MICHELANGELO

Andre Chastel discusses the different ways in which the artists of the renaissance experienced their difference and creatively transformed it."For Raphael, Beauty was the promise of happiness, for Leonardo the solicitation of a profound mystery. For Michelangelo, it became a source of torment and moral distress. No one went so far in exploring the intuition-indeed, the declared principle of Florentine Platonists- that attraction of beauty, through the impulse of love that thrills through the entire being, is the creative principle par excellence, and the only one worthy of a noble soul. But at the same time, no one felt as painfully as Michelangelo the difficulty of detaching beauty from its sensual forms and sublimating love in its entirety"