Michelangelo art history lesson

Michelangelo is famous for many things. He was a brilliant artist, and I deliberately use artist because he was great at painting AND sculpture. His David is one of the most famous sculptures ever, there are hundreds of postcards for it, many in questionable taste. Then there is his famous Sistine Chapel painting, there are so many panels, but the one everyone talks about is God reaching down to man. When our history lessons reached the Renaissance, I knew I wanted in-depth studies of the famous artists of the time. All in all, it was a fun Michelangelo art history lesson.

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Michelangelo Resource List

Michelangelo is a super popular artist and not too surprisingly there are quite a lot of pretty cool resources for a Michelangelo art history lesson. Let’s start off with the book list.

• Michelangelo: the artist who dreamed of perfection– it’s a fairly decent book, though reading a review I saw it may have some factual inaccuracies, I did not catch that, but I’m not exactly knowledgable about him
• Michelangelo– illustrated biography of sorts
• Michelangelo: getting to know the world’s artists– I love this series
• Famous Children: Michelangelo– this is probably out of print, but it covers his childhood that led to him becoming an artist

Michelangelo YouTube videos

Okay, I have two sorts of videos, first are the informational videos, this will give you an idea of who he was as a person, and see some of his artwork. Next, are some art lessons (some are better than others, just to warn you).

Michelangelo the person videos

Here are the videos I saved to share with my kids when we studied him.

We covered the Renaissance four years ago, but I have a feeling that even then the kids would have made fun of this video. It’s a good series for elementary ages.

Now let’s get to the many many videos I have saved back when we studied Michelangelo all those years ago.

First a short biography video.

Next, a focus by the same YouTuber on how he painted the Sistine Chapel.

And then Biographics, Michelangelo video. This is another creator who has some great videos. I like having a plethora of videos so you can see many different angles of a person.

This video is a field trip to the Sistine Chapel, which is impressive to see, and gives a bit of history behind the Sistine Chapel, not so much focusing on the artwork.

And the final video is the science behind a fresco, I should add it into my Roman Fresco lesson.

I may enjoy finding videos on what we’re studying.

Michelangelo art lessons

These are the videos I found just now to give you some sample lessons.

This first video is rather meh, but amusingly enough it is more or less the craft we did, and it does show a little bit of artwork.

While the lady doing the speech in this video is not super engaging, it is probably one of the better videos.

This particular project focuses on what Michelangelo enjoyed doing the most, sculpture, and it’s a project I never got to do with my kids.

The same guy who did the focus on the Sistine Chapel video, has a watercolor lesson for Michelangelo.

All right, that is a lot of different ways to try drawing in Michelangelo’s style.

Michelangelo’s art history lesson

After learning all about Michelangelo, and studying some of his more famous artwork, including my personal favorite, his Pieta. After studying all of it, we started talking about how you would choose to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling if we were doing that. After talking about this for a little bit, then I pulled out our card table, and taped index cards to the bottom of the table and grabbed some acrylic paints and challenged them to figure out how to paint the ceiling.

It didn’t take them long to figure out that laying on the ground works the best for their situation.

Now, if you’ve read some more modern historical textbooks, you’ll have seen that some paperwork has been found where Michelangelo drew himself standing on a platform to paint the ceiling, and so the current theory is not he created tall platforms to lay down on, but that he stood up.

Either way, the kids found it an interesting challenge to try and paint upside down. Here are the big things the kids learned:

• Your arm gets very tired quickly because it is constantly up in the air above you
• It is much harder to have the same level of control as you would if the paper was on a table
• It changed your perspective of what the illustration looked like, I wonder how Michelangelo changed the perspective to account for the distance people would be looking at the artwork. For example, David is scaled to look correct for being on top of a building (yes, originally, it was going to be on the walls of a building, but it was judged to be such an amazing piece of art, that it needed to be visible to more people), and so David’s head is somewhat out of proportion to what it would be if he stood on the ground

Our artwork was not anywhere near as evocative as Michelangelo’s especially since we just did not have the control he had.