The Michelangelo Code

Michelangelo: A Life on Paper, by Leonard Barkan (Princeton University Press, 352 pp. $49.50).

Don't we already know a lot about Michelangelo? Most of us are aware of his awe-inspiring achievements in sculpture, painting and architecture, but perhaps not that he was a prodigious poet who strove to find in words a vehicle for connecting ever more closely with the divine. We know that, as a young man in Florence at the end of the 15th century, he already displayed prodigious talent. While still in his 20s, he completed two of the most remarkable sculptures in the Western canon: the David and the St. Peter's Pieta. Art historians and popular audiences alike have marveled at the sculptor's extraordinary technical skill and been moved by the subtlety and grandeur of his translations of Biblical moments into material form. His large public projects, like the design for the dome of St. Peter's Basilica and the paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, cemented his fame as an artist-hero. He was celebrated in his own time, and he has remained in the popular imagination ever since. In America, the older generation will remember Charlton Heston's portrayal of the artist's fierce struggles for perfection, while the younger generation turns up the volume as the Counting Crows sing "When I Dream of Michelangelo." The sculptor's contemporaries simply called him il Divino.

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