Excerpt from Michelangelo by Miles J. Unger, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Michelangelo has depicted Mary in a style that recalls classical Greek funerary monuments and reflects the erudite humanism of the Medici Palace, where Lorenzo was constantly adding to his collection of ancient statues, cameos, and vases and where the wisdom of the ancients was examined with the reverence of Holy Scripture. Even her profile is distinctively "Greek," with her brow and nose forming a single, unbroken line, in keeping with classical canons of beauty. The most original (and nonclassical) element is the Christ child himself. He is seen from the back, his head protectively buried in the folds of his mother's dress. His pose is curious. Is he turning to take his mother's breast, or recoiling in fear as he sees his own fate foreshadowed in the form of the burial shroud? There is an uncomfortable psychological distance between the mother and her child, whom she envelops but largely ignores. She tends to him distractedly, her gaze drawn by the putti, whose activities seem to rehearse the sorrow of the Passion. Jesus, for his part, appears to simultaneously burrow into the protective folds of his mother's garments, while struggling to free himself from her suffocating embrace. Michelangelo will employ the same complex, twisting pose—suggestive of struggle and internal contradictions—in mature works like the famous Night from the Medici tombs.

The technique of rilievo schiacciato that Michelangelo employed in the Madonna of the Stairs would prove to be an artistic dead end. Even when he worked in two dimensions, he usually strived for three-dimensionality. His paintings exhibit a brittle quality that some contemporaries compared unfavorably to the atmospheric subtleties of Leonardo, Raphael, and Titian. Indeed, Michelangelo, rebutting Leonardo's claim that painting was superior to sculpture, famously remarked: "[I]t seems to me that painting may be held good in the degree in which it approximates to relief, and relief to be bad in the degree in which it approximates to painting"—a standard that if applied to the Madonna of the Stairs would brand it an utter failure.

The two years Michelangelo lived in Il Magnifico's palace reinforced his sense of superiority and his faith in the natural affinity of art and other more refined pursuits. The works he created there, especially the Battle of the Centaurs, were philosophical allegories realized in three dimensions. Poliziano, Ficino, Pico, and Lorenzo himself all encouraged him to think of art in rarefied terms, as a product of the mind rather than of the hands. At a later period in his life, when he was beset by many cares, he excused his dilatoriness by reminding his correspondent, "you work with your mind and not with your hands," an attitude that reflected the cultured atmosphere of the Medici Palace but would have been considered laughable in the busy atelier of the Ghirlandaios, where no distractions could be allowed to interfere with productivity.

Excerpted from Michelangelo by Miles J Unger. Copyright © 2014 by Miles J Unger. Excerpted by permission of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.