Book Presentation: MICHELANGELO: A LIFE ON PAPER

  Michelangelo is best known for great artistic achievements such as the Sistine ceiling, the David, the Pietà, and the dome of St. Peter's. Yet throughout his seventy-five year career, he was engaged in another artistic act that until now has been largely overlooked: he not only filled hundreds of sheets of paper with exquisite drawings, sketches, and doodles, but also, on fully a third of these sheets, composed his own words. Here we can read the artist's marginal notes to his most enduring masterpieces; workaday memos to assistants and pupils; poetry and letters; and achingly personal expressions of ambition and despair surely meant for nobody's eyes but his own. Michelangelo: A Life on Paper is the first book to examine this intriguing interplay of words and images, providing insight into his life and work as never before.

Leonard Barkan is the Class of 1943 University Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. His books include Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture; The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism; and Satyr Square: A Year, a Life in Rome.

With:
 
Author Leonard Barkan
 
Alexander Nagel (Institute of Fine Arts, NYU)
Jane Tylus (NYU)