Antonio Forcellino

Antonio Forcellino talks about Michelangelo

November 26, 2019

Antonio Forcellino takes his cue from the release of Andrei Konchalovsky’s film Il Peccato (The Sin) to show us a real Michelangelo, different from the American one of the 1965 film The Agony and the Ecstasy. A completely different Michelangelo from the glossy Hollywood portrait: his nails split by hard work, in the midst of the dust of the marble from which he extracts bodies, the divine grace of his ability conflicting with his artist’s greed for fame.  An interpretation of the Renaissance through the artist who had the courage to go beyond all the limits of representation, opening up the way to modernity. As for Leonardo, the anatomy of his bodies derives from the scientific study of anatomical dissections; his violent passion drives him to extract muscles and veins from the blocks of marble, giving the world masterpieces such as David or Moses, figures where representation is pushed to its extremes without ever seeming grotesque, where the work develops out of the study of nature and not out of previous models.
Antonio Forcellino the architect, restorer and artist, comes from the Istituto Centrale per il Restauro  (Central Institute of Restoration) of Rome. He mainly deals with with Renaissance art, curating the restoration of the funeral monument of Julius II in San Pietro in Vincoli and restoring Michelangelo’s Moses. It is to Forcellino that we owe the discovery of Michelangelo’s signature on the statue of Pope Julius II.