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Michelangelo's Grocery List

kamalktk

Antediluvian
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Feb 5, 2011
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There doesn't seem to be a Michelangelo thread. A grocery list by Michelangelo.

twentytwowords.com/michelangelo-illustrated-his-grocery-list-and-we-still-have-one/
Link is dead. See later post for additional info.

It’s not that surprising once you think about it, yet it is still intriguing to see that one of the greatest artists ever plied his craft for even the most mundane tasks. Michelangelo, the famous Renaissance artist of the 15th and 16th centuries, not only wrote grocery lists, he also drew pictures of the food he needed.

One of these lists still exists today and is a part of the exhibit “Michelangelo Public and Private: Drawings for the Sistine Chapel and Other Treasures from the Casa Buonarroti.” When this collection was at the Seattle Art Museum several years ago, Steve Duin wrote in a review for The Oregonian…

Because the servant he was sending to market was illiterate, Michelangelo illustrated the shopping lists — a herring, tortelli, two fennel soups, four anchovies and “a small quarter of a rough wine” — with rushed (and all the more exquisite for it) caricatures in pen and ink.
 
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Pretty cool, eh? I LOVE Michelangelo. Especially that ceiling he didn't want to paint. I'll take Gian Lorenzo Bernini for sculpture, though.
 
It's weird that ephemera like this still exists.
Most ordinary people would throw something like that away, or it would be disposed of after somebody had died.
 
He was recognized as a genius in his day and biographers like Vasari followed him around, unlike poor folks like Vermeer, later on, though an inventory of his studio survives him. Michelangelo, on his deathbed, actually asked Andrea Del Sarto, his student, to burn the anamorphic cartoons for the Sistine Chapel, to hide the process he went through! A few of those drawings survive, though.
 
We have a very intimate portrait of Beethoven in his later years, thanks to the conversation books he needed to communicate. They throw little if any light on the creative processes which gave rise to the late Sonatas and Quartets.

These days, artists are quickly recycled as subjects but I am puzzled by people who will go to a film about Hitchcock - to take the most obvious recent example - without having any previous or subsequent curiosity about the films made by the man himself. :?
 
The link in post #1 is long dead. The full text of the MIA article is quoted in post #1.

Here's the article's illustrative photo of the grocery list, salvaged from the Wayback Machine.

Michelangelos-Grocery-List-685x973.jpg


SOURCE: https://web.archive.org/web/2014020...rated-his-grocery-list-and-we-still-have-one/
 
Yea, i dont have a printer, i a thicky concerning pooter stuff :(
I'd entertain the idea myself but seeing as we haven't got a fresh ink cartridge? .. it's right click with your mouse over the image, then 'save as' then you can rename it.
 
I know how to do that bit, but i haven't got a printer lol
 
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