Religious Leader

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 441.

Artist

The epitaph on the tomb of the greatest artist in history summarizes his life simply: “Il Divino Michelangelo.” Indeed, Michelangelo Buonarroti was held to be divine by his contemporaries—it was the only way to explain his tremendous genius. While his countryman and peer Leonardo da Vinci edges Michelangelo as the quintessential Renaissance man, when it comes to sheer artistry there is no real competition. Even though Leonardo's Mona Lisa arguably ranks as the millennium's most recognizable painting, Michelangelo's total body of work—his sculptures, paintings, and frescoes—is unequaled.

Michelangelo's popular fame may rest on the sculpture masterpiece David (1501-1504, Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence, Italy) and the Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508-1512, Vatican City), but the Italian artist had a long and varied career. He was born in 1475 in the village of Caprese and grew up in Florence, which was the art capital of the early Renaissance. His early success came as a sculptor, but he also excelled at painting, architecture, and even poetry. The famous dome on the top of Saint Peter's Basilica in Vatican City is a Michelangelo design.

Michelangelo seemed to thrive on challenge and difficulty in his work. David, perhaps the most famous sculpture in the world, was completed using a block of discarded marble. The artist spent four years flat on his back high on a scaffold in the Sistine Chapel to complete the masterpiece painting on the ceiling. Although ceiling paintings were usually considered unimportant and were reserved for figures because of their distance from the viewer, Michelangelo produced biblical scenes of power and subtlety on the chapel ceiling. He also painted the controversial fresco Last Judgment (1536-1541) on the chapel wall above the altar.

Michelangelo's best work offers a combination of detail and exquisite beauty that is unmatched, according to art historians. His attention to the technical aspects of human anatomy, especially the male nude, is brilliant and influential. The artist's work is also intellectually stimulating, grounded in mythology, religion, and other references. Widely considered the greatest artist of his own time, Michelangelo is still seen as a key to the flowering of the Renaissance and is the standard against which all subsequent artists are measured.

It can be persuasively argued that no government or institution wielded as much power during the last millennium as the Roman Catholic Church and its leadership, the papacy. Despite the Great Schism of 1054 that split the Christian church into Western and Eastern branches, the Roman church retained an incredible amount of power and prestige. In the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, however, the church suffered a huge blow to its authority. One man was at the heart of that split: German theologian Martin Luther.

Luther, who was born in 1483 in the town of Eisleben, succeeded perhaps because he attacked the corruption of the medieval Catholic Church from the inside. An ordained priest, Luther began questioning some of Catholicism's main tenets after becoming a professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg in 1508. Although many others had decried the corruption of the papacy and the church before, Luther focused his disputes directly on certain church doctrines.

Chief among these was his belief that only God, not the Catholic Church, could grant redemption from sin. This directly conflicted with the church's policy of selling indulgences. The indulgence was a monetary payment that promised the soul's release from punishment after death for sins committed during a person's lifetime. It was a popular and successful way for the church to raise money. In 1517 Luther publicly attacked this and other church practices that had become corrupted in his Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, commonly known as the Ninety-Five Theses. (In Encarta Deluxe see the Sidebar “Luther's Ninety-Five Theses.”)

Thanks to the new printing technology of the time, Luther's writings were widely distributed, discussed, and debated. Historians consider his revolutionary ideas the single most important contribution to the Reformation, a movement that ultimately shattered Catholicism's 1,200-year dominance in Europe and gave rise to Protestantism. Luther's defiance touched off more than a century of religious warfare and nurtured an emerging spirit of nationalism throughout the continent as governments rejected the authority of Rome and established their own national churches. In 1534, for example, England's King Henry VIII passed a law that created an independent Church of England, with himself as its head.

Luther was excommunicated in 1521, but he continued to agitate against the Roman Catholic Church for the rest of his life. He was also the principal figure behind translating the Bible from the ancient Hebrew and Greek into German; this translation was important in opening religious scholarship to those without training in the ancient languages. Luther died in 1546, but his influence lives on in the religious world. Protestantism stands beside Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy as one of the three main divisions of Christianity. Lutheranism, the religious denomination named after Luther, is just one of many Protestant denominations that exist today, denominations that by one estimate claim 316 million adherents.