Michelangelo describes in the above quote what it is like to carve a likeness of a person out of a large block of marble. As we know from seeing his work, he did an excellent job with this task. Bernini did just as fine a job on his, but in a much different way as you will see in the following pages.

Michelangelo was born on March 6, 1475, in Caprese, Italy, a tiny village, owned by the nearby city-state of Florence. His father was the mayor. He attended school in Florence, but he was preoccupied by art. When he was 13, his father agreed to apprentice him to some well-known painters in Florence. Michelangelo was unsatisfied with these artists, because they would not teach him their artistic secrets. He went to work under another sculptor hired by Lorenzo de Medici.

When Michelangelo was 21, he went to Rome, where he was commissioned to carve a group of marble statues showing the Virgin Mary supporting the dead Christ on her knees. His sculpture was called Madonna Della Pieta, and it made Mich

“Throughout the statue, but especially in the head, the conflict between line and form… …is intensified and deepened. The features are more deeply undercut than in any of the earlier works, possibly because of the height from which the statue was originally intended to be seen. …The enormous eyes …seem at once liquid and fiery. The flat planes joining at determined angles underlie all the construction of the David, not only in the squared-off masses of the features but throughout the knotty, bony, sinewy, half- developed, and unprecedentedly beautiful torso and legs. For the first time Michelangelo is able to embody in the quality of a single human body all the passionate drama of a man’s inner nature. The sinews of the neck seem to tense and relax, the veins of the neck, hands and wrists to fill, the nostrils to pinch, the belly muscles to contract and the chest to lift with the intake of breath, the nipples to shrink and erect, the wh!

The statue of David was Bernini’s first major work, which he completed at the age of only twenty-one over a period of only seven months. Bernini gave David his own face, by sculpturing it while his friend, Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, was holding a mirror in front of him. He depicted David as an artist (of war), using his hands as the means of his art. Both Bernini and David (at the time of his fight with Goliath) are young, at the start of their careers, facing a giant challenge (Wallace 27).

Although both of the above artists chose the same subject matter, there are many differences between their sculptures. The first difference is the moment the artist chose to represent. Michelangelo chose the moment just before the start of the battle. His David is thinking about what he is about to do. Bernini on the other hand, chose the split second before David launches the stone from his sling. By choosing this moment, Bernini has created a dramatic representation of an event frozen in time, suggesting the next series of events, the release of the stone and the death of Goliath. His figure is bursting with the same energy that Michelangelo had stored in his figure.

Bernini also became famous in his own time for his rendition of David. He took a completely different view of the subject, as you will soon see.

"[The statue] made way very slowly, . . . suspended in the air with enormous beams and a complicated mechanism of ropes. It took four days to reach the piazza. . . . More than forty men were employed to make it go." One night during the move, vandals—thought by historians to have been Medici sympathizers—pelted it with stones; a guard was set to watch until the installation was complete.”

I also love Michelangelo’s David for other reasons. It is perfect in form, as is was meant to be, which makes the viewer believe that this is just a boy, even though he is seventeen feet tall. I believe both artists got their point across very well in embodying the artistic ideals at the time o

Some common words found in the essay are:
Bernini David, Frederick Hartt, Pieta Michelangelo, Comparison Davids, Luca Landucci, Goliath David, Michelangelo’s David, Donatello's Verrocchio's, Caprese Italy, Buonarroti Michelangelo, abrams inc, statue david, harry abrams, york harry abrams, harry abrams inc, york harry, york time-life books, excellent job, david own, bernini david, fight goliath, viewer’s space, time-life books,
Approximate Word count = 2033
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)