A Friends of Kenwood Sunday lecture given by Grant Lewis.
The British Museum recently hosted an exploration of Michelangelo's busy final decades before his death in 1564, aged 88. This lecture celebrates one of the lesser-known aspects of the artist’s career: his architecture.
Michelangelo grumbled about not being an architect, but with time he angled for some important commissions, before becoming the Popes’ go-to architect in his sixties. His career involved some of the Renaissance’s most iconic buildings. In one of his first, brief engagements, undertaken in the 1500s, Michelangelo sought to finish the drum of Brunelleschi’s famous dome for Florence Cathedral; half a century later, he was designing an equally ambitious dome of his own, this time for no less a church than St Peter’s Basilica. Rebuilding St Peter’s was Michelangelo’s main focus in his later years; but he also juggled its construction with other building engagements, causing the elderly artist to devote more time to architecture than painting or sculpture.
Grant Lewis co-curated 'Michelangelo: The Last Decades' at the British Museum. A specialist of Italian art, especially drawings, he has rediscovered a large group of unattributed drawings by Sienese painters in the Museum collection, and has also published on artists including Titian, Giulio Romano and Parmigianino. Other recent exhibition projects have explored Genoese and Venetian art. He teaches at Cambridge and the Courtauld.
Introduction music: Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, by Benjamin Britten, 1940 The cycle consists of seven sonnets, all originally love songs by Michelangelo, dedicated by Britten to Peter Pears.
Produced by Friends of Kenwood
www.friendsofkenwood.org.uk
@friendsofkenwood7574