The Seventeenth-Century Michelangelo

Toward the end of the century, artists in Florence and elsewhere began to move toward naturalism, signaling some of the changes that led into the Baroque style of the seventeenth century. Michelangelo never relaxed his republican principles, although briefly, toward the end of the life, he entertained the possibility of returning to Florence to work at the duke’s court. Michelangelo’s panoramic vision of the subject meant that the two windows on the altar wall had to be closed and Perugino’s frescoed altarpiece of the Assumption of the Virgin and his Nativity and Finding of Moses, Both part of the fifteenth century narrative program had to be destroyed.
To help unify the scene, Michelangelo increased the scale of the figures in the upper part