The Brancacci Chapel and Uffizi Gallery in Florence amply illustrate the powerful influence on Michelangelo of his fellow masters. Cimabue’s Madonna and Child Enthroned with Eight Angels and Four Prophets and Giotto’s Ognissanti Madonna, both at the Uffizi, plus Masaccio’s Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise at the Brancacci, all feed directly into one of the most talented and famous artists of Italy’s sixteenth century...

The legend of Michelangelo (1475-1564) has endured undiminished for five hundred years. Scholars like Chateaubriand, Manzoni and Rilke have seen in him a master of the renewal of Western art. Indeed, endowed with an almost superhuman creative genius, Michelangelo incarnates for us the "universal man" of the Italian Renaissance, and the quality and scope of his oeuvre is uncontested, not even by Leonardo da Vinci - works like his PietY, David, and the Sistine Chapel frescoes are the proof.

  How was he able, in so few years, to develop the methods behind a body of work worthy of his Greek predecessors?

  No one has better examined the complexities of the man, the artist and the age he lived in than Eugene Muntz. His text, written in dear and pure style, is a literary work in itself, and it is accompanied here by illustrations of an exceptional qualiry.

Introduction

The Sculptor

The Painter and the Draftsman

The Architect

Conclusion

Biography

List of illustrations