1510
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
The Climbers (Three Figures from Michelangelo's Battle of Cascina) is a 1510 by Marcantonio Raimondi, a Renaissance work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see three muscular men scrambling up a riverbank, muscles tight, arms reaching. This print copies part of Michelangelo’s lost drawing for a huge battle scene. The original was never painted, so this engraving is one of the few ways we can still see what it looked like. The artist carved every line so carefully you can almost feel the strain in the men’s bodies. If you like how these figures look, check out *chiaroscuro*—a way of using light and shadow to make shapes pop.
Although Michelangelo’s 1504 commission to paint the monumental Battle of Cascina fresco in Florence’s city hall was never completed, his cartoon (full-scale drawing) for the composition was studied by many artists in Florence before being destroyed. In this print made just six years after the commission, engraver Marcantonio Raimondi directly quoted three figures from the left side of the cartoon, demonstrating his superior ability in accurately rendering Michelangelo’s heroic male figures. The landscape, which Marcantonio copied from a print by Netherlandish artist Lucas van Leyden, shows…
Read the full account in the museum source.
Marcantonio Raimondi, often called simply Marcantonio (c. 1470/82 – c. 1534), was an Italian engraver, known for being the first important printmaker whose body of work consists largely of prints copying paintings. He…
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