ARTH 3440 - Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael, and their World

(crosslisted) VISST 3443
(HB) (HA-AS)

Spring. 4 credits. Student option grading.

C. Lazzaro.

Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael transformed the art of their time. Leonardo was an extraordinary thinker, scientist, and engineer as well as artist. Michelangelo invented grandiose projects for ambitious patrons and created a novel visual language with parallels to his poetry, and in his later years, profoundly spiritual images. Raphael, the consummate court artist, antiquarian, and archaeologist, produced a new classical style. Leonardo and Michelangelo pioneered new approaches to the study and representation of the human body. They deployed wit and humor and reinvented the grotesque from ancient art, and all influenced the proliferation of erotic art. Biographies presented them as geniuses, leading the Florentine sculptor Cellini to model himself in his autobiography on a larger-than-life Michelangelo. Florentine painters and sculptors grappled with Michelangelo’s enormous inventiveness. We will also examine prints in the Johnson Museum after Michelangelo and Raphael, and consider recent attributions of new discoveries to them.