The Agony and the Ecstasy

The Biographical Novel of Michelangelo

by Irving Stone

Doubleday and Company, 1961, hardcover, dustjacket

Very Good Condition, some edge and shelf wear, some rubbing and bumping to edges and corners, ex-library with stamps and stickers to endpapers and title page, front endpaper removed, tape residue on covers, price-clipped dustjacket shows some edge and shelf wear with some rubbing, bumping, chipping, creasing and small tears (See photographs)

“The Agony and the Ecstasy begins when Michelangelo, against his family’s ambitions became apprenticed at the age of thirteen to the painter Ghirlandaio.  Shortly after, he moved into the fabulous palace of the Medici as Lorenzo’s protégé.  There, as an intimate of the circle of humanist scholars and future popes, he studied the classics, carved his first sculptures, and fell in love with Lorenzo’s frail daughter, Contessina – a love that endured for a lifetime.
However, his greatest passion, overriding his spiritual love for Contessina, his carnal love for the dark-haired Clarissa, or the mature love for Vittoria Colonna, was his lifelong, titanic struggle to release the forms and beauty imprisoned in pure white marble.”