Michelangelo, seventy-five in 1550, returns to his first love, sculpture, executing his most intimate statue, the Pietá, or Deposition, that he intends to have placed on his own tomb.
This marble, unfinished and partially mutilated by Michelangelo in a fit of depression, reveals the omnipresent power of death.
In the aged and resigned features of the morning figure of Joseph of Arimathea (or, possibly, Nicodemus) supporting the dead Christ, can be seen a self-portrait.
Italian architect Giacomo da Vignola, upon being appointed papal architect to Pope Julius III in 1550, settles in Rome.
He begins work on the church of Sant’Andrea in Via Flaminia, whose oval-based plan represents a radical break with the Renaissance classical tradition (and anticipates one of the most widely used forms in baroque architecture).
Italian poet and humanist Gian Giorgio Trissino attempts to revive the Italian tradition of heroic poetry in his L'Italia liberata dai Goti (“Italy Liberated from the Goths”), written in 1547-48) in eleven-syllable rhymeless lines.
He bases his verse comedy, I simillimi, published in 1548, on the Roman playwright Plautus' “Menaechmi.”
Best remembered for his tragedy “Sonofisba,” Trissino dies at seventy-two on December 8.
