Battle of the Centaurs

Another example of how the young Michelangelo went back, from Bertoldo's examples, to a newly problematic interpretation of the classical repertoire, taken up without cultural schemes or parameters as a stimulus for new and “topical” imaginative inventions. Indeed, he does not repeat, with variants and compositional adjustments in the manner of humanist erudition, the formal and iconographic motifs of Roman sarcophagi, as his master Bertoldo had done, and with him all the prosaic followers of the Donatellian school, but uses them as a starting point to rediscover, through the older readings of the Pisanos and Donatello, a meaning as moral symbol; where one already senses that tormented anxiety to realise inwardly every formal experience. It is as if Pollaiuolo's “Battle of the Nudes” were transformed from an obsessive dynamic display of anatomies into an epic and painful struggle between men.