Ikigai Daily
Menu
DriveArt insight

Michelangelo was still carving the Rondanini Pietà, a marble of Mary holding the dead Christ, shortly before his death in 1564 at eighty-eight. The phrase 'ancora imparo' ('I am still learning') is traditionally attributed to him, though the attribution is not firmly documented.

Rome, 1564

ArtPhilosophy

The story behind the card

Michelangelo began the Rondanini Pietà in the early 1550s and kept returning to it until the last days of his life, cutting the marble back again and again. The figures grew ever thinner and more abstract, and a spare arm from an earlier version still stands beside them. The statue was left unfinished and is now in the Castello Sforzesco in Milan. In the same years he was chief architect of St Peter's Basilica in Rome, a post he held from 1546 without taking a salary. A Pietà is an image of Mary mourning over the body of Christ; his best-known one, carved in his early twenties, is in St Peter's.

Türkçe oku
Michelangelo, 1564'te seksen sekiz yaşında ölmeden kısa süre önce hâlâ Rondanini Pietà'yı yontuyordu: Meryem'in ölü İsa'yı taşıdığı bir mermer heykel. “Ancora imparo” (“Hâlâ öğreniyorum”) sözü de geleneksel olarak ona mal edilir, ama bunu kesin olarak belgeleyen bir kaynak yok.
Roma, 1564

Michelangelo, Rondanini Pietà'ya 1550'lerin başında başladı ve hayatının son günlerine kadar ona dönüp durdu; mermeri defalarca yeniden yonttu. Figürler giderek inceldi, soyutlaştı; önceki bir hâlinden kalan fazladan bir kol hâlâ yanlarında duruyor. Heykel yarım kaldı ve bugün Milano'daki Castello Sforzesco'da. Aynı yıllarda Roma'daki Aziz Petrus Bazilikası'nın baş mimarıydı; bu görevi 1546'dan başlayarak maaş almadan yürüttü. Pietà, Meryem'in İsa'nın cansız bedeni başında yas tuttuğu sahneye verilen addır; Michelangelo'nun en ünlü Pietà'sı, yirmili yaşlarının başında yonttuğu ve Aziz Petrus'ta duran heykeldir.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Rondanini Pietà
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

DriveArt

Katsushika Hokusai, the Japanese artist behind the famous print The Great Wave, wrote at about 75 that nothing he had made before the age of seventy was worth counting. By 110, he hoped, every dot and every line he drew would be alive.

The lines come from the afterword to his picture book One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, published in 1834, when he was 75 by the traditional Japanese count. He writes that he had loved drawing the shapes of things since the age of six, and that only at seventy-three had he begun to grasp the structure of animals, birds, insects and fish and how plants grow. He hoped to go further in his eighties and nineties and to reach something divine at a hundred. He signed it Gakyō Rōjin Manji, 'the old man mad about drawing'. The Great Wave, from around 1831, was already behind him. He kept working until his death in 1849, at 88.

Katsushika HokusaiRead card
StillnessArt

John Cage's 4′33″ (1952) is a piece of music in which the performers play nothing for four minutes and 33 seconds, so the audience hears the sounds of the room instead.

Pianist David Tudor gave the premiere on 29 August 1952 at the Maverick Concert Hall near Woodstock, New York. He sat at the piano and closed the lid to begin each of the three movements, opening it to end them. Cage recalled that wind stirred the trees outside during the first movement, rain pattered on the roof in the second, and in the third the audience muttered and some walked out. Two things led him to the piece: Robert Rauschenberg's all-white paintings, and a 1951 visit to an anechoic chamber at Harvard, a room built to absorb almost all sound. There he still heard two sounds, which he was told were his nervous system and his blood. He concluded that true silence does not exist.

MoMARead card
StillnessArt

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with lacquer dusted with gold, silver or platinum, so the repaired cracks shine instead of being hidden and become part of the object's history.

The lacquer is urushi, the sap of the Japanese lacquer tree, which hardens slowly in humid conditions; a single repair can take weeks of gluing, filling and polishing before the metal powder is applied. An often-told but unproven story traces the craft to the late fifteenth century, when the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa sent a cracked Chinese tea bowl to China for repair and it came back held together with plain metal staples, prompting Japanese craftsmen to find a more beautiful method. Kintsugi grew up alongside the tea ceremony and wabi-sabi, an aesthetic that values simplicity, age and imperfection. Some repaired bowls came to be prized more than unbroken ones.

Smithsonian Institution / New Orleans Museum of ArtRead card
StillnessArt

Tibetan Buddhist monks build sand mandalas, intricate circular pictures of a deity's palace, grain by grain over days or weeks. Then they ceremonially sweep them away and pour the sand into flowing water.

The coloured sand is poured through narrow, ridged metal funnels called chak-pur: rubbing a rod along the ridges makes the sand trickle out a few grains at a time. Each mandala is a flat plan of a three-dimensional sacred palace; the Kalachakra mandala alone contains 722 deities. When it is finished, the monks hold a dissolution ceremony. They sweep the design into a heap, collect the sand in a jar wrapped in silk and carry it to a river or other moving water, so that its blessing spreads out into the world. The whole ritual is a lesson in impermanence, the Buddhist teaching that nothing material lasts.

Tibetan Buddhist art (sand mandala)Read card
DrivePhilosophy

What is now proved was once only imagined.

The line is one of the 'Proverbs of Hell', a page of sharp sayings in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Like most of his books, Blake made it by hand: he etched words and pictures on copper plates, printed them himself and coloured the pages with his wife Catherine, as no ordinary publisher could reproduce them. He earned his living as an engraver and was largely ignored as a poet and painter in his lifetime; only later was he recognised as one of the great figures of English Romanticism.

William BlakeRead card
Next card in the archiveThe American novelist Zora Neale Hurston died in 1960 with most of her books out of print, and was buried in an unmarked grave. In 1973 the writer Alice Walker found its likely spot in Florida, set a headstone there and helped bring her work back to readers.Read next →