Works

Thirty major works by Michelangelo Buonarroti — paintings, sculptures, frescoes, and drawings spanning seven decades of relentless creation. No artist has ever worked on a larger scale or with greater physical intensity. The Sistine Chapel ceiling, painted lying on his back on scaffolding for four years, contains over 300 figures across 500 square meters and is the single greatest feat of painting in Western art. The David, carved from a block of marble that two other sculptors had abandoned, is the defining image of human beauty and strength. The Last Judgment, painted on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel twenty-five years after the ceiling, is a terrifying vision of divine wrath that shocked even the Renaissance. This collection spans from the teenage relief Madonna of the Stairs to the unfinished Rondanini Pietà he was still carving six days before his death at eighty-eight — the longest and most productive career in the history of art.