Image of Michelangelo’s “Male Nude” courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.

Image of Michelangelo’s “Male Nude” courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.

I’m stumped as to how to introduce Michelangelo: where does one start with a titan like this, whose career lasted three-quarters of a century, for which time he was unchallenged as the biggest and best artist in Europe? He’s now known the world over (pop star style) by his first name and his Adam, David and other icons are etched on the eyes of so many minds. Michelangelo (1475 – 1564) thought of himself as a sculptor first, but painting, drawing and architecture, he had it all covered. There’s a sprinkling of his scintillating brilliance sitting in the National Gallery of Art, in the form or a few small drawings. And that’s cause for a serious sit-up-and-listen, since even the didiest of doodles by this man can and do fetch millions on the art market. We’ll look at two Male Nude sketches today.

It was the Huffington Post that pushed me into Michelangelo’s arms today. It seems that like any other great cult icon of our times, people are unable to let him or his genius lie. A few weeks ago, the HuffPo published an article about two neuroanatomists at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, who’ve “discovered” that the artist inserted secret anatomical illustrations into his paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Yes, really. Rather like the physician Frank Meshberger, who in 1990 “observed” that there was “a perfect anatomical depiction of a human brain in cross section” in the God Creating Adam fresco, Ian Suk and Rafael Tamargo have unearthed body parts in God Separating Light from Dark: a human spinal cord and brain stem.