DANIELE da Volterra

Michelangelo made preparatory drawings for a painting depicting Aeneas taking off his clothes to lie with Dido when he is surprised by Mercury. He provided them to his friend, Daniele da Volterra, who elaborated the details or developed them further independently. The painting is lost but the composition is known from a copy.

The present detailed sheet, with its finest nuances of shading, was created immediately before the painting was executed.

Toward the end of his creative life, Daniele da Volterra turned his back on painting and began devoting his time to sculpture. After his death, numerous artworks were found in his house in Rome, in whichMichelangelo had once resided. Alongside drafts and proof casts for a bronze equestrian statue of Henry II of France, these included several, partly unfinished bronze bust-portraits of his deceased friend and master, Michelangelo. Daniele’s estate inventory lists a total of six bronze busts of Michelangelo in varying degrees of completion and finish. Today, about a dozen busts - among the an undefined number of copies - are known, differing from one another in the style and quality of the surface treatment. This suggests that Daniele created several more busts that left his workshop when he was still alive. It is not clearly determined which versions came directly from Daniele’s workshop.

Conflicting opinions are expressed in the literature on whether Daniele created the bust of his master before Michelangelo’s death, or posthumously.It remains to be clarified if the portrait was created after a death-mask or from memory. The intended purpose of the bust is also unknown.It is likely, however, that it was created as a memorial object, possibly for Michelangelo’s tomb in Santa Croce. The marble bust by the sculptor Battista Lorenzi that was finally installed there is of the same type as the bronze bust but looking in the other direction and does indeed appear to be based on a model by Daniele da Volterra.

Daniele da Volterra (Daniele Ricciarelli), an artist from Tuscany is mainly known by his paintings in Rome.

Michelangelo became the subject of younger artists who made bronze busts of him even during his lifetime. In his features they sought the traces of extraordinary existence, already engrained in his face during his youth with a nose broken by Torrigiani; they sought his solitary, unique character in order to express in the image of this Titan the contrast between the toughened face of this old man and the beauty of his universal art.

After the completion of the frescoes in the Cappella Paolina in 1550, Michelangelo abandoned painting. He continued, however, to create drafts for paintings by artists such as Ascanio Condivi, Marcello Venusti, and Daniele da Volterra. He provided Daniele preliminary drawings for several paintings, among them the David and Goliath painted on slate (now in the Louvre, Paris). For the depictions on both sides of the slate, Daniele created numerous drafts, starting from the initial ideas received from Michelangelo’s drawings. The present sheet in the Uffizi is one of Daniele’s drafts.

Daniele da Volterra and his workshop frescoed a tomb chapel for Lucrezia della Rovere in the Roman church of Santissima Trinità dei Monti. The Marian program of the decoration is tailored to the woman who commissioned it; the worries, plights, joys, achievements, and heavenly rewards of women are depicted. Each of the three walls is filled from floor to cornice with a single large narrative scene. On the side walls one finds painted balustrades below, from which steps seem to lead up out of the chapel to the stage on which the story takes place. The left balustrade, in front of the terrible scene of the Massacre of the Innocents, is closed; the one on the right, before the exemplary Presentation of the Virgin, is open.

The Massacre of the Innocents were executed after the design of Daniele da Volterra by Michele Alberti (documented 1535-1568), an assistant to Daniele da Volterra.

This unfinished portrait has recently been identified as the work of Daniele da Volterra, Michelangelo’s faithful follower and the author of a bronze bust of the great Florentine artist. Indeed, an inventory drawn up after Daniele’s death lists “a portrait of Michelangelo on panel.” It was probably painted about 1545, when Michelangelo would have been seventy. It was the source for numerous copies.

The portrait looks unfinished, but Daniele has fully described the sculptor’s features and his left hand, almost as though recalling Michelangelo’s notion that, “It is necessary to keep one’s compass in one’s eyes and not in the hand, for the hands execute, but the eye judges.”

Based on the information from Giorgio Vasari, this portrait of Michelangelo is traditionally attributed to Jacopo del Conte. The question of attribution is not yet settled.

This portrait shows Michelangelo when he was more than seventy years old. The sheet served as a one-to-one model for the head of one of the apostles in Daniele’s Ascension of the Virgin fresco on the altar wall of the Cappella della Rovere in Santissima Trinità dei Monti in Rome. There the apostle is clad in a purple cloak and appears at the right end of the fresco, emphatically pointing upward with his outstretched right arm to the miraculous ascension.

Daniele da Volterra and his workshop frescoed a tomb chapel for Lucrezia della Rovere in the Roman church of Santissima Trinità dei Monti. The Marian program of the decoration is tailored to the woman who commissioned it; the worries, plights, joys, achievements, and heavenly rewards of women are depicted. Each of the three walls is filled from floor to cornice with a single large narrative scene. On the side walls one finds painted balustrades below, from which steps seem to lead up out of the chapel to the stage on which the story takes place. The left balustrade, in front of the terrible scene of the Massacre of the Innocents, is closed; the one on the right, before the exemplary Presentation of the Virgin, is open. The chapel seems to have been transformed into a loggia, which on the altar wall continues into the depth of the painting. The real chapel is expanded into a fictive one, in which the apostles are standing around Mary’s grave, and the Mother of God floats away to the Assumption amid a wreath of angels. In the foreground two apostles seem to be leaning out of the painting onto the actual altar of the chapel.

This panel was painted in 1557 for the church of San Pietro in Volterra.

Best known as the man who painted loincloths on Michelangelo’s Sistine nudes at papal insistence, Daniele here delivered a nightmare scene in a very classically composed fashion. The central axis, recalling the construction of some of Raphael’s frescoes in the Vatican, draws the eye deep into the dreadful space.

Daniele da Volterra and his workshop frescoed a tomb chapel for Lucrezia della Rovere in the Roman church of Santissima Trinità dei Monti. The Marian program of the decoration is tailored to the woman who commissioned it; the worries, plights, joys, achievements, and heavenly rewards of women are depicted. Each of the three walls is filled from floor to cornice with a single large narrative scene. On the side walls one finds painted balustrades below, from which steps seem to lead up out of the chapel to the stage on which the story takes place. The left balustrade, in front of the terrible scene of the Massacre of the Innocents, is closed; the one on the right, before the exemplary Presentation of the Virgin, is open.

These drafts represent Daniele da Volterra’s earliest ideas for a painting depicting Aeneas taking off his clothes to lie with Dido when he is surprised by Mercury. The painting is lost but the composition is known from a copy. Michelangelo made preparatory drawings for the painting and provided them to his friend. Daniele elaborated the details or developed them further independently.

The present drawing depicts Aeneas with a boy in three different views. Here the artist was clarifying the motif of the boy helping the hero to remove his cloak. Daniele probably used a three-dimensional model for the group.