Michelangelo: amici, allievi, collaboratori. Il caso di Marcello Venusti
Marcella Marongiu
In his very long career, Michelangelo made a radical transformation in the modus operandi of the Renaissance artist. Departing from the established model of workshop organisation, in which each level of the learning stage corresponded to different occupations and margins of autonomy, he implemented a critique and an overcoming of it in the building site of the Sistine Ceiling, effectively assuming control of every aspect of the decoration and delegating only practical tasks to two lowly assistants. He experimented in the immediately following years with a new modality, namely the direct collaboration with talented artists, with whom he experimented with new ways of artistic production. Others followed the successful and long-lasting experiment with Sebastiano del Piombo over the years, and this mode became prevalent after the completion of the frescoes in the Paolina Chapel (1549), the last pictorial work realised by Michelangelo. This essay analyses the phenomenon on a diachronic level and takes a closer look at Michelangelo’s collaboration with Marcello Venusti, which began in the mid-1540s and only ended with Buonarroti’s death.