TeaWithTater.com

Michelangelo
Portrait by Daniele da Volterra

Today is the birthday of Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (Caprese near Arezzo, Republic of Florence (present-day Tuscany, Italy) 6 March 1475 – 18 February 1564 Rome); sculptor, painter, architect, and poet of the High Renaissance who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art.  In my opinion, the greatest living artist of his lifetime, one of the greatest artists of all time.  His versatility in the disciplines he took up was of such a high order that he is often considered a contender for the title of the archetypal Renaissance man, along with his rival and fellow Florentine Medici client, Leonardo da Vinci.

He sculpted two of his best-known works, the Pietà and David, before the age of thirty.  Despite holding a low opinion of painting, Michelangelo also created two of the most influential frescoes in the history of Western art: the scenes from Genesis on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, and The Last Judgment on its altar wall.  As an architect, Michelangelo pioneered the Mannerist style at the Laurentian Library.  At the age of 74, he succeeded Antonio da Sangallo the Younger as the architect of St. Peter’s Basilica.  Michelangelo transformed the plan so that the western end was finished to his design, as was the dome, with some modification, after his death.

In his lifetime he was often called Il Divino (“the divine one”).  One of the qualities most admired by his contemporaries was his terribilità, a sense of awe-inspiring grandeur.  The attempts by subsequent artists to imitate Michelangelo’s impassioned and highly personal style resulted in Mannerism, the next major movement in Western art after the High Renaissance.

Gallery 

Erythraean Sibyl, sistine chapel

• 

  The Madonna of the Steps (1490–92)

• 

  The Taddei Tondo (1502)

• 

  Madonna and Child. Bruges, Belgium (1504)

• 

  The Doni Tondo (1504–06)

• 

  Angel early work (1494–95)

• 

  Bacchus early work (1496–97)

• 

  Dying slave, Louvre (1513)

• 

  Bound slave, known as Atlas (1530–34)

• 

  The Drunkenness of Noah

• 

  The Deluge (detail)

• 

  The Creation of Adam (1510)

• 

  The First day of Creation

• 

  Studies for The Libyan Sibyl

• 

  The Libyan Sibyl (1511)

• 

  The Cumaean Sibyl

• 

  The Prophet Jeremiah (1511)

• 

  Ignudo

• 

  Battle of the Centaurs (1492)

• 

  Copy of the lost Battle of Cascina by Bastiano da Sangallo

• 

  The Last Judgment, detail of the Redeemed

• 

  The Crucifixion of St. Peter

• 

  The vestibule of the Laurentian Library has Mannerist features which challenge the Classical order of Brunelleschi’s adjacent church.

• 

  Redesign of the ancient Capitoline Hill included a complex spiralling pavement with a star at its centre.

• 

  Design for St Peter’s is both massive and contained, with the corners between the apsidal arms of the Greek Cross filled by square projections.

• 

  The exterior is surrounded by a giant order of pilasters supporting a continuous cornice. Four small cupolas cluster around the dome.

Michelangelo died in Rome, three weeks before his 89th birthday.  His body was taken from Rome for interment at the Basilica of Santa Croce, fulfilling the maestro’s last request to be buried in his beloved Florence.

• 

  Statue of Victory (1534), Palazzo Vecchio, Florence

• 

  The Pietà of Vittoria Colonna (c. 1540)

• 

  Michelangelo and Tiberio Calcagni, Pietà Firenze (c. 1550–61)

• 

  The Rondanini Pietà (1552–64)

 Verse

A quel pietoso fonte, onde siam tutti,
S’assembra ogni beltà che qua si vede,
Più c’altra cosa alle persone accorte

Cyrano de Bergerac

Today is the birthday of Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac (Paris 6 March 1619 – 28 July 1655 Sannois); novelist, playwright, epistolarian and duelist.

A bold and innovative author, his work was part of the libertine literature of the first half of the seventeenth century.  Perhaps best known as the inspiration for Edmond Rostand’s most noted drama Cyrano de Bergerac which, although it includes elements of his life, also contains myth.

 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Today is the birthday of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (née Moulton-Barrett, Kelloe, Durham; 6 March 1806 – 29 June 1861 Florence); in my opinion, one of the most prominent poets of the Victorian era, popular in Britain and the United States during her lifetime.

In the 1830s Elizabeth was introduced to literary society through her cousin, John Kenyon.  Her first adult collection of poems was published in 1838 and she wrote prolifically between 1841 and 1844, producing poetry, translation and prose.  She campaigned for the abolition of slavery and her work helped influence reform in the child labour legislation.  Her prolific output made her a rival to Tennyson as a candidate for poet laureate on the death of Wordsworth.

Elizabeth’s volume Poems (1844) brought her great success, attracting the admiration of the writer Robert Browning.  Their correspondence, courtship and marriage were carried out in secret, for fear of her father’s disapproval.  Following the wedding she was disinherited by her father.  The couple moved to Italy in 1846, where she would live for the rest of her life.  They had one son, Robert Barrett Browning, whom they called Pen.  A collection of her last poems was published by her husband shortly after her death.

Elizabeth’s work had a major influence on prominent writers of the day, including the American poets Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson.  She is remembered for such poems as “How Do I Love Thee?” (Sonnet 43, 1845) and Aurora Leigh (1856).

Verse  

How Do I Love Thee?

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Sonnet XLIII
from Sonnets from the Portuguese, 1845 (published 1850)

Gabriel García Márquez
in 2002

Today is the birthday of Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez (Arcataca 6 March 1927 – 17 April 2014 Mexico City); novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo or Gabito throughout Latin America.  In my opinion, one of the most significant authors of the 20th century and one of the best in the Spanish language.  He was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature.  He pursued a self-directed education that resulted in his leaving law school for a career in journalism.

In 1958, he married Mercedes Barcha.

García Márquez started as a journalist, and wrote many acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories.  Perhaps he is best known for his novels, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985).  His works have achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for popularizing a literary style labeled as magic realism, which uses magical elements and events in otherwise ordinary and realistic situations.  Some of his works are set in a fictional village called Macondo (the town mainly inspired by his birthplace Aracataca), and most of them explore the theme of solitude.