Michelangelo, probably the best
We are going to leap forward now to the period of intellectual re-emergence, and the casting off of the ignorance of the Dark Ages that began as Hypatia breathed her last. Michelangelo represents the absolute acme of Renaissance artistic achievement. The soil from which his genius grew was a congruence of wealth, leisure and intellectual and philosophical liberation. An atmosphere of intellectual freedom, and the availability of patronage triggered the creative explosion that was the Renaissance. Ironically, it was the Roman Church, hitherto responsible for suppressing individual creativity, that suddenly became the major patron of arts, offering wide latitude of subject matter and interpretation.
But, of course, there was much more to it than just that. Whatever touches a generation or an era to produce such a concentration of virtuosity is impossible to quantify, but Michelangelo certainly did not live in a vacuum of genius. The Renaissance hailed back to that other age of intellectual brilliance, the classical period, and certainly Michelangelo’s work was deeply influenced by classical form and technique. Michelangelo was not merely a genius, but a polymath, for the scope of his work extends far beyond the more commonly recognized works of art that he is responsible for. Although not quite as versatile as Aristotle, nor as densely productive as Leonardo da Vinci, he nonetheless produced astonishing work in architecture and poetry, as well as in marble and tempera.
But in each of those disciplines, Michelangelo strove towards the same goal, to capture an artistic, indeed a spiritual ideal that he could imperfectly describe in his work, but which he could see in clear, literal terms. This is something invisible to the rest of us, but which great genius understands instinctively.
Indeed, the story goes that when be put down his mallet and chisel, and looked up at the complete David, he was so impressed with its physical perfection that he commanded in to speak. As he himself remarked: ‘I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.’