ABSTRACT
Michelangelo was a man of tenacious and profound memory,’ Vasari says, ‘so that, on seeing the works of others only once, he remembered them perfectly and could avail himself of them in such a manner that scarcely anyone has ever noticed it.’ 1 That ‘scarcely anyone has ever noticed it,’ is easy to understand. For, Michelangelo, when exploiting the ‘works of others,’ classical or modern, subjected them to a transformation so radical, that the results appear no less ‘Michelangelesque’ than his independent creations. In fact a comparison between Michelangelo’s ‘borrowings’ and their prototypes makes us particularly aware of certain compositional principles which are entirely his own and remained essentially unaltered until his style underwent the fundamental change discernible in his very latest works. 2 https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203063439/70c941d4-1d92-4b80-89c3-59c86e6c83d2/content/fig31_u1_B.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
