Do we still need another Michelangelo?

Michelangelo wrote: “neither painting nor sculpture can any longer quiet the soul”. It is a line from his last sonnet, which speaks of art as sin, as illusion. Despite everything he had made, in the end the work itself was no longer enough for him.

Lately we often hear that contemporary art will never produce another Michelangelo. Perhaps this claim comes not so much from a lack of great artists like those of the past, as from the fact that today the world no longer relies on the finished work alone to recognise it as art. Today what also matters (if not above all) is how you get there.

The process is not a backstage to be hidden. It is the living body of the work.
The research, the attempts, the failures, the intuitions, the questions left open - all of this is part of the artistic gesture. To say it is not art is like saying that effort is not running. That doubt is not thinking.

In contemporary art, a work is never just an object: it is the result of an urgency, of a passage, of a tension. Sometimes the process is the work. When we look at a work today, we no longer ask only “what is it”, but also “where does it come from”, “why was it born this way”, “what question does it open?”.

Perhaps this is exactly what Michelangelo teaches us too, at the end of his path: that carving marble is not enough if the soul finds no peace. That the work is not enough if we forget why we began it. In a time of uncertainty, then, rather than new Michelangelos we need artists willing to stay in doubt. To show the process, even when it is not perfect. To sculpt not only the form, but also the gesture that produced it.

And so it is no longer just the “what” that defines value, but the “how”. How you listened to the context. How you let doubt pass through you. How you chose to give something back to the world. The work is the trace, but it is the journey that speaks to us.