Rebellious Slave
Sculpture by Michelangelo
The Rebellious Slave is a 2.15m high marble statue by Michelangelo, dated to 1513. It is now held in the Louvre in Paris.
History.
The two "slaves" of the Louvre date to the second version of the tomb of Pope Julius II which was commissioned by the Pope's heirs, the Della Rovere in May 1513. Although the initial plans for a gigantic mausoleum were set aside, the work was still monumental, with a corridor richly decorated with sculpture and Michelangelo was immediately put in charge of the work. Among the first pieces completed were the two "Prigioni" (renamed the "slaves" only in the nineteenth century), destined for the lower part of the funerary monument, next to the pilasters which framed the niches containing the Victories. Their poses were determined by the needs of this architectural setting, so from the front they have great effect, but the side views received less care than usual.
The date of the two statues is confirmed by a letter of Michelangelo to Marcello dei Covi, in which he speaks of a viewing by Luca Signorelli in his Roman house, while he worked on "a figure of marble, standing four cubits high, which has its hands behind its back".
All the "Prigioni" produced in the studio of the artist were eliminated from the monument in its final version, completed in 1542. In 1546 Michelangelo gave the two works in the Louvre to Roberto Strozzi, for his generous hospitality in his Roman house during Michelangelo's periods of sickness in July 1544 and June 1546. When Strozzi was exiled to Lyon in April 1550 for his opposition to Cosimo I de' Medici, he had the two statues sent ahead. In April 1578 they were put on view in two niches in the courtyard of the castle of the constable of Montmorency at Écouen, near Paris.
In 1632 they were sold by Henri II de Montmorency to Cardinal Richelieu, who had them sent to his Château in Poitou, where they were seen by Gianlorenzo Bernini who made an illustration of them, on his travels.
In 1749, the Duke of Richelieu had them taken to Paris and placed in the Pavillon de Hanovre. They were hidden in 1793, but when the widow of the last Marshal of Richelieu attempted to put them on sale, they became property of the government and joined the collection which is now in the Louvre.
Description and style.
The "Rebellious Slave" is portrayed trying to free himself from the fetters which hold his hands behind his back, contorting his torso and twisting his head. The impression given, which would have contributed to the spatial appearance of the monument, was that he was moving towards the viewer, with his raised shoulder and knee.
The iconographic significance of the two figures is probably linked to the motif of the Captive in Roman art; in fact Giorgio Vasari identified them as personifications of the provinces controlled by Julius II. For Ascanio Condivi, however, they symbolised the Arts taken prisoner after the death of pontif. The "Rebellious Slave" in particular might, speculatively, represent sculpture or architecture. Other meanings of a symbolic and philosophical nature have been suggested as well as some linked to Michelangelo's personal life and his "torments".
From a stylistic point of view, they are based on ancient models, particularly Hellenistic sculpture, like the statue group of "Laocoön and His Sons", discovered in 1506 and at that time in Michelangelo's possession, but also the sculptural friezes on the triumphal arches of Rome and depictions of Saint Sebastian.

Michelangelo
Italian artist and architect (1475–1564)
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (6March 1475 – 18February 1564), known mononymously as Michelangelo, was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet of the High Renaissance. Born in the Republic of Florence, his work was inspired by models from classical antiquity and had a lasting influence on Western art. Michelangelo's creative abilities and mastery in a range of artistic arenas define him as an archetypal Renaissance man, along with his rival and elder contemporary, Leonardo da Vinci. Given the sheer volume of surviving correspondence, sketches, and reminiscences, Michelangelo is one of the best-documented artists of the 16th century. He was lauded by contemporary biographers as the most accomplished artist of his era.
Michelangelo achieved fame early. Two of his best-known works, the "Pietà" and "David", were sculpted before the age of 30. Although he did not consider himself a painter, Michelangelo created two of the most influential frescoes in the history of Western art: the scenes from Genesis on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, and "The Last Judgment" on its altar wall. His design of the Laurentian Library pioneered Mannerist architecture. At the age of 71, he succeeded Antonio da Sangallo the Younger as the architect of St. Peter's Basilica. Michelangelo transformed the plan so that the Western end was finished to his design, as was the dome, with some modification, after his death.
Michelangelo was the first Western artist whose biography was published while he was alive. Three biographies were published during his lifetime. One of them, by Giorgio Vasari, proposed that Michelangelo's work transcended that of any artist living or dead, and was "supreme in not one art alone but in all three".
In his lifetime, Michelangelo was often called ("the divine one"). His contemporaries admired his "terribilità"—his ability to instill a sense of awe in viewers of his art. Attempts by subsequent artists to imitate the expressive physicality of Michelangelo's style contributed to the rise of Mannerism, a short-lived movement in Western art between the High Renaissance and the Baroque.
Life.
Early life, 1475–1488.
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was born on 6 March 1475 in Caprese, known today as Caprese Michelangelo, a small town situated in Valtiberina, near Arezzo, Tuscany. For several generations, his family had been small-scale bankers in Florence; but the bank failed, and his father Ludovico briefly took a government post in Caprese. At the time of Michelangelo's birth, his father was the town's judicial administrator and "podestà" (local administrator) of Chiusi della Verna. Michelangelo's mother was Francesca di Neri del Miniato di Siena. The Buonarrotis claimed to descend from the Countess Matilde di Canossa—a claim that remains unproven, but which Michelangelo believed.
Several months after Michelangelo's birth, the family returned to Florence, where he was raised. During his mother's later prolonged illness, and after her death in 1481 (when he was six years old), Michelangelo lived with a nanny and her husband, a stonecutter, in the town of Settignano, where his father owned a marble quarry and a small farm. There the young boy gained his love for marble. As his biographer Giorgio Vasari quotes him:
<templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" />
Apprenticeships, 1488–1492.
As a young boy, Michelangelo was sent to the city of Florence to study grammar under the Humanist Francesco da Urbino. Michelangelo showed no interest in his schooling, preferring to copy paintings from churches and seek the company of other painters. Florence was at that time Italy's greatest centre of the arts and learning. Art was sponsored by the (the town council), the merchant guilds, and wealthy patrons such as the Medici and their banking associates. The Renaissance, a renewal of Classical scholarship and the arts, had its first flowering in Florence. In the early 15th century, the architect Filippo Brunelleschi, having studied the remains of Classical buildings in Rome, had created two churches, San Lorenzo's and Santo Spirito, which embodied the Classical precepts. The sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti had laboured for 50 years to create the north and east bronze doors of the Baptistry, which Michelangelo was to describe as "The Gates of Paradise". The exterior niches of the Church of Orsanmichele contained a gallery of works by the most acclaimed sculptors of Florence: Donatello, Ghiberti, Andrea del Verrocchio, and Nanni di Banco. The interiors of the older churches were covered with frescos (mostly in Late Medieval, but also in the Early Renaissance style), begun by Giotto and continued by Masaccio in the Brancacci Chapel, both of whose works Michelangelo studied and copied in drawings.
During Michelangelo's childhood, a team of painters had been called from Florence to the Vatican to decorate the walls of the Sistine Chapel. Among them was Domenico Ghirlandaio, a master in fresco painting, perspective, figure drawing and portraiture who had the largest workshop in Florence. In 1488, at the age of 13, Michelangelo was apprenticed to Ghirlandaio. The next year, his father persuaded Ghirlandaio to pay Michelangelo as an artist, which was rare for someone that young. When in 1489, Lorenzo de' Medici, "de facto" ruler of Florence, asked Ghirlandaio for his two best pupils, Ghirlandaio sent Michelangelo and Francesco Granacci.
From 1490 to 1492, Michelangelo attended the Platonic Academy, a Humanist academy founded by the Medicis. There, his work and outlook were influenced by many of the most prominent philosophers and writers of the day, including Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola and Poliziano. At this time, Michelangelo sculpted the reliefs "Madonna of the Stairs" and "Battle of the Centaurs", the latter based on a theme suggested by Poliziano and commissioned by Lorenzo de' Medici. Michelangelo worked for a time with the sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni. When he was 17, another pupil, Pietro Torrigiano, struck him on the nose, causing the disfigurement that is conspicuous in the portraits of Michelangelo.
Bologna, Florence, and Rome, 1492–1499.
Lorenzo de' Medici's death on 8 April 1492 changed Michelangelo's circumstances. He left the security of the Medici court and returned to his father's house. In the following months he carved a polychrome wooden "Crucifix" (1493), as a gift to the prior of the Florentine church of Santo Spirito, which had allowed him to do some anatomical studies of the corpses from the church's hospital. This was the first of several instances during his career that Michelangelo studied anatomy by dissecting cadavers.
Between 1493 and 1494, Michelangelo bought a block of marble, and carved a larger-than-life statue of Hercules. On 20 January 1494, after heavy snowfalls, Lorenzo's heir, Piero de Medici, commissioned a statue made of snow, and Michelangelo again entered the court of the Medici. In the same year, the Medici were expelled from Florence as the result of the rise of Savonarola. Michelangelo left the city before the end of the political upheaval, moving to Venice and then to Bologna. In Bologna, he was commissioned to carve several of the last small figures for the completion of the Shrine of St. Dominic, in the church dedicated to that saint. At this time Michelangelo studied the robust reliefs carved by Jacopo della Quercia around the main portal of the Basilica of St Petronius, including the panel of "The Creation of Eve", the composition of which was to reappear on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Towards the end of 1495, the political situation in Florence was calmer; the city, previously under threat from the French, was no longer in danger as Charles VIII had suffered defeats. Michelangelo returned to Florence but received no commissions from the new city government under Savonarola. He returned to the employment of the Medici. During the half-year he spent in Florence, he worked on two small statues, a child "St. John the Baptist" and a sleeping "Cupid". According to Condivi, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, for whom Michelangelo had sculpted "St. John the Baptist", asked that Michelangelo "fix it so that it looked as if it had been buried" so he could "send it to Rome ... pass [it off as] an ancient work and ... sell it much better." Both Lorenzo and Michelangelo were unwittingly cheated out of the real value of the piece by a middleman. Cardinal Raffaele Riario, to whom Lorenzo had sold it, discovered that it was a fraud, but was so impressed by the quality of the sculpture that he invited the artist to Rome. This apparent success in selling his sculpture abroad as well as the conservative Florentine situation may have encouraged Michelangelo to accept the prelate's invitation.
Michelangelo arrived in Rome on 25 June 1496 at the age of 21. On 4 July of the same year, he began work on a commission for Cardinal Riario, an over-life-size statue of the Roman wine god "Bacchus". Upon completion, the work was rejected by the cardinal, and subsequently entered the collection of the banker Jacopo Galli, for his garden. In November 1497, the French ambassador to the Holy See, Cardinal Jean de Bilhères-Lagraulas, commissioned him to carve a "Pietà", a sculpture showing the Virgin Mary grieving over the body of Jesus. The subject, which is not part of the Biblical narrative of the Crucifixion, was common in religious sculpture of medieval northern Europe and would have been very familiar to the Cardinal. The contract was agreed upon in August of the following year. Michelangelo was 24 at the time of its completion. It was soon to be regarded as one of the world's great masterpieces of sculpture, "a revelation of all the potentialities and force of the art of sculpture". Contemporary opinion was summarised by Vasari: "It is certainly a miracle that a formless block of stone could ever have been reduced to a perfection that nature is scarcely able to create in the flesh." Michelangelo's only work known to have been signed, his name on Mary's sash, it is now located in St Peter's Basilica.
Florence, 1499–1505.
Michelangelo returned to Florence in 1499. The Republic was changing after the fall of its leader, anti-Renaissance priest Girolamo Savonarola, who was executed in 1498, and the rise of the "gonfaloniere" Piero Soderini. Michelangelo was asked by the consuls of the Guild of Wool to complete an unfinished project begun 40 years earlier by Agostino di Duccio: a colossal statue of Carrara marble portraying David as a symbol of Florentine freedom to be placed on the gable of Florence Cathedral. Michelangelo responded by completing his most famous work, the statue of "David", in 1504. The masterwork definitively established his prominence as a sculptor of extraordinary technical skill and strength of symbolic imagination. A team of consultants, including Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Filippino Lippi, Pietro Perugino, Lorenzo di Credi, Antonio and Giuliano da Sangallo, Andrea della Robbia, Cosimo Rosselli, Davide Ghirlandaio, Piero di Cosimo, Andrea Sansovino and Michelangelo's dear friend Granacci, was called together to decide upon its placement, ultimately the Piazza della Signoria, in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. It now stands in the Academia while a replica occupies its place in the square. In the same period of placing the "David", Michelangelo may have been involved in creating the sculptural profile on Palazzo Vecchio's façade known as the Importuno di Michelangelo. The hypothesis of Michelangelo's possible involvement in the creation of the profile is based on the strong resemblance of the latter to a profile drawn by the artist, datable to the beginning of the 16th century, now preserved in the Louvre.
With the completion of the "David" came another commission. In early 1504 Leonardo da Vinci had been commissioned to paint "The Battle of Anghiari" in the council chamber of the Palazzo Vecchio, depicting the battle between Florence and Milan in 1440. Michelangelo was then commissioned to paint the "Battle of Cascina". The two paintings are very different: Leonardo depicts soldiers fighting on horseback, while Michelangelo has soldiers being ambushed as they bathe in the river. Neither work was completed and both were lost forever when the chamber was refurbished. Both works were much admired, and copies remain of them, Leonardo's work having been copied by Rubens and Michelangelo's by Bastiano da Sangallo.
Also during this period, Michelangelo was commissioned by Angelo Doni to paint a "Holy Family" as a present for his wife, Maddalena Strozzi. It is known as the "Doni Tondo" and hangs in the Uffizi Gallery in its original magnificent frame, which Michelangelo may have designed. He also may have painted the Madonna and Child with John the Baptist, known as the "Manchester Madonna" and now in the National Gallery, London.
Tomb of Julius II, 1505–1545.
In 1505 Michelangelo was invited back to Rome by the newly elected Pope Julius II and commissioned to build the Pope's tomb, which was to include forty statues and be finished in five years. Under the patronage of the pope, Michelangelo experienced constant interruptions to his work on the tomb in order to accomplish numerous other tasks.
The commission for the tomb forced the artist to leave Florence with his planned "Battle of Cascina" painting unfinished. By this time, Michelangelo was established as an artist; both he and Julius II had hot tempers and soon argued. On 17 April 1506, Michelangelo left Rome in secret for Florence, remaining there until the Florentine government pressed him to return to the pope.
Although Michelangelo worked on the tomb for 40 years, it was never finished to his satisfaction. It is located in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome and is most famous for the central figure of Moses, completed in 1516. Of the other statues intended for the tomb, two, known as the "Rebellious Slave" and the "Dying Slave", are now in the Louvre.
Sistine Chapel ceiling, 1508 –1512.
During the same period, Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which took approximately four years to complete (1508–1512). According to Condivi's account, Bramante, who was working on the building of St. Peter's Basilica, resented Michelangelo's commission for the pope's tomb and convinced the pope to commission him in a medium with which he was unfamiliar, in order that he might fail at the task. Michelangelo was originally commissioned to paint the Twelve Apostles on the triangular pendentives that supported the ceiling, and to cover the central part of the ceiling with ornament. Michelangelo persuaded Pope Julius II to give him a free hand and proposed a different and more complex scheme, representing the Creation, the Fall of Man, the Promise of Salvation through the prophets, and the genealogy of Christ. The work is part of a larger scheme of decoration within the chapel that represents much of the doctrine of the Catholic Church.
The composition stretches over 500 square metres of ceiling and contains over 300 figures. At its centre are nine episodes from the Book of Genesis, divided into three groups: God's creation of the earth; God's creation of humankind and their fall from God's grace; and lastly, the state of humanity as represented by Noah and his family. On the pendentives supporting the ceiling are painted twelve men and women who prophesied the coming of Jesus, seven prophets of Israel, and five Sibyls, prophetic women of the Classical world. Among the most famous paintings on the ceiling are The Creation of Adam, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the Deluge, the Prophet Jeremiah, and the Cumaean Sibyl.
Florence under Medici popes, 1513 – early 1534.
In 1513, Pope Julius II died and was succeeded by Pope Leo X, the second son of Lorenzo de' Medici. From 1513 to 1516, Pope Leo was on good terms with Pope Julius's surviving relatives, so encouraged Michelangelo to continue work on Julius's tomb, but the families became enemies again in 1516 when Pope Leo tried to seize the Duchy of Urbino from Julius's nephew Francesco Maria I della Rovere. Pope Leo then had Michelangelo stop working on the tomb, and commissioned him to reconstruct the façade of the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence and to adorn it with sculptures. He spent three years creating drawings and models for the façade, as well as attempting to open a new marble quarry at Pietrasanta specifically for the project. In 1520, the work was abruptly cancelled by his financially strapped patrons before any real progress had been made. The basilica lacks a façade to this day.
In 1520, the Medici came back to Michelangelo with another grand proposal, this time for a family funerary chapel in the Basilica of San Lorenzo. For posterity, this project, occupying the artist for much of the 1520s and 1530s, was more fully realised. Michelangelo used his own discretion to create the composition of the Medici Chapel, which houses the large tombs of two of the younger members of the Medici family, Giuliano, Duke of Nemours, and Lorenzo, his nephew. It also serves to commemorate their more famous predecessors, Lorenzo the Magnificent and his brother Giuliano, who are buried nearby. The tombs display statues of the two Medici and allegorical figures representing "Night" and "Day", and "Dusk" and "Dawn". The chapel also contains Michelangelo's "Medici Madonna". In 1976, a concealed corridor was discovered with drawings on the walls that related to the chapel itself.
Pope Leo X died in 1521 and was succeeded briefly by the austere Adrian VI, and then by his cousin Giulio Medici as Pope Clement VII. In 1524, Michelangelo received an architectural commission from the Medici pope for the Laurentian Library at San Lorenzo's Church. He designed both the interior of the library itself and its vestibule, a building utilising architectural forms with such dynamic effect that it is seen as the forerunner of Baroque architecture. It was left to assistants to interpret his plans and carry out construction. The library was not opened until 1571, and the vestibule remained incomplete until 1904.
In 1527, Florentine citizens, encouraged by the sack of Rome, threw out the Medici and restored the republic. A siege of the city ensued, and Michelangelo went to the aid of his beloved Florence by working on the city's fortifications from 1528 to 1529. The city fell in 1530, and the Medici were restored to power, with the young Alessandro Medici as the first Duke of Florence. Pope Clement, a Medici, sentenced Michelangelo to death. It is thought that Michelangelo hid for two months in a small chamber under the Medici chapels in the Basilica of San Lorenzo with light from just a tiny window, making many charcoal and chalk drawings which remained hidden until the room was rediscovered in 1975, and opened to small numbers of visitors in 2023. Michelangelo was eventually pardoned by the Medicis and the death sentence lifted, so that he could complete work on the Sistine Chapel and the Medici family tomb. He left Florence for Rome in 1534. Despite Michelangelo's support of the republic and resistance to the Medici rule, Pope Clement reinstated an allowance that he had previously granted the artist and made a new contract with him over the tomb of Pope Julius.
Rome, 1534–1546.
In Rome, Michelangelo lived near the church of Santa Maria di Loreto. It was at this time that he met the poet Vittoria Colonna, marchioness of Pescara, who was to become one of his closest friends until her death in 1547.
Shortly before his death in 1534, Pope Clement VII commissioned Michelangelo to paint a fresco of "The Last Judgment" on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel. His successor, Pope Paul III, was instrumental in seeing that Michelangelo began and completed the project, which he laboured on from 1534 to October 1541. The fresco depicts the Second Coming of Christ and his Judgement of the souls. Michelangelo ignored the usual artistic conventions in portraying Jesus, showing him as a massive, muscular figure, youthful, beardless and naked. He is surrounded by saints, among whom Saint Bartholomew holds a drooping flayed skin, bearing the likeness of Michelangelo. The dead rise from their graves, to be consigned either to Heaven or to Hell.
Once completed, the depiction of Christ and the Virgin Mary naked was considered sacrilegious, and Cardinal Carafa and Monsignor Sernini (Mantua's ambassador) campaigned to have the fresco removed or censored, but the Pope resisted. At the Council of Trent, shortly before Michelangelo's death in 1564, it was decided to obscure the genitals and Daniele da Volterra, an apprentice of Michelangelo, was commissioned to make the alterations. An uncensored copy of the original, by Marcello Venusti, is in the Capodimonte Museum of Naples.
Michelangelo worked on a number of architectural projects at this time. They included a design for the Capitoline Hill with its trapezoid piazza displaying the ancient bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius. He designed the upper floor of the Palazzo Farnese and the interior of the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, in which he transformed the vaulted interior of an Ancient Roman bathhouse. Other architectural works include San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, the Sforza Chapel (Capella Sforza) in the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore and the Porta Pia.
St Peter's Basilica, 1546–1564.
While still working on the "Last Judgment", Michelangelo received yet another commission for the Vatican. This was for the painting of two large frescos in the Cappella Paolina depicting significant events in the lives of the two most important saints of Rome, the "Conversion of Saint Paul" and the "Crucifixion of Saint Peter". Like the "Last Judgment", these two works are complex compositions containing a great number of figures. They were completed in 1550. In the same year, Giorgio Vasari published his "Vita", including a biography of Michelangelo.
In 1546, Michelangelo was appointed architect of St. Peter's Basilica, Rome. The process of replacing the Constantinian basilica of the 4th century had been underway for fifty years and in 1506 foundations had been laid to the plans of Bramante. Successive architects had worked on it, but little progress had been made. Michelangelo was persuaded to take over the project. He returned to the concepts of Bramante, and developed his ideas for a centrally planned church, strengthening the structure both physically and visually. The dome, not completed until after his death, has been called by Banister Fletcher, "the greatest creation of the Renaissance".
As construction was progressing on St Peter's, there was concern that Michelangelo would die before the dome was finished. However, once building commenced on the lower part of the dome, the supporting ring, the completion of the design was inevitable.
Personal life.
Faith.
Michelangelo was a devout Catholic whose faith deepened at the end of his life. Along with Raphael, he was enrolled in the Secular Franciscan Order.
His poetry includes the following closing lines from what is known as poem 285 (written in 1554): "Neither painting nor sculpture will be able any longer to calm my soul, now turned toward that divine love that opened his arms on the cross to take us in."
Personal habits.
Michelangelo was moderate in his personal life, and once told his apprentice, Ascanio Condivi: "However rich I may have been, I have always lived like a poor man." Michelangelo's bank accounts and numerous deeds of purchase show that his net worth was about 50,000 gold ducats, more than many princes and dukes of his time. Condivi said he was indifferent to food and drink, eating "more out of necessity than of pleasure" and that he "often slept in his clothes and ... boots." His biographer Paolo Giovio says, "His nature was so rough and uncouth that his domestic habits were incredibly squalid, and deprived posterity of any pupils who might have followed him." This, however, may not have affected him, as he was by nature a solitary and melancholy person, , a man who "withdrew himself from the company of men."
Relationships and poetry.
<templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" />
It is impossible to know whether Michelangelo had any physical relationships. Understanding about his sexuality is rooted in his art, especially his poetry. He wrote more than three hundred sonnets and madrigals. About sixty are addressed to men – "the first significant modern corpus of love poetry from one man to another".
The longest sequence, displaying deep loving feeling, was written to the young Roman patrician Tommaso dei Cavalieri (c. 1509–1587), who was 23 years old when Michelangelo first met him in 1532, at the age of 57. In his "Lives of the Artists", Vasari observed: "But infinitely more than any of the others he loved M. Tommaso de' Cavalieri, a Roman gentleman, for whom, being a young man and much inclined to these arts, [Michelangelo] made, to the end that he might learn to draw, many most superb drawings of divinely beautiful heads, designed in black and red chalk; and then he drew for him a Ganymede rapt to Heaven by Jove's Eagle, a Tityus with the Vulture devouring his heart, the Chariot of the Sun falling with Phaëthon into the Po, and a Bacchanal of children, which are all in themselves most rare things, and drawings the like of which have never been seen." Some scholars downplay the relationship between Michelangelo and Cavalieri as one of platonic friendship. The poems to Cavalieri make up the first large sequence of poems in any modern tongue addressed by one man to another; they predate by 50 years Shakespeare's sonnets to the fair youth:
<templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" />
Cavalieri replied: "I swear to return your love. Never have I loved a man more than I love you, never have I wished for a friendship more than I wish for yours." Cavalieri remained devoted to Michelangelo until his death.
In 1542, Michelangelo met Cecchino dei Bracci who died only a year later, inspiring Michelangelo to write 48 funeral epigrams. Some of the objects of Michelangelo's affections, and subjects of his poetry, took advantage of him: the model Febo di Poggio asked for money in response to a love-poem, and a second model, Gherardo Perini, shamelessly stole from him.
The nature of the poetry has been a source of discomfort to later generations. Michelangelo's grandnephew, Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger, published the poems in 1623 with the gender of pronouns changed; he also removed words or in other instances insisted that Michelangelo's poems be read allegorically and philosophically, a judgment some modern scholars still repeat today. It was not until John Addington Symonds translated the poems into English in 1893 that the original genders were restored. Since then it has become more accepted that his poems should be understood at face value, that is, as indicating his personal feelings and a preference by him for young men over women. The Elizabeth Jennings translation, "The Sonnets of Michelangelo", is considered the standard version.
Late in life, Michelangelo nurtured a friendship with the poet and noble widow Vittoria Colonna, whom he met in Rome in 1536 or 1538 and who was in her late forties at the time. They wrote sonnets for each other and were in regular contact until she died. These sonnets mostly deal with the spiritual issues that occupied them. Condivi, who in his biography was preoccupied with downplaying Michelangelo's attraction to men, alleged Michelangelo said his sole regret in life was that he did not kiss the widow's face in the same manner that he had her hand.
Feuds with other artists.
In a letter from late 1542, Michelangelo blamed the tensions between Julius II and him on the envy of Bramante and Raphael, saying of the latter, "all he had in art, he got from me". According to Gian Paolo Lomazzo, Michelangelo and Raphael met once: the former was alone, while the latter was accompanied by several others. Michelangelo commented that he thought he had encountered the chief of police with such an assemblage, and Raphael replied that he thought he had met an executioner, as they are wont to walk alone.
Works.
Madonna and Child.
The "Madonna of the Stairs" is Michelangelo's earliest known work in marble. It is carved in shallow relief, a technique often employed by the master-sculptor of the early 15th century, Donatello, and others such as Desiderio da Settignano. While the Madonna is in profile, the easiest aspect for a shallow relief, the child displays a twisting motion that was to become characteristic of Michelangelo's work. The "Taddei Tondo" of 1502 shows the Christ Child frightened by a Bullfinch, a symbol of the Crucifixion. The lively form of the child was later adapted by Raphael in the "Bridgewater Madonna". The "Madonna of Bruges" was, at the time of its creation, unlike other such statues depicting the Virgin proudly presenting her son. Here, the Christ Child, restrained by his mother's clasping hand, is about to step off into the world. The "Doni Tondo", depicting the Holy Family, has elements of all three previous works: the frieze of figures in the background has the appearance of a low-relief, while the circular shape and dynamic forms echo the Taddeo Tondo. The twisting motion present in the "Madonna of Bruges" is accentuated in the painting. The painting heralds the forms, movement and colour that Michelangelo was to employ on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Male figure.
The kneeling "Angel" is an early work, one of several that Michelangelo created as part of a large decorative scheme for the Arca di San Domenico in the church dedicated to that saint in Bologna. Several other artists had worked on the scheme, beginning with Nicola Pisano in the 13th century. In the late 15th century, the project was managed by Niccolò dell'Arca. An angel holding a candlestick, by Niccolò, was already in place. Although the two angels form a pair, there is a great contrast between the two works, the one depicting a delicate child with flowing hair clothed in Gothic robes with deep folds, and Michelangelo's depicting a robust and muscular youth with eagle's wings, clad in a garment of Classical style. Everything about Michelangelo's "Angel" is dynamic. Michelangelo's "Bacchus" was a commission with a specified subject, the youthful God of Wine. The sculpture has all the traditional attributes, a vine wreath, a cup of wine and a fawn, but Michelangelo ingested an air of reality into the subject, depicting him with bleary eyes, a swollen bladder and a stance that suggests he is unsteady on his feet. While the work is plainly inspired by Classical sculpture, it is innovative for its rotating movement and strongly three-dimensional quality, which encourages the viewer to look at it from every angle.
In the so-called "Dying Slave", Michelangelo again utilised the figure with marked contrapposto to suggest a particular human state, in this case waking from sleep. With the "Rebellious Slave", it is one of two such earlier figures for the Tomb of Pope Julius II, now in the Louvre, that the sculptor brought to an almost finished state. These two works were to have a profound influence on later sculpture, through Rodin who studied them at the Louvre. The "Atlas Slave" is one of the later figures for Pope Julius' tomb. The works, known collectively as "The Captives", each show the figure struggling to free itself, as if from the bonds of the rock in which it is lodged. The works give a unique insight into the sculptural methods that Michelangelo employed and his way of revealing what he perceived within the rock.
Sistine Chapel ceiling.
The Sistine Chapel ceiling was painted between 1508 and 1512. The ceiling is a flattened barrel vault supported on twelve triangular pendentives that rise from between the windows of the chapel. The commission, as envisaged by Julius II, was to adorn the pendentives with figures of the twelve apostles. Michelangelo, who was reluctant to take the job, persuaded the Pope to give him a free hand in the composition. The resultant scheme of decoration awed his contemporaries and has inspired other artists ever since. The scheme is of nine panels illustrating episodes from the Book of Genesis, set in an architectonic frame. On the pendentives, Michelangelo replaced the proposed Apostles with Prophets and Sibyls who heralded the coming of the Messiah.
Michelangelo began painting with the later episodes in the narrative, the pictures including locational details and groups of figures, the "Drunkenness of Noah" being the first of this group. In the later compositions, painted after the initial scaffolding had been removed, Michelangelo made the figures larger. One of the central images, "The Creation of Adam" is one of the best known and most reproduced works in the history of art. The final panel, showing the "Separation of Light from Darkness" is the broadest in style and was painted in a single day. As the model for the Creator, Michelangelo has depicted himself in the action of painting the ceiling.
As supporters to the smaller scenes, Michelangelo painted twenty youths who have variously been interpreted as angels, as muses, or simply as decoration. Michelangelo referred to them as "ignudi". The figure reproduced may be seen in context in the above image of the "Separation of Light from Darkness".
In the process of painting the ceiling, Michelangelo made studies for different figures, of which some, such as that for "The Libyan Sibyl" have survived, demonstrating the care taken by Michelangelo in details such as the hands and feet. The prophet Jeremiah, contemplating the downfall of Jerusalem, is a self-portrait.
Figure compositions.
Michelangelo's relief of the "Battle of the Centaurs", created while he was still a youth associated with the Medici Academy, is an unusually complex relief in that it shows a great number of figures involved in a vigorous struggle. Such a complex disarray of figures was rare in Florentine art, where it would usually only be found in images showing either the Massacre of the Innocents or the Torments of Hell. The relief treatment, in which some of the figures are boldly projecting, may indicate Michelangelo's familiarity with Roman sarcophagus reliefs from the collection of Lorenzo Medici, and similar marble panels created by Nicola and Giovanni Pisano, and with the figurative compositions on Ghiberti's Baptistry Doors.
The composition of the "Battle of Cascina" is known in its entirety only from copies, as the original cartoon, according to Vasari, was so admired that it deteriorated and was eventually in pieces. It reflects the earlier relief in the energy and diversity of the figures, with many different postures, and many being viewed from the back, as they turn towards the approaching enemy and prepare for battle.
In "The Last Judgment" it is said that Michelangelo drew inspiration from a fresco by Melozzo da Forlì in Rome's Santi Apostoli. Melozzo had depicted figures from different angles, as if they were floating in the Heaven and seen from below. Melozzo's majestic figure of Christ, with windblown cloak, demonstrates a degree of foreshortening of the figure that had also been employed by Andrea Mantegna, but was not usual in the frescos of Florentine painters. In "The Last Judgment" Michelangelo had the opportunity to depict, on an unprecedented scale, figures in the action of either rising heavenward or falling and being dragged down.
In the two frescos of the Pauline Chapel, "The Crucifixion of St. Peter" and "The Conversion of Saul", Michelangelo has used the various groups of figures to convey a complex narrative. In the "Crucifixion of Peter" soldiers busy themselves about their assigned duty of digging a post hole and raising the cross while various people look on and discuss the events. A group of horrified women cluster in the foreground, while another group of Christians is led by a tall man to witness the events. In the right foreground, Michelangelo walks out of the painting with an expression of disillusionment.
Architecture.
Michelangelo's architectural commissions included a number that were not realised, notably the façade for Brunelleschi's Church of San Lorenzo in Florence, for which Michelangelo had a wooden model constructed, but which remains to this day unfinished rough brick. At the same church, Giulio de' Medici (later Pope Clement VII) commissioned him to design the Medici Chapel and the tombs of Giuliano and Lorenzo Medici. Pope Clement also commissioned the Laurentian Library, for which Michelangelo also designed the extraordinary vestibule with columns recessed into niches, and a staircase that appears to spill out of the library like a flow of lava, according to Nikolaus Pevsner, "... revealing Mannerism in its most sublime architectural form".
In 1546 Michelangelo produced the highly complex ovoid design for the pavement of the Campidoglio and began designing an upper storey for the Farnese Palace. In 1547 he took on the job of completing St Peter's Basilica, begun to a design by Bramante, and with several intermediate designs by several architects. Michelangelo returned to Bramante's design, retaining the basic form and concepts by simplifying and strengthening the design to create a more dynamic and unified whole. Although the late 16th-century engraving depicts the dome as having a hemispherical profile, the dome of Michelangelo's model is somewhat ovoid and the final product, as completed by Giacomo della Porta, is more so.
Final years.
In his old age, Michelangelo created a number of "Pietàs" in which he apparently reflects upon mortality. They are heralded by the "Victory", perhaps created for the tomb of Pope Julius II but left unfinished. In this group, the youthful victor overcomes an older hooded figure, with the features of Michelangelo. The "Pietà of Vittoria Colonna" is a chalk drawing of a type described as "presentation drawings", as they might be given as a gift by an artist, and were not necessarily studies towards a painted work. In this image, Mary's upraised arms and hands are indicative of her prophetic role. The frontal aspect is reminiscent of Masaccio's fresco of the Holy Trinity in the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella, Florence. In the "Florentine Pietà", Michelangelo again depicts himself, this time as the aged Nicodemus lowering the body of Jesus from the cross into the arms of Mary his mother and Mary Magdalene. Michelangelo smashed the left arm and leg of the figure of Jesus. His pupil Tiberio Calcagni repaired the arm and drilled a hole in which to fix a replacement leg which was not subsequently attached. He also worked on the figure of Mary Magdalene.
The last sculpture that Michelangelo worked on (six days before his death), the "Rondanini Pietà," could never be completed because Michelangelo carved it away until there was insufficient stone. The legs and a detached arm remain from a previous stage of the work. As it remains, the sculpture has an abstract quality, in keeping with 20th-century concepts of sculpture.
Michelangelo died in Rome on 18 February 1564, at the age of 88. His body was taken from Rome for interment at the Basilica of Santa Croce, fulfilling the maestro's last request to be buried in his beloved Florence. His heir Lionardo Buonarroti commissioned Vasari to design and build the "Tomb of Michelangelo", a monumental project that cost 770 scudi, and took over 14 years to complete. Marble for the tomb was supplied by Cosimo I de' Medici, Duke of Tuscany, who had also organized a state funeral to honour Michelangelo in Florence.
Legacy.
Michelangelo, with Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael, is one of the three giants of the Florentine High Renaissance. Although their names are often cited together, Michelangelo was younger than Leonardo by 23 years, and eight years older than Raphael. Because of his reclusive nature, he had little to do with either artist and outlived both of them by more than 40 years. Michelangelo took few sculpture students. He employed Granacci, who was his fellow pupil at the Medici Academy, and became one of several assistants on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Michelangelo appears to have used assistants mainly for the more manual tasks of preparing surfaces and grinding colours. Despite this, his works were to have a great influence on painters, sculptors and architects for many generations to come.
While Michelangelo's "David" is the most famous male nude of all time, some of his other works have had perhaps even greater impact on the course of art. The twisting forms and tensions of the "Victory", the "Bruges Madonna" and the "Medici Madonna" make them the heralds of the Mannerist art. The unfinished giants for the tomb of Pope Julius II had profound effect on sculptors such as Rodin and Henry Moore.
Michelangelo's vestibule of the Laurentian Library was one of the earliest buildings to use classical forms in a plastic and expressive manner. This dynamic quality was later to find its major expression in his centrally planned St. Peter's, with its giant order, its rippling cornice and its upward-launching pointed dome. The dome of St. Peter's was to influence the building of churches for many centuries, including Sant'Andrea della Valle in Rome and St Paul's Cathedral, London, as well as the civic domes of public buildings and state capitals across the United States.
Artists who were directly influenced by Michelangelo include Raphael, whose monumental treatment of the figure in the "School of Athens" and "The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple" owes much to Michelangelo, and whose fresco of "Isaiah" in Sant'Agostino closely imitates the older master's prophets. Other artists, such as Pontormo, drew on the writhing forms of the "Last Judgment" and the frescoes of the Cappella Paolina.
The Sistine Chapel ceiling was a work of unprecedented grandeur, both for its architectonic forms, to be imitated by many Baroque ceiling painters, and also for the wealth of its inventiveness in the study of figures. Vasari wrote:
<templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" />
References.
<templatestyles src="Reflist/styles.css" />

The Runaway Slave
Sculpture
The Runaway Slave () is a sculpture in gypsum-tinted bronze by Vladimir Aleksandrovich Beklemishev, produced in Italy in 1891.
It is thought to have been created after the publication of "Uncle Tom's Cabin". It was first exhibited at the Imperial Academy of Arts in 1892, where it acted as Beklemishev's academy piece. It represented Russian art at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, which marked the 400th anniversary of Columbus' arrival in America.
It then returned to the Academy of Arts, but remained the artist's property until 1918, when he donated it to the Academy's museum. It was moved to the State Museum of the Revolution in 1930 and after 1945 was assigned its own building, M. F. Kshesinskaya's town house (). However, it was lost soon afterwards and remained lost until 2010.
References.
<templatestyles src="Reflist/styles.css" />

Louis Rebisso
American sculptor and teacher (1837–1899)
Louis Thomas Rebisso (1837 in Italy – 3 May 1899 in Norwood, Ohio) was an Italian-born American sculptor and teacher.
Biography.
In Italy, Rebisso studied with the sculptor Rubalto and in an art academy under Varni. At 20, he joined in Giuseppe Mazzini's attempt to establish an Italian republic, and was obliged to leave Italy.
Taking refuge in the United States, he settled in Boston, Massachusetts, where he worked for several years in monument yards. Subsequently, he settled in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he spent the most productive years of his career, and his name as an artist developed. Rebisso sculpted the bronze statue of William Henry Harrison in Cincinnati's Piatt Park. Among those who studied with him at the Art Academy of Cincinnati were William Jacob Baer, Clement Barnhorn, Solon Borglum, Janet Scudder, Mary Chase Perry, Louise Lawson, Enid Yandell, Anna Marie Valentien, and Eli Harvey .
References.
<templatestyles src="Reflist/styles.css" />

Kahlil Gibran (sculptor)
Lebanese American painter and sculptor
Kahlil G. Gibran (`ka-lil jə-ˈbrän) (November 29, 1922 – April 13, 2008), sometimes known as "Kahlil George Gibran" (note the artist's preferred Americanized spelling of his first name), was a Lebanese American painter and sculptor from Boston, Massachusetts. A student of the painter Karl Zerbe at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gibran first received acclaim as a magic realist painter in the late 1940s when he exhibited with other emerging artists later known as the "Boston Expressionists". Called a "master of materials", as both artist and restorer, Gibran turned to sculpture in the mid-fifties. In 1972, in an effort to separate his identity from his famous relative and namesake, the author of "The Prophet", Gibran Kahlil Gibran, who was cousin both to his father Nicholas Gibran and his mother Rose Gibran, the sculptor co-authored with his wife Jean a biography of the poet entitled "Kahlil Gibran His Life And World". Gibran is known for multiple skills, including painting; wood, wax, and stone carving; welding; and instrument making.
Early years.
Childhood.
Gibran aspired to be an artist since he was seven. The third of five children, he was inspired by his namesake cousin and godfather, the poet Gibran Khalil Gibran. Related to the author on both sides of his family, he was nurtured by his Lebanese immigrant family in Boston. Gibran spent hours in his father's woodworking workshop. From his cabinet-maker father, he learned about instrument making and helped fashion stringed instruments, including a miniature violin that he treasured all his life.
Gibran lived in what is now Chinatown, Boston, and attended local public schools. As a boy, he frequented the Denison House where he occasionally would see social worker Amelia Earhart drive up in her famous yellow roadster. He regularly visited the local public library and enjoyed crafting exotic objects like the scimitar in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum" or the guillotine from "Tale of Two Cities". At eleven, he received Honorable Mention in a national soap-carving contest, and during his senior year at English High School, was awarded the "Lawrence Prize for Art".
Studying.
Gibran entered the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1940. He was offered a full scholarship if he concentrated on sculpture. However, he chose a partial scholarship given by the painting department where he studied with Karl Zerbe. The experience shaped his career. “It was an atelier", he recalled. “They let us develop our own vision while grounding us in the fundamentals – drawing, anatomy, techniques, and materials". "Winner of The Boit Summer Competition" in 1942, the young artist soon was recognized as a master of diverse materials. He was known as "jittery Gibran" for prodigious production fueled by an abundance of nervous energy and for his deep concern that he not be a burden to his family. In 1943, shortly after his study for a mural "Entrée á Paradis" was awarded the Karl Zerbe prize, he left school in order to apprentice at several craft-related organizations.
For a period during World War II, he served as draftsman at Harvard's Underwater Sound Laboratory. Later his carving skills led him to work for Martin Heiligmann, a gilder of fine objects and frames. Finding a Joy Street studio on Beacon Hill, he also started to work for Boris Mirski whose Charles Street Gallery was attracting Boston artists and collectors. Word of the young artist's talent spread, and Gibran briefly honed his skills at the Conservation Laboratory of Harvard University's Fogg Museum. He finally located a studio at 15 Fayette Street in Boston's Bay Village, where he settled in as a freelancer, restoring and repairing fine art objects during the day, and painting at night. Shortly after moving, he met sculptor and conservator Morton C. Bradley. The two would maintain a lifelong friendship.
Early career.
Painting.
Gibran first displayed original creative work at Boris Mirski's Charles Street Gallery in 1944. A January 1946 review of his pictures at the Stuart Art Gallery, introduced him to Boston's art world: “Mr. Gibran is in his early twenties. ... He is a mystic and seeks a symbolism which can convey transcendent ideas... a romantic of the artistic clan of Redon. In another Stuart Art Gallery exhibit, "Study of a Head" by Kahlil Gibran was described as “the tenuous enterprise of another young Boston mystic".
Soon his paintings appeared at Symphony Hall, along with panels by his mentor Karl Zerbe in a selection of work by contemporary artists titled "Fantasy in Art". One reviewer wrote: “There are also among these "fantasts", visionary artists who perceive images in tenuous dreamlike mists... The portrait for example by Kahlil Gibran".
By June 1947, a "New York Times" review of paintings he exhibited at Jacques Seligmann's gallery in the group show, "Artists Under 25", acknowledged his efforts with the brief but laudatory comment, “Kahlil Gibran works subtly and effectively in encaustic". Five months later, Boston's Institute of Modern Art (now Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston) featured works “carefully chosen from the recent production of notable artists in Massachusetts". Exhibitors included Karl Knaths, Edward Hopper and Edwin Dickinson along with younger Boston artists. "ART news" published a John Brook portrait of eleven Boston painters including Karl Zerbe, Reed Champion, Ture Bengtz, Giglio Dante, Maud Morgan, and Lawrence Kupferman. The photograph shows a serious and pensive Gibran in profile seated on a ladder near the painter Esther Geller.
In her review of this seminal show, Dorothy Adlow, wrote in the "Christian Science Monitor": “Kahlil Gibran, who like Mr.David Aronson is 24 years old, paints a "Pietà" in oil with remarkable technical adaptation of pigment". And later, when the "Pietà" was exhibited in a March, 1948 Artists’ Equity show, this critic heralded it as “one of the more distinguished pictures painted in Boston in recent years".
Within a year, his identity as a “visionary” with great technique was spreading. Reviewing contemporary New England painters at the Fitchburg Art Center, Ms. Adlow reinforced this image: “"The Old Fashioned Bouque"’ by Kahlil Gibran sets forth once again the sensitive gift of that young visionary. Mr. Gibran employs his wax technique most effectively. He works with consistency, grace, and poetry".
Gibran continued to exhibit in group shows at the Niveau Gallery, and made his New York solo debut at the Mortimer Levitt Gallery, April 1948. In The "Artists Speaks", Adlow again introduced him:
"Gibran is one of the exceptional group of talented artists who have come to the fore in Boston in the last few years. He has a rare capacity of envisioning intangibles, for conjuring the immaterial in tenuousness and exiguousness of concrete image... the most recent painting "Joseph’s Cloak" discards the subdued chromatic scheme for a rich palette of colors that sing out movingly".
Time in Provincetown.
By June 1949, then married to Eleanor “Elly” Mott a fellow student at Museum School, Gibran began working for the sculptor Ken Campbell during a summer in Provincetown. With his growing reputation as a magic realist, he formed close friendships with several Provincetown artists, including Varujan Boghosian, Mischa Richter, Giglio Dante, poet Cecil Hemley, and painter/poet Weldon Kees. For editor Hemley's "The Noonday Press" he designed that publishing house's first colophon. He also became involved with "Forum 49", founded by Hemley and Kees a pivotal event in American 20th century culture. Jules Aarons brilliant physicist and photographer of Provincetown's artistic community documented Gibran, his wife, and colleagues during that fecund period. Notable is a portrait of the artist with his fish skeleton painting "On the Beach" shown at Gallery 200 during the original exhibit of "Forum 49", and then again, at the Provincetown Art Association's fiftieth anniversary memorial show in 1999.
Spending summers in Provincetown, Gibran and his wife opened a boutique called "Paraphernalia". It became known for its fanciful signs, innovative displays and handsome mannequins, all crafted by Gibran. But soon, railing at life as shopkeeper, he explored other avenues professionally and personally. The couple agreed to separate, Gibran returning to Boston and Elly taking over the shop.
Innovation.
During the early fifties, Gibran, with the young Boston painter William Georgenes, spent two summers in Nantucket, working on new paintings and exploring new techniques. Always experimenting with the latest in materials, he and artist Alfred Duca, also living at the 15 Fayette Street studio, made major media breakthroughs. "New Plastic Medium Used by Painter" was Dorothy Adlow's response to Gibran's innovative technique shown at the Margaret Brown Gallery, during the winter of 1952.
At 30, Gibran turned to a completely new art form. “My marriage was breaking up.."., he told the "Globe" in 1967. "I had too much energy... After my divorce, psychiatry made me understand I had to sculpt".
Crediting Dr. Clemens Benda, with pointing his way to sculpture and, in some ways, transforming his entire persona, even his approach to art, Gibran developed a strong bond with that Jungian psychiatrist. He had learned of him from Hyman Bloom< who, like many Boston artists of the period, were searching for spirituality in non-traditional ways.
Instrument-building.
Throughout the 1940s, Gibran's friendship with Bloom was, in part, due to their mutual devotion to the music of what was then called “the Orient". The young Gibran had always searched for recordings of early 20th century Arabic singers and instrumentalists, and soon joined a group of devotees of Middle Eastern and Indian music that included Bloom, composer Alan Hovhaness, painter Hermon Di Giovanno, sculptors Frank and Jean" Teddy" Tock, Dr. Betty Gregory, and, later on, James Rubin, founder of Boston's Pan Orient Arts Foundation.
As Gibran's reputation for building instruments grew, he also repaired instruments for players from local nightclubs as well as creating and restoring instruments for the Museum of Fine Arts Boston] and folk musicians. Self-taught luthier, he began constructing ouds, sazes, Renaissance-type lutes, and even bows. His vihuela, a 15th-16th century Spanish forerunner of today's guitar, was admired and played by many classical guitarists, and featured in a 1954 concert "Court Music Of The Spanish Renaissance" at the Museum of Fine Arts. Throughout his life, he continued to indulge his passion for building violins as well as other exotic instruments. In the early 90s he took time to self-publish his deeply researched theory illuminating the mystery of the brilliant tonal quality of Stradivarius and other Cremonese fiddle-makers. "Observations On The Reasons For The Cremona Tone" appeared in the January 1994 bulletin of the Southern California Violin Makers, with the convincing and tested argument that burnishing the wood face of instruments prior to varnishing created a compressed, non-spongy, and more resonant soundboard, and consequent tonal brilliance and richness.
Middle years.
Sculpting.
For the next 6 decades, Gibran mostly concentrated on sculpture. Experimenting with metal, he constructed his initial figures from wire found while beachcombing in Nantucket; soon he was combining this technique with thermal metal spraying. By the mid-fifties, Gibran enrolled in Boston's Wentworth Institute of Technology where he learned the oxy-acetylene welding process. Within months, he had begun work on his first major welded figure "John the Baptist" voted "Most Popular" in the 1956 Boston Arts Festival and named “a show stopper and crowd-collector” by the "Boston Globe’s" Edgar Driscoll. Gibran explained the process of creating "John the Baptist" years later in Sculpture Review in a paragraph reminiscent of Michelangelo's statement that a sculpture was simply waiting to be released from within the block of marble:
""John the Baptist", my first welded figure grew out of a fascination for a jumble of baling wire discovered on a Boston wharf. [n.b.: The same wharf where today’s Institute of Contemporary Art is located]. His staff – a tie rod for piers – was eroded by the sea into a most beautifully organic and tactile iron length. The figure was already there. All that was required was order. It was all there, the conceptual and the technical – the raw and primal qualities of John in the desert reflected through nature’s brutalization of man’s objects".
"Voice in the Wilderness", a welded iron rod 7-foot figure received the George D. Widener Gold medal at the Pennsylvania Academy Annual in 1958. A year later, "Pieta" exhibited at the eighth Boston Arts Festival received acclaim as articulated by "The New York Times" critic Stuart Preston: “This year’s Grand Prize in art was awarded to ... Gilbert Franklins’ "Beach Figure" ... but it must have been a close thing deciding between it and Kahlil Gibran's noble and expressive "Pieta"".
Concurrent with his welded figures, Gibran was accepting commissions for decorative works that at times were combinations of wood carving or of metal abstract extruded welded metal wall hangings. For one Chestnut Hill mansion designed by Walter Bogner and its adjacent pool house designed by Saltonstall and Morton, now included in a list of National Historic Buildings, Gibran executed a 100-foot welded Corten steel fence surrounding the swimming pool, doorknobs and other hand wrought architectural features throughout the home, culminating with his sculpture "Javelier".
Publications.
"Sculpture/Kahlil Gibran" published by The Bartlett Press in 1970, focused on the artist's welded iron and hammered steel works.
Once more, Gibran, turned to a completely different art form. With his second wife, Jean English Gibran, he spent three years co-authoring the definitive biography of his relative, Gibran Kahlil Gibran, the author of "The Prophet". "Kahlil Gibran His Life and World", published first by New York Graphic Society in 1974, and by Interlink in 1991, was an effort not only to separate his and the poet's identities, but also to present a well researched, accurate story of the adolescent's immersion in Boston's cultural life shortly after his arrival in 1895, and his meteoric rise in the world of arts and letters.
Commissions and monuments.
Immediately after the appearance of the biography of his famous relative, Gibran abandoned welding, but branched out to several fields that had fascinated him.
A long time admirer and collector of medals, by 1977, Gibran's first significant effort relating to that medium was a bas relief portrait of his cousin for a monument sited in Copley Square across from the main branch of the Boston Public Library. Sculpting in wax led to several commissions, including bas reliefs "Cardinal Richard Cushing", "Amy Beach", "Elliot Norton medal" and portrait heads Karon, "Najwa", "Nureyev", "Self Portrait".
Finally he had the time and, as always, the passion to fulfill a childhood promise to honor his parents Rose Gibran (her maiden name) and Nicholas Gibran. In 1981, Gibran's monumental sculpture the 12 foot bronze Lady of the Cedars of Lebanon was placed on a high Jamaica Plain hill on a Roxbury puddingstone ledge, at the site of the Maronite Church to which the family belonged.
Later years.
Inventing.
The eighties and nineties brought more exposure to Gibran as a multi-faceted creator. Returning to drawing, his mixed media works were featured in several Boston-area galleries including the Cambridge Arts Association, Obelisk Gallery, Pierce Galleries, and the Copley Society where he became a Copley Master. By 1989, during a solo exhibit at Esthetix Gallery on Boston's State Street, the "Boston Sunday Globe’s" Mark Wilson characterized him as:
"A drawer, a painter, a collector, a photographer, a lens maker (he made his own 600 mm f/4.5 telephoto lens for his Nikon), a restorer of musical instruments, a craftsman, an inventor (he has new designs for a furnace, a shotgun shell and a screw driver) and an avid pool player. ‘I go to bed making pool shots in my head,’ he says. ‘I play for the inner game.’ ”
Although he neglected to mention Gibran as jewelry maker and furniture designer, Wilson did describe the Gibran Tripod that he and Chris Casgrande began to manufacture and distribute to institutions, including The Museum of Modern Art gift shop. Like the pool cues he made, the leather belts he fashioned, Gibran’s design for this object was sleek and described as “one brilliant new American product” that during its display at the German Photokina exhibit “had the French, the Germans, and the Italians slavering".
Forest Hills Cemetery and donations.
It was also during the late nineties that Gibran more or less left the competitive art world. Just steps away from his South End studio, "West Canton Street Child" presided over Hayes Park. For the first time in his life, he deliberately avoided publicity, explaining to one neighbor who successfully interviewed him: “I live in a world here that’s very different. When we bought this house I created sort of a haven, I equipped it with all the tools that I need, and it takes up all my time".
Within the vibrant South End art world, Gibran formed close ties with local artists including his Museum School classmate and member of the Boston art group Direct Vision Francesco Carbone, painter Steven Trefonides, and photographers Morton Bartlett, Marie Cosindas and David Robinson.
Along with his studio, Boston's Forest Hills Cemetery had symbolized escape for Gibran ever since he was a boy roaming its rural paths. In Susan Wilson's "Garden of Memories", he recalled how meaningful the space was: “Forest Hills had a quiet solitude and magic...I walked through the gates, and it was MINE, all mine".
At the turn of the 21st century shortly after the creation of his double-figure, "Into the Millennium", Gibran became involved in the Forest Hills Educational Trust. His "Seated Ceres" joined other contemporary art on its Sculpture Path.
Gibran gave "Seated Ceres" to the cemetery. It was featured in a "New York Times" slide show in January 2008, and its presence, seated on the shore of Lake Hibiscus, became a beloved icon.
Last years.
Gibran's last four years were spent giving back to the community. The "Jean and Kahlil Gibran Collection" was shown at Framingham's Danforth Museum of Art in 2002. The exhibit included Gibran's many Boston colleagues – often under-represented painters, photographers, and sculptors – whom he and his wife had collected throughout the decades.
The donation of these works to Danforth, a local museum that respects and continues to show neglected Boston artists, was soon followed by the couple's quest to find an eventual permanent home for their Gibran Kahlil Gibran archive of paintings, correspondence, and documents that they had carefully collected and nurtured. Helping and supporting this plan were long time friends, art historians, dealers, and writers Stuart and Beverly Denenberg. Publishing a confidential digital catalog of the Gibran Kahlil Gibran Collection, the Gibrans and Denenbergs determined that among the several institutions interested in acquiring the collection was Mexico City's Museo Soumaya, This institute provided the space, security, curatorial staff, scholars, and passion to care for the works and possessions of the poet. On October 21, 2007, the archive was placed in that museum's care.
Shortly after, Jean and Kahlil Gibran made another special donation when their vast collection of European and American medals was accepted by the Los Angeles County Museum.
A major exhibition of Gibran's work was shown at Boston's St. Botolph Club during September and October 2007. The curators of this retrospective "As a Man/ Kahlil Gibran", selected forty-five examples, including paintings, musical instruments, sculpture, drawings, inventions, and books. With a stunning catalog, champagne toasts, and the violinist Joo-Mee Lee playing Gibran's violins, the opening reception resounded with applause. Stuart Denenberg read "This Kahlil Gibran" a praise poem honoring his friend of more than forty years.
Death and legacy.
On April 13, 2008, at the age of 85, Gibran died suddenly of congestive heart failure at Massachusetts General Hospital. Obituaries also paid tribute. His final resting place at Forest Hills Cemetery was marked by "Boy with a Dove" the young figure from "Into the Millennium". Exactly three months after his death, "Seated Ceres" was stolen from her Forest Hills site. Though stunned and horrified by this act of vandalism, Gibran's family and Forest Hills Educational Trust administrators collaborated to replace this figure with a "Standing Ceres" that was installed and dedicated on August 15, 2008, at a spot in the cemetery park that Gibran loved best.
On April 26, 2014, Gibran's bronze sculpture "Ad Astra" was dedicated at Childe Hassam Park located on the corner of Columbus Avenue and Chandler Street in Boston's historic South End Neighborhood.
"Love Made Visible" by Jean Gibran, with a foreword by critic Charles Giuliano and an afterword by Katherine French Director of the Danforth Museum, tells the story of "Scenes from a Mostly Happy Marriage" while paying tribute to the exciting Boston art scene that flourished in that city during last half of the 20th century.
In January 2017, Interlink Press published Gibran's & his wife's revision of their biography of Gibran Kahlil Gibran. "Kahlil Gibran Beyond Borders" features more than 200 black and white and color illustrations related to the poet's life and received positive reviews including one by Magda Abu-Fadi from the Huffington Post.
Articles about the sculptor still reveal his reputation as “Golden Hands.” Echoing the 2007 St. Botolph Catalogue that recorded his close friends’ tributes to him is an essay by Joseph Steinfield published in July 2017.
The Monadnock Ledger recalls Gibran's love affair with materials.
Boston Globe Art Critic Cate McQuaid