Michel-Ange, le premier livre d’art en BD et en mille images (book)

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Michelangelo, the first art book in comics and a thousand images / Michel-Ange, le premier livre d’art en BD et en mille images (book) by Hector Obalk. 96 pages. New in blister pack. 2016. Editions Hazan. French texts.

This book aims to show and understand, chronologically, the best of all the painted work, all the sculpted work and all the drawn work of Michelangelo (1475-1564).

A UFO in the world of publishing, it is the result of an extraordinary editorial device: several hundred images, reproducing the breathtaking details of more than a hundred paintings, sculptures and drawings, form a visual story related to comics, where each image is accompanied by a sentence, or the beginning of a commentary, the continuity of which produces a real and new story of the artist.

Equally distant from the classic, doctoral art book and the picture book, Obalk’s Michelangelo engages in a different dialogue with his readers: it is first of all a matter of unfolding a text, each segment of which is illustrated, in conversational mode.

It is therefore neither a comic strip nor a photo novel, firstly because there are no characters or speech bubbles (or very rarely), but also because only the narrator’s voice runs from panel to panel – and directs the layout.

In short, it is an essay published under the guise of a comic strip. It is the result of combined research in the fields of art history and art criticism, documentary film and graphic design (the “comic strip” form).

We find there the critical, lyrical, willingly subjective, sometimes poetic, always educational and not devoid of humor tone of Hector Obalk.

An excellent book to introduce children to art but also to introduce the works of this exceptional artist to adults!

Feel free to check out the additional photos at the top left, thank you!

If you prefer to pay in euros, =before= you start ordering, you must click on the word “Français” in orange, under the main photo above, which will redirect you to the same description in French and payment in Euros.