Aziz Art Nov2019

Apprenticeships, 1488–92
As a young boy, Michelangelo was
sent to Florence to study grammar
under the Humanist Francesco da
Urbino.[5][8][b] The young artist,
however, showed no interest in his
schooling, preferring to copy
paintings from churches and seek
the company of painters.
The city of Florence was at that
time the greatest centre of the
arts and learning in Italy. Art was
sponsored by the Signoria (the
town council), by the merchant
guilds and by 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 1400s, the
architect Brunelleschi had studied
the remains of Classical buildings
in Rome and created two churches,
San Lorenzo's and Santo Spiritu,
years to create the bronze doors of
the Baptistry, which Michelangelo
was to describe as "The Gates of
Paradise". The exterior niches of
the Church of Or' San Michele
contained a gallery of works by the
greatest sculptors of Florence,
Donatello, Ghiberti, Verrocchio, and
Nanni di Banco.The interiors of the
older churches were covered with
frescos, mostly in the Late Medieval
style, 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, in order to
decorate the walls of the Sistine
Chapel. Among them was
Domenico Ghirlandaio, a master of
the technique of fresco painting, of
perspective, figure drawing and
portraiture. He had the largest
workshop in Florence, at that
period.
which embodied the Classical
precepts. The sculptor Lorenzo
Ghiberti had laboured for fifty
In 1488, at thirteen, Michelangelo
was apprenticed to Ghirlandaio..