Reactions to the Master: Michelangelo’s Effect on Art and Artists in the Sixteenth Century

The immense effect that Michelangelo had on many artists working in the sixteenth century is widely acknowledged by historians of Italian Renaissance art. Yet until recently greater stress has been placed on the individuality of these artists’ styles and interpretation rather than on the elucidation of their debts to others. There has been little direct focus on the ways in which later sixteenth-century artists actually confronted Michelangelo, or how those areas or aspects of their artistic production that are most closely related to his reveal their attitudes and responses to Michelangelo’s work. Reactions to the Master presents the first coherent study of the influence exerted by Michelangelo’s work in painting and sculpture on artists of the late-Renaissance period including Alessandro Allori, Agnolo Bronzino, Battista Franco, Francesco Parmigianino, Jacopo Pontormo, Francesco Salviati, Raphael, Giorgio Vasari, Marcello Venusti, and Alessandro Vittoria. The essays focus on the direct relations, such as copies and borrowings, previously underrated by art historians, but which here form significant keys to understanding the aesthetic attitudes and broader issues of theory advanced at the time.