Michelangelo, Part Two

Accorded divine status in the world of art, Michelangelo Buonarroti was a beginning and an end unto himself. Regardless of the media in which he worked - painting, sculpture or architecture - there is a breathtaking perfection to the finished product. This film marks the high point of the art film-making of Carlo Ragghianti. The most technically ambitious and innovative film on art in its period, Michelangelo is still unsurpassed as an exposition of an artist's vision in painting, architecture, drawing and sculpture. A camera was designed and built specifically for this film to achieve the sense of a completely free, fluid, infinitely varied viewpoint, weaving at will around the artist's forms. Our conception of the genius of Michelangelo is one of a master able to move between and within his various media, bending and twisting his forms freely into the dramatic contrapposto which marks the transition from late Renaissance to Mannerism. It is this soaring, spiralling fluency that Ragghianti's unique camera work supported by music by Johann Sebastian Bach conveys.

`...absolutely new and hitherto unexplored possibilities of the film camera in the analysis of artistic forms' La Nazione, Florence

`Leaves an impression of weightlessness, even brevity, as well as force' Corriere della Sera, Milan

`We can feel the thematic and stylistic unity in the art of Michelangelo' La Stampa, Turin

© 1998-2008 The Roland Collection & Pira Intl.