Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (March 6, 1475 – February 18, 1564), commonly known as Michelangelo, was an Italian Renaissance sculptor, painter, architect, and poet. His versatility, accomplishment, and artistic mastery were so commanding that he is often considered the archetypal Renaissance Man, along with his rival and fellow Florentine, Leonardo da Vinci.

Michelangelo’s output in every field during his long life was prodigious. When the sheer volume of correspondence, sketches, and reminiscences that survive is taken into account, he is the best-documented artist of the sixteenth century. Two of his best-known works, the Pietà and the David, were sculpted in his late twenties to early thirties. Despite his low opinion of painting, Michelangelo also created two of the most influential fresco paintings in the history of Western art: the scenes from Genesis on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican in Rome and The Last Judgment on the chapel’s altar wall. Later in life, he designed the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican and revolutionized classical architecture with his invention of the giant order of pilasters.

In his lifetime, Michelangelo was often called Il Divino (“the divine one”), an appropriate sobriquet given his intense spirituality. His statue of David is testimony to the beauty of God’s creation, even though the artist saw the raw material of inert stone as an obstacle to be mastered, a vault from which the sculptor laboriously released the work of art. One of the qualities most admired by his contemporaries was his terribilità, a sense of awe-inspiring grandeur. It was attempts by subsequent artists to imitate Michelangelo’s impassioned and highly personal style that resulted in the next major movement in Western art after the High Renaissance, Mannerism.

Unique for a Renaissance artist, two biographies were published of Michelangelo during his lifetime. Biographer Giorgio Vasari called his work the pinnacle of all artistic achievement since the beginning of the Renaissance. This viewpoint was upheld in art history for centuries. Michelangelo died in 1564, the year of the birth of Galileo and William Shakespeare.

Early life

Michelangelo was born in 1475 near Arezzo, in Caprese, Tuscany. His father, Lodovico di Leonardo di Buonarotti di Simoni, was the resident magistrate in Caprese and podestà of Chiusi. His mother was Francesca di Neri del Miniato di Siena. Genealogies of the day indicated that the Buonarroti descended from Countess Matilda of Tuscany, so the family was considered minor nobility. Even so, the family was far from rich. Lodovico struggled financially and definitely hoped for the day when Michelangelo would contribute an income to help with the family obligations.

Michelangelo was raised in Florence. Later, during his mother’s prolonged illness and following her death, he lived with a stonecutter and his wife and family in the town of Settignano where his father owned a marble quarry and a small farm. From a young age, he loved the feel of marble beneath his fingers and felt at home while working it. Michelangelo once said to Giorgio Vasari, the biographer of artists, “What little good I have within me came from the pure air of your native Arezzo and the chisels and hammers I sucked from my mother’s milk.”

Michelangelo devoted a period to grammar studies with the humanist Francesco d’Urbino. After a time, and in defiance of his father’s wishes, Michelangelo chose to continue his apprenticeship in painting with Domenico Ghirlandaio, a well known painter, and in sculpture with Bertoldo di Giovanni. On June 28, 1488 he signed a contract for three years with Ghirlandaio. Lodovico tried to insist that his son take up a more practical and lucrative profession and was not averse to using harsh treatment and words to get his way. Michelangelo was driven from deep within. When Lodovico was unable to persuade or force him, amazingly, Lodovico was able to get Ghirlandaio to pay the young artist, which was unheard of at the time. In fact, most apprentices paid their masters for the education.

Impressed by Michelangelo’s talent and work ethic, Ghirlandaio recommended him to the head of the ruling Medici family, Lorenzo de’ Medici. After leaving Ghirlandaio in 1489, Michelangelo dedicated himself to his studies at Lorenzo’s school from 1490 to 1492. There, he was influenced by many prominent people who modified and expanded his ideas on art, following the dominant Platonic view of the age. During this period, Michelangelo met literary personalities Pico della Mirandola, Angelo Poliziano, and Marsilio Ficino.

In this period Michelangelo finished Madonna of the Steps (1490–1492) and Battle of the Centaurs (1491–1492). ‘Centaurs’ was based on a theme suggested by Poliziano and was commissioned by Lorenzo de Medici. Michelangelo had become like a son to Lorenzo. After Lorenzo’s death on April 8, 1492, Michelangelo quit the Medici court.

In the following months he produced a Wooden Crucifix (1493), as a thanksgiving gift to the prior of the church of Santa Maria del Santo Spirito who had permitted him some studies of anatomy on the corpses of the church’s hospital. Between 1493 and 1494 he bought the marble for a larger than life statue of Hercules, which was sent to France and disappeared sometime in the 1700s.

He entered the Medici court again on January 20, 1494. Piero de Medici commissioned a snow statue from him. But that year, the Medici were expelled from Florence after the Savonarola rise. Michelangelo stayed in Florence for awhile, in a small room underneath San Lorenzo that can still be visited to this day. In this room, there are charcoal sketches still on the walls of various images that Michelangelo drew from memory. Michelangelo left Florence before the end of the political upheaval. He moved to Venice and then to Bologna.

In Bologna, he was commissioned to finish the carving of the last small figures of the tomb and shrine of St. Dominic.

After nearly a year away, he returned to Florence at the end of 1494. But he soon fled again to escape the turmoil and the menace of the French invasion. He was in his home city of Florence again between the end of 1495 and June of 1496. Michelangelo was touched by Friar Savonarola’s preaching, moral severity, and his vision of renovation of the Roman Church.

A marble Cupid by Michelangelo was fraudulently sold to Cardinal Raffaele Riario as an ancient piece in 1496. The prelate found out that it was a fraud, but was so impressed by the quality of the sculpture that he invited the artist to Rome, where he arrived on June 26, 1496. On July 4, Michelangelo started to carve a larger than-life-size statue of the Roman wine god, Bacchus, commissioned by the banker Jacopo Galli for his garden.

Subsequently, in November of 1497, the French ambassador in the Holy See commissioned one of his most famous works, the Pietà. The contemporary opinion about this work — “a revelation of all the potentialities and force of the art of sculpture” — was summarized by Vasari: “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.”

Though he devoted himself only to sculpture during his first stay in Rome, Michelangelo continued his daily practice of drawing. In Rome, Michelangelo lived near the church of Santa Maria di Loreto. Here, according to legend, he fell in love with Vittoria Colonna, marquise of Pescara and a poet.

The house Michelangelo lived in during this time was demolished in 1874. The remaining architectural elements saved by new proprietors were destroyed in 1930. Today a modern reconstruction of Michelangelo’s house can be seen on Gianicolo hill.

Michelangelo returned to Florence from 1499–1501. Things were changing in the city after the fall of Savonarola and the rise of the gonfaloniere Pier Soderini. He was proposed by the consuls of the Guild of Wool to complete a project started 40 years before by Agostino di Duccio that had never materialized: a colossal statue portraying David as a symbol of Florentine freedom, to be placed in the Piazza della Signoria, in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. Michelangelo responded to the commissioning by completing his most famous work, David in 1504. This masterwork definitively established his fame as sculptor for his extraordinary technical skill and the strength of his symbolic imagination. The sculpture of David stands in the Academy in Florence. Indeed it is a stunning depiction of David, larger than life, so strong and handsome, as he contemplates his approaching confrontation with Goliath. The giant sculpture is so flawless that it is hard to imagine that it emerged from marble with the help of human hands.

Also during this period, Michelangelo painted the Holy Family and St. John, also known as the Doni Tondo or the Holy Family of the Tribune. It was commissioned for the marriage of Angelo Doni and Maddalena Strozzi. In the seventeenth century, the painting hung in the room known as the Tribune in the Uffizi. He also may have painted the Madonna and Child with John the Baptist, known as the Manchester Madonna and now in the National Gallery, London.

Under Pope Julius II in Rome: the Sistine Chapel ceiling

Michelangelo was invited back to Rome in 1503 by the newly appointed Pope Julius II and was commissioned to build the Pope’s tomb. Under the patronage of Julius II, Michelangelo constantly had to stop work on the tomb to accomplish numerous other tasks. Due to interruptions, Michelangelo worked on the tomb for 40 years without finishing it. One interruption was the commission to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which took four years to complete (1508 – 1512). According to Michelangelo’s account, Bramante and Raphael convinced the Pope to commission Michelangelo in a medium not familiar to the artist, to divert him from his preference for sculpture into fresco painting, so that unfavorable comparisons with his rival Raphael would be made. However, this story is heavily discounted by modern historians and contemporary evidence, and may merely have reflected his suspicions, as he grappled with frustration over being separated from his beloved marble.

Michelangelo was employed by Pope Julius II to paint the 12 Apostles on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but protested for a different scheme. Eventually he completed the work with over 300 Biblical figures in a composition. His figures showed the creation of Man, the creation of Woman, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and the drunkenness of Noah and the Great Flood. Around the windows he painted the ancestors of Christ. On the pendentives supporting the ceiling he alternated seven Prophets of Israel with five sibyls, female prophets of the classical world, with Jonah over the altar. On the highest section, Michelangelo painted nine episodes from the Book of Genesis. His drive to manifest what he imagined ruled him.

Under Medici Popes in Florence

In 1513 Pope Julius II died. His successor Pope Leo X, a Medici, commissioned Michelangelo to reconstruct the façade of the Basilica di San Lorenzo di Firenze in Florence and to adorn it with sculptures. Michelangelo agreed reluctantly. The three years he spent creating drawings and models for the façade, as well as attempting to open a new marble quarry at Pietrasanta for the project, were among the most frustrating in his career. Work was abruptly cancelled by his financially strapped patrons before any real progress had been made. The basilica lacks a façade to this day.

Apparently not the least embarrassed by this, the Medici later came back to Michelangelo with another grand proposal, for a family funerary chapel in the Basilica of San Lorenzo. Fortunately for posterity, this project, occupying the artist for much of the 1520s and 1530s, was more fully realized. Though still incomplete, it is the best example of the integration of the artist’s sculptural and architectural vision. Michelangelo created both the major sculptures and the interior plan. Ironically, the most prominent tombs are those of two rather obscure Medici who died young, a son and grandson of Lorenzo. Lorenzo de’ Medici, Il Magnifico is buried in an obscure corner of the chapel, without the free-standing monument that had been planned.

In 1527, the Florentine citizens, encouraged by the sack of Rome, threw out the Medici and restored the republic. A siege of the city ensued. Michelangelo went to the aid of his beloved Florence by working on the city’s fortifications from 1528 to 1529. The city fell in 1530 and the Medici family rule was restored to power. Completely out of sympathy with the repressive reign of the ducal Medici, Michelangelo left Florence for good in the mid-1530s, leaving assistants to complete the Medici chapel. Years later his body was brought back from Rome for interment at the Basilica di Santa Croce, fulfilling the maestro’s last request to be buried in his beloved Tuscany.

Last works in Rome

The fresco of The Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel was commissioned by Pope Paul III. Michelangelo labored on the project from 1534 to October 1541. The work is massive and spans the entire wall behind the altar of the Sistine Chapel. The Last Judgment is a depiction of the second coming of Christ and the apocalypse; where the souls of humanity rise and are assigned to their various fates, as judged by Christ, surrounded by the Saints.

The depictions of nakedness in the papal chapel were considered obscene and sacrilegious. Cardinal Carafa and Monsignor Sernini Mantua’s ambassador campaigned to have the fresco removed or censored, but the Pope resisted. After Michelangelo’s death, it was decided to obscure the genitals (“Pictura in Cappella Ap.ca coopriantur”). So Daniele da Volterra, an apprentice of Michelangelo, was commissioned to cover the genitals with perizomas (briefs), leaving the complex of bodies unaltered. When the work was restored in 1993, the restorers did not remove all the perizomas. Some were left as a historical document. Also, some of Michelangelo’s work had been tragically scraped away when the perizomas had been installed. A faithful uncensored copy of the original, by Marcello Venusti, can be seen at the Capodimonte Museum of Naples.

Censorship always followed Michelangelo, once described as “inventor delle porcherie” (“inventor of obscenities,” in the original Italian language referring to “pork things”). The infamous “fig-leaf campaign” of the Counter-Reformation, aiming to cover all representations of human genitals in paintings and sculptures, started with Michelangelo’s works. To give two examples, marble statue of Cristo della Minerva in Rome was covered by a pan, as it remains today, and the statue of the naked child Jesus in Madonna of Bruges (The Church of Our Lady in Bruges, Belgium) remained covered for several decades.

In 1546, Michelangelo was appointed architect of St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, and designed its dome. As St. Peter’s was progressing there was concern that Michelangelo would pass away before the dome was finished. Once construction began on the lower part of the dome, the supporting ring, the whole design slowly came into being. There was no way to turn back.

Capitoline Square

The Capitoline Square, designed by Michelangelo, was located on Rome’s Capitoline Hill. Its shape, more a rhomboid than a square, was intended to counteract the effects of perspective.

Laurentian Library

Around 1530 Michelangelo designed the Laurentian Library in Florence, attached to the church of San Lorenzo. He produced new styles such as pilasters, tapering thinner at the bottom, and a staircase with contrasting rectangular and curving forms.

Palazzo Farnese

Work on the Palazzo Farnese in Rome was begun by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, who was commissioned by Pope Paul III. Michelangelo took over the works in 1546 after the death of Sangallo.

After the death of Julius II, construction was halted. His successor, Pope Paul III, appointed Michelangelo as chief architect following the death of Antonio de Sangallo in 1546. Michelangelo actually razed some sections of the church designed by Sangallo in keeping with the original design by St. Peter’s first architect, Donato Bramante (1444–1514). However the only elements built according to Michelangelo’s designs are sections of the rear façade and the dome. After his death, his student Giacomo della Porta continued with the unfinished portions of the church.

Michelangelo the man

Michelangelo was often arrogant toward others and constantly dissatisfied with himself. His art originated from deep inner inspiration and drive as well as culture. In contradiction to the ideas of his rival, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo saw nature as an enemy that had to be overcome. The figures that he created are forceful and dynamic; each in its own space apart from the outside world. For Michelangelo, the job of the sculptor was to free the forms that were already inside the stone. He believed that every stone had a sculpture within it, and that the work of sculpting was simply a matter of chipping away all that wasn’t a part of the statue.

For Michelangelo, his life was a seemingly endless struggle between fulfilling commissions to earn money to help support himself, his aging father, and other family members, and having time to pursue the artistic ideas and passions that were in his heart and mind. It is hard to imagine that the artist who created the magnificent fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel felt frustrated to be painting, having been taken away from the sculptural work he was most devoted to.

The Silent Hill 2 Remake should’ve never been made. Despite critical acclaim from both journalists and “””fans”””, I’m here to tell you it’s a soulless cash-grab.

0:00 Gaming is Dying Segment
15:55 Review Section – Gameplay
18:53 Boss Fights
21:24 It’s Less Scary
28:01 CENSORSHIP
32:01 Angela
39:06 Eddie
42:02 Mary
45:00 James
48:16 Conclusion

Reacting to the Silent Hill transmission.

Burrard Street is a major thoroughfare in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. It is the central street of Downtown Vancouver and the Financial District. The street is named for Burrard Inlet, located at its northern terminus, which in turn is named for Sir Harry Burrard-Neale.

The street starts at Canada Place near the Burrard Inlet, then runs southwest through downtown Vancouver. It crosses False Creek via the Burrard Bridge. South of False Creek, on what used to be called Cedar Street before the completion of the bridge in 1932, the street runs due south until the intersection with West 16th Avenue.

The intersection of Burrard Street and Georgia Street is considered to be the centrepoint of Downtown Vancouver, along with the more tourist-oriented and upscale shopping-spirited intersection of Burrard Street and Robson Street to the south. At and due northeast of the centre is the heart of the Financial District. Further down closer to Vancouver Harbour stands the historic Marine Building, an Art Deco masterpiece, opened in 1930, two years before the Art Deco pylons of the Burrard Bridge at the opposite end of the street. Finally at the Harbour lies Canada Place and the Vancouver Convention Centre.

Nearer to Burrard Bridge is located St. Paul’s Hospital, established on Burrard Street in 1894.

Burrard Street served as the dividing line between the two district lots laid out on the downtown peninsula in the second half of the 19th century: District Lot 185 (now West End) and District Lot 541 (granted to the Canadian Pacific Railway). The two grids were oriented differently, with the result that only every third northwest-southeast street in DL185 actually continuing southeast beyond Burrard into DL541. Burrard currently serves as the boundary between West End and Downtown, as defined by the City of Vancouver.

Burrard Street is served by SkyTrain’s Burrard Station, located underground between the intersections with Melville and Dunsmuir Streets in the heart of the Financial District. Along the downtown portion, there is a bike lane on the southwest-bound direction towards the Burrard Bridge.

How do you tell if a book has samurai in it? Don’t worry, they’ll put a katana on the cover. A book about ninjas is a little harder, since they are invisible to anyone that hasn’t just been killed by a ninja. How do you tell if a book is a thriller? Don’t worry, they’ll put a gun on the cover.

Professional protectors – the fifth profession…. get it! – Savage and Akira are teamed up to protect a travelling businessman. Things go horribly wrong and Savage is beaten to a pulp after seeing the businessman and Akira killed. Akira is also beaten to a pulp and sees the businessman and Savage killed. And so begins the twist in this David Morrell thriller.

A lot of thrillers take you from point A to point B very efficiently to the point of cliche. Some authors even churn out the same book dozens of times in this manner. The thing that keeps you coming back is the the taut writing, thrills and cool escapism. The strength of The Fifth Profession is that it starts with the standard thriller plot setup and then eschews that for a different plot entirely. It makes the entire story novel. See what I did there?

There are some annoying aspects to Morrell’s novel. David has a habit of hammering certain points and descriptions at the reader, to the point I started assuming everyone had “karate” calloused hands. To some people this could be annoying and enough to throw the book against a wall – which I wouldn’t be doing this since I read this on my iPad. To others the plotting and pacing will keep you entertained, as it did with me.

Why does modern Nintendo suck, well its not what you think. It’s not stuff like their mediocre online service, cheap hardware, treatment of legacy games and then selling those legacy games back to consumers at full price or just the fact that their games never go on sale. While all of these things are super frustrating, it’s not the reason modern Nintendo sucks. The reason is Nintendo has lost its creativity.

Nintendo is speedrunning the Disney playbook. We all know where that goes.

We’re experiencing a golden age of Nintendo…’s legal bloodhounds. Seriously, these days I hear more about Nintendo’s latest target of annihilation than Nintendo’s latest videogames. That’s partly because the console giant’s recent output has mostly been a forgettable roster of late-generation call-ups like “a Zelda spinoff” and “more Mario Party”, but it’s also because Nintendo’s public persona has gotten pretty ugly.

Beyond that one month that we were all really into Tears of the Kingdom, the story of Nintendo lately is one of picking fights or (more commonly) threatening to sue its own fans so hard that they don’t even dare fight back. The decimation of the Ryujinx emulator and a potentially risky Palworld lawsuit are making headlines everywhere, but taking stock of just the past couple of years revealed a bunch of Nintendo legal actions that I totally forgot about.

Between late 2022 and 2024, Nintendo:

• Went after a PC application that assigns box art to your non-Steam games because it had Nintendo art in its database
• Barraged a YouTuber/modder with copyright strikes and threats until he took down a Breath of the Wild multiplayer mod
• Blocked the release of the Dolphin emulator on Steam by warning Valve it’d come after them next
• Indirectly killed a cool Portal 64 demake in development for genuine N64 hardware: Amazingly, Valve nipped this one in the bud not because of the Portal usage, but because it didn’t want to deal with the inevitable Nintendo fallout.
• DMCA’d a Palworld Pokémon mod off the internet as the game was blowing up (months before the patent suit)
• Sued the developers of the Yuzu Switch emulator, killed the project, and settled for millions of dollars before a judge could decide if there is anything illegal about Yuzu
• Killed the Citra 3DS emulator, made by the same Yuzu group, in the fallout
• Nuked 20 years’ worth of Nintendo-related Garry’s Mod creations from orbit (because why not)
• Formally filed a patent lawsuit against Palworld
• Sicced the dogs on the last Switch emulator standing, Ryujinx

It’s worth saying out loud that this is not normal, even for videogame company standards. Hostility toward fan games isn’t unique to Nintendo (though it is easily the most hostile), but you don’t see Microsoft wiping Xbox emulators off the net, and it’d be pretty weird for EA to go after a software dev because they downloaded some box art. Sega and Sony, two companies with a rich backlog of IP and console hardware, aren’t sending cease and desist letters to ISO sites, and they’re generally more chill about fan projects, too (though the Sega-owned Atlus loves go after fans almost as much as Nintendo). Earlier this year, the developers of the Bloodborne Kart fan game was able to release its FromSoftware-inspired kart racer after scrubbing it of official Bloodborne branding.

In a time when we’re used to viewing game companies as adversaries—”[insert company here] isn’t your friend” is a common social media refrain—Nintendo’s heel turn has been a slower burn. It’s been true as long as I’ve followed games that people just aren’t normal about Nintendo. The company has always enjoyed this special, Disney-like reputation as a game maker that puts fun first and breeds creativity. Those qualities have cultivated a fandom fiercer than any other entertainment brand on earth, and insulate the billion-dollar operation from cynicism.

Perhaps it’s that Disney-like trajectory fueling Nintendo’s latest litigious surge against any and all perceived infringers. After all, Nintendo ain’t a game company anymore—with a billion-dollar Mario movie under its belt, a sequel on the docket, theme parks, and a Zelda film on the way, the company’s value is increasingly tethered to its icons, and decreasingly associated with brand new characters or worlds. When your game plan revolves around repackaging decades-old stories, everything starts to look like a threat..

Nintendo’s situation is unique because nobody hates emulation quite like Nintendo. To the Big N, there is no game preservation debate: emulation leads to piracy, so emulators are as good as pirates. Mario in Garry’s Mod is a crime. Fan games are an assault on the IP vault.

That one particularly sticks in my craw. When a publisher pressures a fan into cease-and-desisting their fan game, you’ll sometimes hear that the Nintendos of the world have an obligation to defend their trademark, because if they don’t, they’ll lose it. That makes sense when you first think about it—if they let just anyone make a game called Pokémon, Nintendo’s baby would get genericized like Kleenex or the yo-yo! But when you consider that this worst-case scenario of a publisher losing its intellectual property because it didn’t shut down a fan game has never actually happened, it starts to sound less like a legitimate worry and more like a one-size-fits-all excuse.

It’s not like Nintendo’s legal exploits are gonna trigger a mass fan exodus, but I’d argue we’re seeing the effects of its reputation in how people are talking about the Palworld lawsuit: In one corner are Nintendo diehards cheering for the downfall of a too-familiar creature collector, in the other a mix of Palworld players and Nintendo skeptics who see this as just another example of Nintendo overreach—its latest attack on PC gaming. Even if it emerges victorious, Nintendo will come out the other side having chipped another little piece of its “lovable toymaker” mask.

And if Nintendo is going to keep going full Ace Attorney on emulators, drawing larger borders around its precious IP in the process, it shouldn’t be tedious-to-impossible to access so much of its precious back catalog legally. With the Wii Virtual Console, 3DS, and Wii U stores gone forever, the only official way to emulate an old Zelda is to buy Nintendo’s crappy online subscription and wait for that service to die in a decade, too. The Switch 2 is an opportunity to do better—to put as much focus on how fans can play its games as it’s currently putting on how they can’t.