Becoming Michelangelo

Michelangelos genius is revealed as never before by the man who became Michelangelos 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 geniusa 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 Michelangelos journey from student to master, using the artists drawings to chart his progress and offering unique insight into the true nature of his mastery. Pascuzzi himself is a practicing artist in Florence, Michelangelos 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 Craftsmans Handbook (1399), which was available to apprentices as a kind of textbook of the period. Pascuzzis narrative traces Michelangelos 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 Michelangelos burgeoning abilities through copies he himself executed in museums and galleries in Florence and elsewhere around the world, Pascuzzi unlocks the transformation that made Michelangelo great. At the same time, he narrates his own transformation from student to artist as Michelangelos last apprentice.