Battle of The Centaurs (Michelangelo) - Composition and Technique

Composition and Technique

The relief consists of a mass of nude figures, writhing in combat, placed underneath a roughed out strip in which the artist's chisel marks remain visible. Architectural historian Howard Hibbard says that Michelangelo has obscured the centaurs, as most of the figures are represented from the waist up. One of the few identifiable centaurs is visible in the bottom center, his leg extending between the legs of the twisting figure above him. According to Hibbard, Michelangelo has also obscured a lone female figure in the piece, while Hippodamia can be seen among the figures in the center right.

Battle of the Centaurs was an early turning point and a harbinger of Michelangelo's future, sculptural technique. Michelangelo biographers, Antonio Forcellino and Allan Cameron, say that Michelangelo's relief, while created in a classical tradition, departed significantly from the techniques established by masters such as Lorenzo Ghiberti and Donatello. Rather than working on discrete, parallel planes as his predecessors had done, Michelangelo carved his figures dynamically, within "infinite" planes. Forcellino and Cameron describe this break with modern practice as Michelangelo's "own personal revolution", and they point specifically to the left of the relief where a twisting figure becomes "something of an artistic manifesto." Particularly striking is the composition of the figure's upper limbs, which deviate from the carefully articulated norms. Also remarkable, according to them, is the manner in which Michelangelo sculpted independently of his preparatory drawings, freeing him from the constraints of two-dimensional vision and allowing him to merge the figures fluidly and multi-dimensionally.

Battle of the Centaurs was also the first sculpture for which Michelangelo eschewed the use of the bow drill. Finer details of the relief were probably achieved with the use of a toothed chisel called a gradina. The smooth figures of the foreground contrast strongly with the roughly-hewn background, created with a subbia chisel. A traditional sculptor's tool, the subbia produced punched marks that had never before been left as a final surface in a work completed to this degree. Georgia Illetschko insisted in 2004, these unfinished surfaces are "a conscious compositional element.", and not due to a lack of time. According to Scigliano, it was an important development in the non finito sculpting technique.

• View from a left angle

• Right side, detail

• Men holding rocks

• Twisting figure on the left, right view