painted sky, this was to be just the first of a series of unprecedentedly original images, rightly celebrated as the quintessential masterpiece of the Renaissance. Yet the painting of the Sistine Chapel, for all its magnificence, came at a considerable human cost. It would take Michelangelo four years of long and bitter toil to complete his masterpiece, goaded all the while by his volatile, impatient patron, Pope Julius II. In his new study of Michelangelo's work in the Sistine Chapel, Andrew Graham-Dixon retells the story of the Sistine Chapel for modern times, and an essential companion guide for one of the artistic wonders of the world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #129794 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-19
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
'Graham-Dixon depicts a wonderfully strange man and his strangely wonderful masterpiece' (OBSERVER )

About the Author
Andrew Graham-Dixon is a leading art critic and arts presenter. He has written columns for the Independent and the Sunday Telegraph, and a number of acclaimed books. He has won numerous awards including three consecutive Arts Journalist of the Year Awards and the Hawthornden Prize for Art Criticism. He is married with three children and lives in London.

Customer Reviews

Splendid book
Having seen the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel on a couple of occasion and appreciated it as an amazing work of art, I had not understood, or even noticed, the plethora of details and their significance. Andrew Graham Dixon writes for both the novice and those with some knowledge of art history and his style is extremely engaging and informative. I now want to go back to Rome and view the chapel again.

A timely contribution
Andrew Graham-Dixon's book is a timely contribution to our understanding and appreciation of Michelangelo's masterpiece, the Sistine Chapel ceiling : as he states in his Introduction, the book was written to celebrate the artist's commencement of this great undertaking exactly 500 years ago. What I particularly liked about it was his use of every day as opposed to the flowery language that Italian reviewers are generally wont to resort to, or the obscure semantics of esoteric critics! Granted his comments represent his own personal views but at least they're of the down-to-earth, common or garden variety that ordinary mortals like me can understand.
Graham-Dixon's research is impeccable : he has drawn on original sources to substantiate his theories with regard to who was responsible for each aspect of the work : its design, content and artistic format. In addition the book contains a series of excellent photographs of the various sections of the ceiling that proved of invaluable assistance in clarifying the author's explanation of them. And that's not all, we are given insight into Michelangelo's later work : his Last Judgement which with its gloom and doom, stands in utter contrast to the ceiling's energetic images! In conclusion this book has greatly enhanced my appreciation of the provenance and execution of the Sistine Chapel ceiling; and equally importantly it has given me insight into Michelangelo's humanity as well as his artistic genius.

Disappointing

Having read several authorities on Michaelangelo I found this book very disappointing. There are several criticisms I could make, but above all I think that Graham-Dixon too often allows his particular prejudices to get in the way of the facts. An example is his brief discussion of Micahelangelo's sexuality. All serious modern scholars (from Lord Clark onwards) are agreed that Michaelangelo was almost certainly homosexual in inclination: though whether he remained other than celibate we will probably never know. Graham-Dixon's suggestion that there is no evidence one way or the other and that he was probably non-sexual is lazy and not convincing. There is quite a lot of evidence pointing the other way. No mention is made, for example, of Micahelangelo's known infatuation with the youth Tommaso dei Cavalieri and the homoerotic love sonnets which flowed from the artist's pen. Granted, the fact that his subject matter was often the male nude is not in itself determinative, but the contrast with the clearly heterosexual Raphael is striking. The Pope's Ceilling is a much better read; take this book with a large pinch of salt!