When it comes to the High Renaissance, Michelangelo Buonarotti (1475-1564) is as high as it gets. A peerless sculptor, expert draftsman, and reluctant but skilled painter, he was not only one of the best-known artists of his day but probably remains one of the best-known artists ever.
To pay tribute, we surveyed 10 of his most popular works (based on Google Image searches). Here, we rank them according to where we think they stand, critically, as representations of what makes Michelangelo awesome.
This was the look Michelangelo was going for and, at the time, it was quite innovative. Few sculptors had attempted a project of such complexity at this scale, with the image hewn from a single slab of marble and standing at six-and-a-half feet tall.
Images for download on the MIT News office website are made available to non-commercial entities, press and the general public under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license. You may not alter the images provided, other than to crop them to size. A credit line must be used when reproducing images; if one is not provided below, credit the images to "MIT."
Distinctive as their case may be, the story of the Wright brothers tells us something important about employment in the U.S. today. Most work in the U.S. is new work, as U.S. census forms reveal. That is, a majority of jobs are in occupations that have only emerged widely since 1940, according to a major new study of U.S. jobs led by MIT economist David Autor.
This finding, covering the period 1940 to 2018, yields some larger implications. For one thing, many new jobs are created by technology. But not all: Some come from consumer demand, such as health care services jobs for an aging population.
On another front, the research shows a notable divide in recent new-job creation: During the first 40 years of the 1940-2018 period, many new jobs were middle-class manufacturing and clerical jobs, but in the last 40 years, new job creation often involves either highly paid professional work or lower-wage service work.
The fact that some areas of employment feature relatively more new jobs than others is one of the major features of the U.S. jobs landscape over the last 80 years. And one of the most striking things about that time period, in terms of jobs, is that it consists of two fairly distinct 40-year periods.
In the first 40 years, from 1940 to about 1980, the U.S. became a singular postwar manufacturing powerhouse, production jobs grew, and middle-income clerical and other office jobs grew up around those industries.
That corresponds with levels of education. The study finds that employees with at least some college experience are about 25 percent more likely to be working in new occupations than those who possess less than a high school diploma.
At the moment, it remains unclear how, and to what extent, evolving technologies such as artificial intelligence will affect the workplace. However, this is also a major issue addressed in the current research study: How much does new technology augment employment, by creating new work and viable jobs, and how much does new technology replace existing jobs, through automation? In their paper, Autor and his colleagues have produced new findings on that topic, which are outlined in part 2 of this MIT News series.
English contains many words related to this multifarious emotion. At the mild end of the spectrum, we talk about things being marvellous. More intense episodes might be described as stunning or astonishing. At the extreme, we find experiences of awe and the sublime. These terms seem to refer to the same affect at different levels of intensity, just as anger progresses from mild irritation to violent fury, and sadness ranges from wistfulness to abject despair.
Atheist that I am, it took some time for me to realise that I am a spiritual person. I regularly go to museums to stand in mute reverence before the artworks that I admire. Recently, I have been conducting psychological studies with Angelika Seidel, my collaborator at the City University of New York (CUNY), to explore this kind of emotional spell.
Art, science and religion appear to be uniquely human institutions. This suggests that wonder has a bearing on human uniqueness as such, which in turn raises questions about its origins. Did wonder evolve? Are we the only creatures who experience it?
Descartes claimed that it was innate in human beings; in fact, he called it our most fundamental emotion. The pioneering environmentalist Rachel Carson also posited an inborn sense of wonder, one especially prevalent in children. An alternative possibility is that wonder is a natural by-product of more basic capacities, such as sensory attention, curiosity and respect, the last of which is crucial in social status hierarchies. Extraordinary things trigger all three of these responses at once, evoking the state we call wonder.
Other animals can experience it, too. The primatologist Jane Goodall was observing her chimpanzees in Gombe when she noticed a male chimp gesturing excitedly at a beautiful waterfall. He perched on a nearby rock and gaped at the flowing torrents of water for a good 10 minutes. Goodall and her team saw such responses on several occasions. She concluded that chimps have a sense of wonder, even speculating about a nascent form of spirituality in our simian cousins.
Art, science and religion reflect the cultural maturation of our species. Children at the circus are content to ogle at a spectacle. Adults might tire of it, craving wonders that are more profound, fertile, illuminating. For the mature mind, wondrous experience can be used to inspire a painting, a myth or a scientific hypothesis. These things take patience, and an audience equally eager to move beyond the initial state of bewilderment. The late arrival of the most human institutions suggests that our species took some time to reach this stage. We needed to master our environment enough to exceed the basic necessities of survival before we could make use of wonder.
If this story is right, wonder did not evolve for any purpose. It is, rather, a by-product of natural inclinations, and its great human derivatives are not inevitable. But wonder is the accidental impetus behind our greatest achievements. Art, science and religion are inventions for feeding the appetite that wonder excites in us. They also become sources of wonder in their own right, generating epicycles of boundless creativity and enduring inquiry. Each of these institutions allows us to transcend our animality by transporting us to hidden worlds. In harvesting the fruits of wonder, we came into our own as a species.
After that, he moved to Rome in the 1590s and started his career as both a painter and criminal. Author Felix Witting explains that Caravaggio committed a series of crimes. Some of these even included violence and defamation. Eventually, his criminal life lead him to the seemingly accidental killing of Tommasoni in a gang duel in 1606.
He quickly moved to Naples under the protection of the Colonna family. Between 1607 and 1608, he tried to get a pardon in Malta from the Knights of the Order. With no luck, he returned to Naples after a short stop in Sicily. In a final act of despair in 1610, he went to Rome to seek a pardon from the pope himself. He died in transit.
The cause of his death was unclear for a long time. However, a recent study of his remains by Michael Drancourt and his colleagues confirmed that he died from sepsis. It seems a wound he sustained in Naples after a fight got infected and eventually killed him.
This painting depicts the biblical passage from the Book of Judith where Judith gets the Assyrian general Holofernes drunk and then cuts his head off. Caravaggio decided to paint the most impactful moment: when Judith is severing the head.
According to Andrea Pomella, this is the first painting in a series of works where Caravaggio explores the tragic meaning of life. The striking realism and expression on the faces convey the anxiety of the painter.
Author John L. Varriano explains this is also the first painting where Caravaggio starts using incisions in the materials to carve contours, which reinforces the contrast between light and dark in his tenebrism style.
The more elaborate composition creates drama, instead of the stark tenebrism of the Milan version. According to Giulio Bora, this is because, in the London version, he borrows from the mannerism techniques we can see in Michelangelo or Raphael.
According to Andrea Pomella, the dramatism of this scene shines through the entangling of the bodies in the painting. Even though there is no clear setting or background to this scene, the figures alone and the drama created are sufficient. This is the key moment when Judas betrays Christ in the garden.
Thankfully for us, the senior conservator of the National Gallery of Ireland, Sergio Benedetti, found it amongst the collection of some Jesuit priests in Dublin in the 90s and expertly identified it as an authentic Caravaggio.
If we look at this Cupid, he is charming but far from the beautiful god of ancient history. He has crooked teeth and appears incredibly childish, which is very far removed from the angelic and platonic Cupid of the Renaissance and Ancient Rome.
Art historian Ann Sutherland Harris says this is the most polished of all the half-length paintings of young men that Caravaggio produced early in his career. She also points out that this is one of the few paintings that was never copied.
This is another painting by Caravaggio, according to Mary Ann Mattoon, that transforms art and the way we see the story of Narcissus. The trick is all in the water. Caravaggio uses his mastery of light and shadow, along with his realism of movement and form, to create two parallel images of narcissus.
In other paintings, Mattoon says water was traditionally used as a direct mirror or a calming effect. Here, however, Caravaggio achieves troublesome anguish that drives the narrative. Due to the composition of this painting, we also get a general sense of fragility and a lack of stability.
b1e95dc632