The drawing does not show St Catherine. The 
window in the background helps to locate her position. 
St John's robe in The Magdalen Reading fits 
exactly onto the edge of the drawing.

By deduction from the surviving pieces, the original work is thought to have been about
1 m high by 1.5 m wide. The background clearly included an extensive landscape view.

The Entombment 
Detail of Mary Magdalene

Kneeling Figures

Kneeling Woman  MICHELANGELO  Musée du Louvre, Paris

On the left of The Entombment the kneeling figure of Mary Magdalene appears to meditate 
on something in  her raised hand. This drawing by Michelangelo in 
the Louvre is clearly a preparatory study for this figure and shows her looking 
at the crown of thorns, the nails in her other hand.
The Doni Tondo, painted perhaps five years later, develops this pose 
with an added backwards twist.
Doni Tondo  Detail of the Virgin Mary  MICHELANGELO 
Galleria degli Uffizi, Firenze

Birth name Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni 
Born March 6, 1475
near Arezzo, in Caprese, Tuscany 
Died February 18, 1564
 
Field sculpture, painting, architecture and poetry 
Training Apprentice to Domenico Ghirlandaio 
Movement High Renaissance 

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (March 6, 1475 – February 18, 1564), commonly known as Michelangelo, was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, poet and engineer. Despite making few forays beyond the arts, his versatility in the disciplines he took up was of such a high order that he is often considered a contender for the title of the archetypal Renaissance man, along with his rival and fellow Italian Leonardo da Vinci.

Michelangelo's output in every field during his long life was prodigious; when the sheer volume of correspondence, sketches and reminiscences that survive is also taken into account, he is the best-documented artist of the 16th century. Two of his best-known works, the Pietà and the David, were sculpted in his late twenties to early thirties. Despite his low opinion of painting, Michelangelo also created two of the most influential fresco paintings in the history of Western art: the scenes from Genesis on the ceiling and The Last Judgement on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Later in life he designed the dome of St Peter's Basilica in the same city and revolutionised classical architecture with his invention of the giant order of pilasters.

Uniquely for a Renaissance artist, two biographies were published of Michelangelo during his own lifetime. One of them, by Giorgio Vasari, proposed that he was the pinnacle of all artistic achievement since the beginning of the Renaissance, a viewpoint that continued to have currency in art history for centuries. In his lifetime he was also often called Il Divino ("the divine one"), an appropriate sobriquet given his intense spirituality. One of the qualities most admired by his contemporaries was his terribilità, a sense of awe-inspiring grandeur, and it was the attempts of subsequent artists to imitate Michelangelo's impassioned and highly personal style that resulted in the next major movement in Western art after the High Renaissance, Mannerism.

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