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Hired to Depress: A Digital Scholarly Edition of William Blake's Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses

Michelangelo

Professor Wallace’s biography has been called “the most important re-assessment of Michelangelo in more than one hundred years. Not since Irving Stone’s novel The Agony and the Ecstasy has there been such a compelling and human portrayal of this remarkable yet credible human individual.” An internationally recognized expert on Michelangelo, Wallace will speak about the challenges and excitement of writing a modern biography of the famous Renaissance artist. He will present a substantially new view of the extraordinary man, who was not only a great sculptor, painter, architect, engineer, and poet but also an aristocrat who believed in the ancient and noble origins of his family. Utilizing the words of Michelangelo and his contemporaries, the lecture will place the famous artist firmly in his times, among his workers, family, friends, popes and patrons.

William E. Wallace received his Ph.D. in Art History from Columbia University in New York in 1983 and is currently Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis. He teaches Renaissance art and architecture, and is an internationally recognized authority on Michelangelo and his contemporaries. In 1990-91 he was a fellow at Harvard University’s Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence; in 1996-97 he was at the American Academy in Rome; and in 1999 he was Distinguished Visiting Professor at Williams College. In addition to more than eighty essays, chapters and articles (as well as two works of fiction), he is the author and editor of six different books on Michelangelo, including Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man, and his Times (2010), which has been widely hailed as the foremost recent study of the artist. He served as the principal consultant for The Divine Michelangelo, a two-part film produced by the BBC.

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Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni
Michelangelo was an Italian Renaissance sculptor, painter, architect, and poet who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art.

Michelangelo was considered the greatest living artist in his lifetime, and ever since then he has been held to be one of the greatest artists of all time. A number of his works in painting, sculpture, and architecture rank among the most famous in existence. Although the frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (Vatican; see below) are probably the best known of his works today, the artist thought of himself primarily as a sculptor. His practice of several arts, however, was not unusual in his time, when all of them were thought of as based on design, or drawing. Michelangelo worked in marble sculpture all his life and in the other arts only during certain periods. The high regard for the Sistine ceiling is partly a reflection of the greater attention paid to painting in the 20th century and partly, too, because many of the artist’s works in other media remain unfinished.

Biography from Britannica.