The Renaissance was the revival of the ancient world through the spirit of the modern Christian world, and no work better rep

Michelangelo's last paintings, produced between 1542-50, were a series of frescoes for the private Pauline Chapel in the Vatican. One of these paintings, The Crucifixion of Saint Peter, features a horseman wearing a turban and restorers, and historians believe that this was, in fact, a self-portrait of the artist. He continued to sculpt, but did so privately for personal pleasure. He completed a number of Pietas, including The Disposition, which he attempted to destroy, as well as his last, The Rondonini Pietà, on which he worked until the last weeks before his death. The Conversion of Saul, housed in the Cappella Paulina, Vatican Palace. The style of this fresco is more mannerist than Michelangelo's earlier Sistine Chapel frescoes, and for this reason it was not as well received by his contemporaries. The fresco depicts the conversion of the Apostle, as related in the New Testament, an event that took place in the life of Paul, leading him to end his persecution of the early Christians and become a follower of Christ. The event is normally dated by researchers to AD 33-36. Within the New Testament, Paul's conversion experience is discussed in both Paul's own letters and in the book known by the title Acts of the Apostles. Commissioned by Pope Paul, this work is housed in the Cappella Paulina, in the Vatican Palace, and is believed to be the last fresco completed by Michelangelo. Saint Peter is represented at the moment in which he was raised by the Roman soldiers to the cross. With stress given to the depiction of his pain and suffering. Restoration of the fresco, completed in 2009, revealed an image believed to be a self-portrait of Michelangelo himself. The figure is standing in the upper left corner of the fresco wearing a red tunic and a blue turban. Blue turbans were often worn by Renaissance sculptors to keep the dust out of their hair. The mountains are painted in a faint blue hue, which perhaps is intended to increase the depth of field through atmospheric perspective. The land represented in the middle ground and foreground is a pale yellow-green that is in some places more of a yellow ochre in color. The main vertical elements in the painting are the figures, which occupy most of the foreground. Many clusters of people surround a single large central figure that is mounted on a crucifix. Unlike the previous representations of the martyrdom of Peter, Michelangelo depicts the raising of the cross at the moment before the crucifixion has started. The angle of the crucifix activates the composition and makes what might otherwise be a static image into a more dynamic image. The strong diagonal line of the crucifix creates a cyclical visual pattern for the eyes to follow to the group of people located on the top right corner, which in turn leads to the end of the crucifix, whilst the other end points to the men climbing up the steps. Michelangelo also created many strong diagonals with the placement of his figures and the extension of their arms and legs towards a central point of convergence. The positioning of St. Peter himself is often noted as a striking innovation implemented in this work. St. Peter's upper body cranes upward, twisting his neck around so that his eyes make contact with the viewer. The saint's penetrating stare gives the impression that he is demanding our observation of his crucifixion so that his sacrifice would not be in vain. Florence Pietà, now housed in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo in Florence, this sculpture was produced between 1547 and 1553. It depicts the dead body of Christ, newly taken down from the cross, while supported by Nicodemus, or Joseph of Arimathea, Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary. According to Vasari, Michelangelo intended for the Florence Pietà to decorate his tomb in Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. The biographer noted that Michelangelo began to work on the sculpture around the age of 72, often sculpting tirelessly into the night with just a single candle to illuminate his work. Vasari wrote that Michelangelo began to work on this piece to amuse his mind and to keep his body healthy. After eight years of working on the piece in a fit of frustration one day, Michelangelo attempted to destroy the work. This marked the end of his work on the Florence Pietà, and from there it found its way into the collection of Francesco Bandini, who hired an apprentice sculptor, Tiberius Calcagni, to transform the work to its current composition. Rondanini Pietà, it is recorded that Michelangelo worked on this sculpture group from the 1550s until the final days of his life. Housed in the Museum of Ancient Art of Sforza Castle in Milan, the sculpture reprises the theme of the Virgin Mary mourning over the body of the dead Christ, which the sculptor had explored in his first Pietà of 1499. Like his late series of drawings of the Crucifixion and the Florentine Pietà, portraying the deposition of Christ, intended for Michelangelo's own tomb, the Rondanini Pietà was produced at a time when his own mortality and spirituality was a growing concern for the sculptor. In his final days, Michelangelo hacked at the marble block until only the dismembered right arm of Christ survived from the sculpture as originally conceived. The spectral, waif-like Virgin and Christ are a departure from the idealized figures that exemplified Michelangelo's earlier style, and have been said to bear more of a resemblance to the attenuated figures of Gothic sculpture than those of the Renaissance. On viewing the sculpture from the reverse, it looks as if Jesus is holding Mary up with his back, instead of Mary cradling her son. It has been argued that Michelangelo crafted the sculpture in this way to represent how Jesus' spirit comforted Mary in her loss. Gilbert has observed that a side effect of Michelangelo fame in his lifetime was that his career was more fully documented than that of any artist of the time or earlier, and that he was in fact the subject of two important biographies, a first for a living artist. In the final chapter of his series on artists' lives, 1550, Vasari explicitly presented Michelangelo works as the culminating perfection of art surpassing the efforts of all those before him. Yet Gilbert explains that Michelangelo was not entirely pleased with Vasari's piece, and arranged for his assistant Ascanio Condivy to write a brief, separate book, 1553, probably based on the artist's own spoken comments. It is, nevertheless, Vasari's lively writing and the influence of the book, which was translated into many languages, that have made it the most usual basis of popular ideas on Michelangelo and other Renaissance artists. Gombrich notes that in his final years, Michelangelo seemed to retire more and more into himself. The poems he wrote show that he was troubled by doubts as to whether his art had been sinful, while his letters make it clear that the higher he rose in esteem in the world, the more difficult and bitter he became. He was not only admired but feared for his temper, and he spared neither high nor low. His highly secretive and guarded nature, and an incident where, while working on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he threw wooden planks at an approaching pope who he had mistaken for a spy, seemed to suggest he suffered with feelings of paranoia. His great companion Tommaso remained with him until his death at home, in Rome, following a short illness in 1564, aged 88. Per his wishes, his body was returned to his beloved Florence and interred at the Basilica di Santa Croce. Michelangelo was the undisputed master of sculpting the human form, which he did with such technical aplomb that his marble seemed to almost transform into living flesh and bone. His dexterity with handling human emotions and psychological insights only enhanced his standing and brought him worldwide fame during his own lifetime. He complemented his Pietas, David, and Moses with what is the most famous ceiling fresco in the world, and has made the Vatican City's Sistine Chapel a site of pilgrimage for those with and without faith. Gombrich said of his cupola for St. Peter's, As it rises above the city of Rome, supported, it seems, by a ring of twin columns and soaring up with its clean majestic outline, it serves as a fitting monument to the spirit of this singular artist who his contemporaries called divine. Historians have tracked Michelangelo influence through the work of such luminaries as Raphael, Peter Paul Rubens, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and the last great sculptor to follow in his realist tradition, Auguste Rodin. Yet Gilbert makes the point that Michelangelo belongs to a very select and exalted group of artists, which includes William Shakespeare and Ludwig van Beethoven, who were able to capture the tragic experience of humanity with the greatest depth and universal scope, and as such, their influence on later art is relatively limited. Gilbert's point is that Michelangelo works, like those of Shakespeare and Beethoven, carry an almost cosmic grandeur that was inhibiting for those artists who followed and who might aspire to emulate his achievements. Singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, meanwhile, likened his own songwriting processes to those of Michelangelo. He said in a recent interview, there's a Duff McKagan song called Chip Away that has profound meaning for me. It's a graphic song. Chip away, chip away, like Michelangelo breaking up solid marble stone to discover the form of King David inside. He didn't build him from the ground up. He chipped away the stone until he discovered the king. It's like my own songwriting. I overwrite something, then I chip away lines and phrases until I get to the real thing.