Important Workshop Plaster - The Day After Michelangelo - Period XIX Eme -

IMPORTANT WORKSHOP PLASTER AFTER A WORK BY MICHELANGELO ENTITLED "THE DAY" - VERY NICE NATURAL PATINA - TRACE OF A WORKSHOP STAMP AND APPARENT STITCHING - VERY GOOD CONDITION - The Day (in Italian, Giorno) is a marble statue made by Michelangelo between 1526 and 1531. It is part of the decoration of the Sagrestia Nuova, the new sacristy of the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence. Its dimensions are 160 × 150 cm (maximum oblique length 285 cm). It is one of the four allegories of the Parts of Time, which is on the right on the sarcophagus of the tomb of Giuliano de Medici (1479-1516), Duke of Nemours. The Day is represented as a male personification, semi-recumbent and naked, like the other statues in the series. Its model, perhaps, is the river divinities of the arch of Septimius Severus and the Torso of Belvedere, from which it takes up the powerful anatomical structure in tension. He also takes up the pose of the Child in the young Virgin on the stairs and that of one of the bronze nudes from the Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He is represented as a tired old man, with a half-discernible face, half freed from the stone following the non finito, the logic of the Unfinished in Michelangelo: the head and the right hand of the figure are unfinished1. She is the only one, among the series of allegories, to turn her back on the viewer, in a pose opposite to that of The Neighboring Night. The left elbow is bent in support, while the right arm leans back to look for something: only the forearm is really sculpted, the hand is lost on the contrary in the unsculpted part. The legs are crossed in the opposite direction to the rotation of the torso and this twist is also emphasized by the rotation of the head towards the viewer. The bearded face, barely sketched, shows only a mysterious expression, highly evocative and emblematic, precisely because of its incompleteness.