Előszó
INTRODUCTION
If we are to understand fully the personality and life of a supreme artist such as Michelangelo Buonarroti, it is quite inadequate and too simple to summarise in a few biographical data and brief com ments the events and achievements of a man, we might say of a genius, üke the one we propose to describe. Indeed this understanding calls for far more than a few words and requires a much deeper and more critical analysis.
However, we intend to trace the essential and most significant points of everything that helps to give as critical and exhaustive a picture as possible of the life and work of this artist, and the influence he exercised in the sphere of art.
From his earliest creations, marked by a classicistic style, through already imbued with exceptional power and spirituality, to his dramatic last works, Mi-chelangelo's art reveals itself as being of consistently high, and above all, poetic quality.
Michelangelo's outlook and achievement are as well known and amifed as any in Italian art, but nevertheless they are not fully understood. This is becau-se as a rule the artist is judged and amired for the formai beauty of his works, and for the plastic power of the whole, without paying heed to what inspires his creations and sustains them from within, far transcending the sheer beauty which imbues somé of the faces, nudes and postures. Within this beauty, at its very heart, Michelangelo's mind is revealed and laid bare, the dominating affirmation of an intense personality, a spirituality wholly taken up with the vision of man-kind as heroic and at the same time tragic; this vision sometimes expresses itself in a powerful reaction, sometimes in sorrowful melancholy, or in the deep sad-ness of someone overwhelmed by grief. This is, then, a dramatic, deeply humán feeling transcending every concept of mere form which, although seemingly attrac-tive, does not really and wholly express his true personality.
Vissza 
