Michelangelo by Shirley Marie Dees

This artwork is from the Bronowski series. The entire image including the frame is 22.5" x 18.5". The main image is of Michelangelo's marble statue, Pieta, c.1500, transformed into a woodburning/painting. Also included is a figure from his Last Judgment (c. 1540), which is thought to depict Michelangelo himself being dragged down to hell. Along with Old English script and Art Nouveau designs around the main image, Dees has used drafting symbols and names of scientists on the frame. These thoughts are tied together by the following quote from Jacob Bronowski's Ascent of Man, which is also in this composition (and relates to Michelangelo's assertion that a statue exists within the marble to begin with and has only to be freed by the artist from the surrounding stone):
"In one sense, everything that we discover is already there, a sculptured figure and the law of nature are both concealed in the raw material.

"And in another sense, what a man discovers is discovered by him; it would not take the same form in the hands of someone else -- neither the sculptured figure nor the law of nature would come out in identical copies when produced by two different minds in two different ages.

"Discovery is a double relation of analysis and synthesis together. As an analysis, it probes for what is there; but then, as a synthesis, it puts the parts together in a form by which the creative mind transcends the bare limits, the bare skeleton, that nature provides."