How is Michelangelo's work a defense of the Catholic faith against Protestantism?

Didn't his paintings of the final judgment support Catholicism in some way?

I never knew it was ever given as a defense of anything other than great art.

Not that I'm aware of.

What countries have all the Great Renaissance Art in Europe which ones don't...Whic countries burnt all the Church art which ones didn't..


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PRjhRRgzDo&feature=related

This has the whiff of a homework question!

Did you know that he didn't actually want to do the Sistine Chapel, he saw himself as a sculptor. The Marble called the Dying Slave was supposed to be the start of his sculptural masterwork - but the pope wanted a ceiling, so that's what he got.

He was also gay - celibate, because he was a believer and therefore thought it was sinful - but in love with a man all his life. Very sad for him.

Hello,

I never heard that his works were done for that reason.
Actually the best work done in defense of the Catholic church was " The Defence of The Seven Sacraments " by Henry VIII which cut many of Martin Luther's arguments to pieces in so far as logic was concerned. He got the title, Defender Of The Faith for that, a title still held by the Queen today. His split with Rome came after the book.

Cheers,

Michael Kelly

Read - "The Pope's Ceiling" - about Michelangelo's life and what was happening.

He definitely had problems with the Church - mostly the around the men who ran it and how it affected his artistic sensibilities. He didn't really want to paint at all - he considered himself a sculptor. Many little "shots" at Church leadership are up there. And Martin Luther was only really beginning to understand what he needed to do when he visited the Vatican around that time and saw all the corruption, etc.

Michelangelo's 'The Last Judgment' was painted on the west wall of the Sistine Chapel, 1536-41 A.D. "The great sculptor was a well-born Florentine, a member of the minor aristocracy and he was temperamentally resistant to coercion at any time. Only the power of Pope Julius II, tyrannical by position and by nature, forced him to the Sistine and the reluctant achievement of the world's greatest single fresco." This Pope reasserted papal authority over the Roman barons and successfully backed the restoration of the Medici in Florence and he was a great patron of the arts.

In The Last Judgment, the "world is portrayed as irredeemably corrupt, a verdict essentially heretical, though at that time it was thought profoundly orthodox." But he paints himself into the scene, "not as an integral person, but as a flayed skin... drained of his person-hood by artistic pressure... the skin belongs to St Bartholomew and through this martyr's promise of salvation we understand that perhaps, though flayed alive, the artist is miraculously saved."

Well, that's what Sister Wendy says in her book, as she should know. She didn't make any comments on point-scoring against the Protestants.