Michelangelo's Dark Night of the Soul

Michelangelo's work as the most renown artist for the papacy after he moved permanently to Rome in 1534 - most particularly the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, the building of the new St. Peter's, and the building complex of the Capitoline Hill - tends to overshadow his growing questioning of the official church and his sympathy for many of the ideas of the reform churches of the north.  But at the very heart of the papacy, hidden in the welter of figures in his Last Judgment there are clues to his critique of the Catholic church, itself about to enter a period of self-aware reform after the Council of Trent.  His late unfinished Deposition sculptures and his poetry at this time also reveal concern about the traditional doctrines of the Catholic Church and whether they could be the road to his own personal salvation.