The Agony and the Ecstasy
Irving Stone imagines Michelangelo’s life as a struggle between artistic ambition and the demands of family, patrons and power. Renaissance Florence gives him his beginnings, while commissions carry him to Rome and into the orbit of competing popes. Sculpture, painting and architecture become work undertaken under pressure, with materials, money and reputation always at stake.
For the reader travelling through Florence, the novel gives the city’s celebrated art a human scale. Behind the finished works are an obsessive maker and a world of workshops, political rivalries and Medici influence. This is historical fiction rather than a documentary biography, and its journey extends well beyond Florence.
Art; Renaissance; Michelangelo; Power; Screen adaptation; Family