«I am not in a suitable place, nor am I a painter.» With these words, Michelangelo concluded a letter in the form of a sonnet to a friend from Pistoia, in which, with painful self-deprecation, he described the pains he felt throughout his body whilst carrying out the gruelling work on the scaffolding of the Sistine Chapel vault. Michelangelo appears as an artist who, throughout his life, continued to practise painting and architecture whilst making it clear that «it is not my profession», always regarding them as a digression from his beloved art of sculpture. The parallel practice of the three arts of drawing – whether at the request of patrons or of his own volition – is, however, the image of reality that history and documents present to us. And his works, a living document of his aesthetic concepts, demonstrate not only that he practised them all, but that in every field he acted as a profound connoisseur of materials and an experimenter with techniques.
The lecture series Michelangelo: The Artist, the Material, organised by Casa Buonarroti for the 2026–2027 season of events, aims to present the artist as he grapples with a variety of techniques and materials, whether as the creator himself or as a collaborator or mentor to other artists.
