Michelangelo’s love for sculpture is reflected in his words – “a true and pure work of sculpture, by definition, one that is cut, not cast or modeled should retain so much of the original form of the stone block and should so avoid projections and separation of parts that it would roll downhill of its own weight.” He believed that every blcok of stone was waiting for a sculptor to breathe life into it. He said, “In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.”
Michelangelo’s apprentice, Ascanio Condivi, said of his teacher that he ate “more out of necessity than of pleasure”and that he “often slept in his clothes and … boots.” Michelangelo once told Condivi: “However rich I may have been, I have always lived like a poor man.”
As Michelangelo was finishing painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling, he wrote in a letter to his father, “Let it be enough for you to have bread and live virtuously and poorly like Christ, as I do here. I live meanly and don’t bother about life or honor… and I live with the greatest toil and a thousand worries. It is now about 15 years since I had a happy hour. ”
Michelangelo’s biographer Paolo Giovio, said of him, “His nature was so rough and uncouth that his domestic habits were incredibly squalid, and deprived posterity of any pupils who might have followed him.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, commenting about the sculpture of Bacchus by Michelangelo wrote, “It looks drunken, brutal, and narrow-minded, and has an expression of dissoluteness the most revolting.”
Giorgio Vasari, a contemporary of Michelangelo said of The Pieta, “It is certainly a miracle that a formless block of stone could ever have been reduced to a perfection that nature is scarcely able to create in the flesh.”
Of the frescoes painted by Michelangelo at the Sistine Chapel, Giorgio Vasari said: “This work has been and truly is a beacon of our art, and it has brought such benefit and enlightenment to the art of painting that it was sufficient to illuminate a world which for so many hundreds of years had remained in the state of darkness. And, to tell the truth, anyone who is a painter no longer needs to concern himself about seeing innovations and inventions, new ways of painting poses, clothing on figures, and various awe-inspiring details, for Michelangelo gave to this work all the perfection … “
