The National Gallery of London will this spring showcase the Italian Renaissance from March 15 through June 25 with the 'Michelangelo and Sebastiano' exhibition.
The creative collaboration and friendship between the two artists, with their complementary but radically different talent, will be on display for the first time. Through about 70 works of art including paintings, sculpture, drawings and letters, the exhibition documents a professional relationship that lasted for over 25 years and does not shy away from times of both exultation and frustration experienced by both Michelangelo and Sebastiano del Piombo.
They first met in Rome in 1511 when Michelangelo was working on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Among the major works presented to the public in the exhibition is the 'Pietà' for San Francesco in Viterbo (c.1512-16), which marked the beginning of the collaboration between the two, the decoration of the Borgherini Chapel in San Pietro in Montorio a Roma (1516 -24) and the 'Raising of Lazarus' (1517-19) by Sebastiano del Piombo, painted for the Cathedral of Narbonne and in which Michelangelo intervened only at an advanced stage of the painting, and 'Christ the Redeemer', a monumental marble sculpture made by Michelangelo in 1514-15 and loaned by the S. Vincenzo Martire Church in Bassano Romano.
photo: Sebastiano del Piombo, Judgement of Solomon, 1508-1510
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