Let no one be surprised that I do now describe the life of Michelangelo,
given that he is living still...
because his immortal works shall never die,
his fame shall last for as long as the world exists...
His name shall live on in the mouths of men and the quills of writers:
despite the envy, despite even death itself.
I have had my whole life to understand...
that stone cannot be bent to the will of man,
but...
it must be denuded of all that oppresses it.
This marble resists,
it rebels.
Often, it rejects you.
At times, it's indulgent.
Just like this life.
MICHELANGELO ENDLESS
Giorgio Vasari, born in Arezzo in the year 1511
painter, architect, writer on art.
I am first of all, the first to have gone beyond narrating simply
what happened in the Lives of the most excellent painters, sculptors
and architects in Italy, from Cimabue to my own day.
I have claimed the right to judge,
choosing the best over the merely good, and the excellent over the best.
I have noted down the approaches, attitudes, manners...
the lines and imaginings of these artists.
I have investigated the causes and roots of evolution in all of the arts.
The greatest of the infinite felicities for which I praise God,
is the fortune of getting to know
the great Michelangelo Buonarroti... a Florentine.
Of being a familiar and a friend.
This is why I have written so many things about him: all of them true.
He was born on 6th of March,
in the year 1475.
From his earliest years, he would sketch on paper, on the walls...
Noting this, his father Ludovico decided to send him to study
at the workshop of master Domenico Ghirlandaio,
so that he could learn the admirable and valuable art of painting.
'Ere long, Ghirlandaio became aware of this talent,
out of the ordinary despite his tender years, one day exclaiming,
"This boy knows more than me".
And Michelangelo was just thirteen.
And so Ghirlandaio entrusted him to the cares of Bertoldo,
a disciple of the great Donatello, at the Gardens of San Marco,
where Lorenzo de' Medici had set up a school
for young painters and sculptors of talent.
I yearned for art more heroic than painting.
I liked getting my hands dirty.
When I was a young 'un, I was sent to wet-nurse at a family of stone-cutters.
My nourishment: marble powder mixed in with the milk.
And when Lorenzo the Magnificent called me to him
and put me to the test with this stone, I was able to show him my mettle.
What did he say, the Magnifico?
"You should know by now that oldsters ne'er have all their teeth,
there's always one or two gone!"
I didn't think twice to make good on his advice:
that faun became old and toothless.
Perhaps they appreciated my courage,
before that sculpted head ever arrived to be seen at Palazzo Medici,
where I met the greatest thinkers of my time,
who gave me faith and guidance in my works to come.
I immediately set to work on a Madonna with young child,
imitating a technique of Donatello's.
Engraved using Donatello's "stiacciato" technique,
the Madonna of the Stairs, today at Casa Buonarroti in Florence,
was Michelangelo's first work to earn him notoriety.
A very low relief, not much bigger than a newspaper page,
in which his scalpel barely grazes the surface of the stone
to create almost imperceptible volumes and a wondrous sensation of space.
Absorbed, imperturbable as a goddess from the classical age,
the Virgin Mary is wrapped in soft, flowing drapery.
Portrayed from behind, the Infant seems totally abandoned to his mother's embrace,
albeit with the physique of a Hercules at rest.
This bold perspective view of the symbolic stairway cohabits with the presence
of a simple marble cube on which the Sacred Group sits:
this perfect three-dimensional solid is an extremely early sign of the passion
for pure materials apparent in all Michelangelo's art.
Then one day, the chance to present il Magnifico all of my appreciation.
It was when Angelo Poliziano, who thought of me highly,
challenged me to try my hand with Centaurs in battle.
I was to gift it to Lorenzo de Medici,
showing my fellows who I was, the most skilful of all.
A violent battle, bodies and limbs entwined in a clash among nude figures,
filling every corner of a scene without the least hint of chaos...
Michelangelo's Battle of the Centaurs, housed today at Casa Buonarroti.
In the centre, one figure looms above all others,
standing apart with the authority of a proudly-raised right arm.
Fifty years later, Michelangelo would reprise this gesture
for the Christ of his Last Judgement.
I was no good at keeping my mouth shut.
All too often I blurted out what I thought of my fellow-students' art.
I already knew it wasn't of my standard.
Whether it was for my teasing words, my presumption perhaps even jealousy
that the Magnifico thought so well of me, that young Torrigiano,
a pupil like myself at Bertoldo's school, punched me square in the face.
This muzzle, this deformed nose that he gave me,
remains his best-known work.
After three days of tempestuous weather, lightning,
a thunderous omen,
il Magnifico, protector, benefactor,
ideal father figure, expired.
Michelangelo, now without his patron, felt he was lost.
He sought help and protection from the Prior
at the convent of Santo Spirito, which was also a hospital. And there...
the young Michelangelo started skinning cadavers to study human anatomy:
ligaments, bone structure, muscles, the veins.
Long nights spent in dim light allowed him to perfect his line,
typical of his later years...
At just twenty, I had the ultimate mystery of death in my hands.
At just twenty.
After - and for the rest of my life - I believed I could beat death with art.
I was wrong...
I owe even more to a Cardinal, Monsignor Raffaele Riario,
who after buying one of my Cupids I made to look like it was ancient,
invited me to his home.
When I saw Rome that first time, I realized why they call it eternal.
What magnificence, what ancient marble!
His challenge:
"Can you make something, my boy, to make something of quite such beauty?"
"Give me the time and I'll show you what I can do."
And with a block of marble bought for little money in the streets of Rome,
I made Bacchus.
The Pagan god of joy and happiness, conserved at the Bargello Museum,
was Michelangelo's great leap forward,
his first time ever making a large-scale work.
A young nude, his body soft and sensual, drunk on wine and pleasure,
his gaze lost in the distance, barely able to keep hold of his goblet...
Meanwhile, a small satyr, lost in Dionysian ecstasy,
plunges his smiling face into a bunch of grapes purloined from the inattentive god.
When I showed it to Cardinal Riario,
he was unable to comprehend the vitality I had managed to infuse into the stone,
or that this Bacchus would have lived longer
than any other body that made of human flesh and blood.
I found myself in Rome, alone,
with no clients and no money to send home to my father,
who hoped, thanks to my work to pull the family
out of the poverty of those years of great difficulty.
It was only thanks to Jacopo Galli, a dear true and lifelong friend
that I did not lose confidence,
that I did not decide to slink back to Florence, a loser.
Jacopo had good contacts at court with the Pope,
with the delegation of Charles VIII, King of France.
"And I, Iacobo Gallo, promise the Most Reverend Monsignor
that the said Michelangelo shall undertake the work infra one year,
and it shall be the most gorgeous work in marble there is today in Rome".
When I read the contract which Jacopo,
from faith in and love for me signed with the Cardinal,
I was moved... and afraid because...
the time was tight and my ambition immense.
No longer did I have to make do with leftover blocks of marble.
As soon as I was commissioned to make a Pietà,
I left for Carrara. When I got there...
What a spectacle, those walls, glinting in the light of the sun!
I had never seen this much white in stone.
The most beautiful marble in the world, since time immemorial and forever.
I took days to choose the purest materials.
Made by God and just for me it seemed,
for my hands to turn into eternal works.
On the road on the way back to Rome,
my mind filled with those great words of Dante's,
when in Paradise he turns to the Madonna:
"Virgin Mother, daughter of thy Son,
Humble and high beyond all creatures".
It all become clear to me...
And I set to making my Pietà.
Before this work, no sculptor ever imbued marble
with more grace and refinement than what Michelangelo achieved,
at the tender age of twenty-four;
the full value and power of art is evident in this Pietà.
The beauteous details... the divine clothes in which the virgin is draped...
beyond them, Christ, dead and naked.
Such expertise in the muscles, veins, the tendons taut over the bones,
his wrists, the joints between the body, arms and legs.
Although some say that he fashioned Our Lady too young,
they fail to consider that uncontaminated virgins
maintain and conserve
a lightness in their lineaments for a long time, free of all blemish.
People marvel that the hand of a man could create in such a short time
a thing so admirable and divine.
Simply, a miracle that a rock, initially so totally formless,
can have been crafted to this perfection,
beyond what nature can achieve in bodily flesh.
So great was Michelangelo's love for this work that he carved his name
above the girdle around Our Lady's breast. Here alone, and nevermore.
Why did I sign it?
Because of the rumour around that my Pietà was the work
of a sculptor from Lombardy, a certain Cristoforo Solari.
All of that exertion! How could I allow another man to benefit?
Then, after, I never had to sign a thing again.
I could have returned to my father, with honour and dignity.
My friends called me to Florence to add lustre
to the Republic of Gonfaloniere Pier Soderini.
Such nourishment for my ambition!
Michelangelo was the first to think that sculpture is an art achieved
by removing all material that is superfluous.
One where the Maker reduces it to the form that it took in his mind's eye.
He found it in the workshops of the Opera del Duomo, a block of marble
that was big enough, already worked by two artists who had thinned it,
hacked at it, then left it abandoned.
At Santa Maria del Fiore, this is how Michelangelo slaved away for three years,
hidden from view, by day and by night,
trying to resuscitate someone who was believed to be dead.
And it came to pass that the work really
did suck the breath from all of the statues ancient and modern,
Greek, Latin, whatever they were.
He who beholds it need not concern themselves with seeing
any other works of sculpture made in this day
or in the time of any other creator.
The most incredible thing about this gigantic work is,
put simply, the challenge.
A heroic and athletic young man with a lean physique
immortalized in the moment before hurling a rock at the cruel philistine giant
who had been terrorizing the people of Israel.
His legs ready to spring, muscles tense,
veins in relief,
a proud expression on his face, they all highlight this vital moment:
the peak of concentration that precedes action.
Pier Soderini fell in love with this statue, which rises more than 5 metres,
before it was even finished.
He appointed a committee of the greatest artists of the day,
including Leonardo and Botticelli,
to find the ideal spot for such an extraordinary work.
Moving it from Florence Cathedral to Piazza della Signoria
was a heroic undertaking:
swinging from a rudimentary crane, secured with ropes and pulleys,
it took more than forty men four days to haul it to its final destination,
right outside Palazzo Vecchio.
In the late 1800s, David was moved once again, to the Galleria dell'Accademia.
It remains there to this day,
the eternal symbol of the City of Florence.
David with his catapult,
me a bow drill.
With a simple catapult, David defeated Goliath.
I felt just like David, powerful and proud.
I had risen to my challenge:
with my bare hands and a bow drill,
I extracted eternal life from living marble.
To think, my David...
took the spot occupied by Donatello's Judith!
Do you now see why they've always called him the "giant"?
Messer Agnolo Doni, a cloth merchant of great wealth,
was very keen to own a work of Michelangelo's,
so he commissioned a tondo on panel,
in which Our Lady, kneeling down, holds the Infant out to Joseph
who with great love, tenderness and reverence takes him into his arms.
Once the work was finished, Michelangelo asked him seventy ducats.
Agnolo Doni, a man of some savvy,
thought the cost too high for a simple painting...
so he offered to pay forty ducats for it.
Instead, Michelangelo claimed a hundred ducats.
Well, Agnolo Doni, who liked the work,
said he'd give him the seventy that he'd initially asked for.
Michelangelo was not at all happy.
Indeed, believing that Agnolo Doni lacked faith in his art,
he went and doubled the price.
A hundred and forty ducats, or the whole deal was cancelled.
In the end, desiring that tondo at all costs, Agnolo Doni
was forced to cough up the price he was asking.
The Doni Tondo, housed at the Uffizi Gallery,
is the only work we know for certain Michelangelo painted on wooden panel.
The Holy Family is an ancient, recurrent motif.
Here, Michelangelo crafted it as if he were sculpting.
He used clear, shimmering, intense colours
to create an effect that leaves us slightly uneasy,
a far cry from the traditional tranquillity of such scenes.
Michelangelo was well-schooled in the symbols so important to Florentine nobles.
In this composition, he seems to have drawn inspiration
from Saint Paul's epistle to the Ephesians.
The low yet impassable wall therefore represents original sin,
separating the Christ Child from the small Baptist
and young nude figures who are pulling their garments off.
As Christians, they can be free at last from sin, stripping away their sins,
they become new men.
The wondrous yet unfinished Pitti Tondo, today at the Bargello Museum,
depicts another Holy Family.
Here, Michelangelo chose a classical composition in which,
impassive as a Hellenic Queen, the Virgin is distracted from her reading
by the Infant beside her.
I have always thought,
the closer a painting resembles a relief, the more successful it becomes.
A brief period of peace, calm, and easing off,
something I no longer had in my life.
But ambition never stops gnawing,
it brooks no peace or happiness at all.
Gonfaloniere Pier Soderini asked me to paint frescoes along one wall
of the Sala del Maggior Consiglio, at Palazzo dei Signori.
On the other wall, none other than Leonardo Da Vinci.
How could I resist the challenge...?
I began by working on the cartoons in complete secret.
I drew the preparatory cartoon for my Battle of Cascina,
the same size as the scene I wanted to depict.
When Michelangelo's drawing became public knowledge,
it attracted immense admiration.
Artists flocked to see it from all over Europe,
a practice usually reserved for the casts of statues.
They came to touch it, copy it and, in the end, pilfer pieces of it
as if it were a holy relic.
Before a few decades were out, there was nothing left of the cartoon...
And the legend was born.
However, a copy of the central portion, made by Aristotile da Sangallo,
has survived, preserving at least a recollection.
The tangle of naked bodies, frozen in the moment just before battle is joined,
is merely a pretext for the artist to show off what he is really interested in:
the heroics of the ideal body.
I never did finish that fresco.
My one consolation, that Leonardo had to give up too.
His usual malaise of trying out new techniques,
he wound up making a huge mess up of wax and oils,
the whole thing gone to pot.
By now, my name was being mentioned in palaces
across Europe with reverence and respect.
Even Pope Julius II wanted me to make him something,
to aggrandize himself.
Such was the renown of Michelangelo after his Pietà, the giant of Florence
and the cartoon for the Battle of Cascina,
that Julius II, now the pontiff,
commissioned him to make his burial monument, which in beauty,
creativity and hauteur exceeded any other ancient imperial burial.
I spent eight months in Carrara,
excavating that marble from the mountain.
Cutting the stone, choosing the crucial point,
eliminating veins that made the marble graceless...
I almost went mad, not being able to exercise my hands with a chisel.
One day I found myself at the top of the mountain, thinking,
"I'll sculpt this, this whole thing,
so that they'll be able to know what I'm capable of from the coast!"
Julius II's tomb was, for Michelangelo, conceived as
a veritable "mountain of marble",
a magnificent free-standing three-dimensional structure
surrounded by a forest of larger-than-life statues.
What, in his mind's eyes, should have been his finest artistic triumph
ended up becoming the "tomb tragedy". Started in 1505,
it would not see the light of day until forty years later,
in a vastly reduced version compared to the initial plan.
Pursuing this obsession with almost superhuman energy, the artist
left us the greatest example of what modern critics refer to as
Michelangelo's "un-finished works".
There is no other way to define the Prisoners,
which jut out of the marble, exposed and raw...
The stone itself imprisons the chained-up slaves,
immortalized in the twists of classical statuary.
Michelangelo's Moses, made to decorate Julius II's tomb,
is the true masterpiece of this work.
The ancient patriarch's face is an ideal portrait of Pope Julius II,
who was known for his "terribleness".
He is portrayed here in a pose that is both vigilant and pensive.
Sculpted at twice natural size, almost thirty years elapsed before Moses
was finally placed in the Basilica of San Pietro in Vincoli.
It is said that to make the most of the statue's face,
vibrant with life and energy,
Michelangelo oriented the head towards the natural light
that enters through a small window in the basilica.
A prodigious touch that puts the seal on an immense work.
That Moses seemed so... so well-crafted
that it was almost strange he was bereft of his own intellect.
When I believed I'd found the inspiration I'd sought my entire life...
What a huge blow to me...
Julius II
snatched the chisel from my hand.
The blame lies with Bramante, a great old friend of Raphael's,
who, having seen the Pope far too enamoured
of Michelangelo's expertise with marble,
convinced Julius II that it was tempting fate,
erecting a tomb while he was still alive.
He persuaded him therefore to suspend this magnificent project.
And given that Michelangelo was no expert in painting frescoes,
wishing to make things more difficult still, he invited the Pope
to commission him to decorate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Pope Julius II had commissioned from Raphael School of Athens.
For his private apartment.
Raffaello, he had... depicted me as Heraclitus,
the philosopher with thoughts deep as a Delian diver.
I was commissioned to make a truly vast fresco.
Raffaello, provoking me. I was forced to respond,
I had to compete with him in his own art, compete and win.
I was to give those painted figures all that marble had taught me.
I was to fill that ceiling with bodies and tendons and muscles,
of a size that the whole world would call a miracle.
And I began by blotting out...
that blue sky and its gilded stars.
Then, I took down the scaffolding Bramante had built,
which went into the ceiling.
I had another one built to my own design.
I brought some friends down from Florence, who alas made a mess up
with the paints and were unable to translate my fantasies.
I sent them away, plunged into depression, but I had to keep going...
I had to triumph over Raphael... over myself.
And so, I did it all. I, alone.
I found no satisfaction in what I was doing. I couldn't see the end.
It is so difficult to detach oneself from one's own work...
Jealous and preoccupied, I let no one see the results of my toils.
Not even the Pope.
I remain in far-off fantasies,
my work is not going how it deserves, it seems to me.
Ah, the difficulty of this work, one that is still not my profession.
And despite lavishing so much time, no fruits do I see.
May god help me.
It is 1508. For the first time in history, a Pope decides to give
an artist "carte blanche" to decorate the ceiling of a papal chapel.
At 33 years of age, Michelangelo is in the prime of his artistic powers.
He brooks no form of simplification as he prepares to take on this titanic task.
A thousand square metres more or less, practically every available space
covered in a riot of human bodies:
frowning, resigned, tense,
frenetic...
Framed within a visionary architecture in which Michelangelo wilfully ignores
all Renaissance rules of perspective, proportion and verisimilitude.
Rather than concealing pillars, arches and cornices,
he uses them to amplify the curvature of the ceiling.
The paints seem to have been mixed not with lime but with light.
He wielded his brushstrokes on the plaster like a chisel on marble.
Prophets and Sibyls dominate the ceiling's surface,
larger than all of the other characters.
They seem to flow out of the architectural context,
clinging precariously to their thrones, hanging perilously over the void.
They announce the coming of Christ with muscular movements
and powerfully-twisting bodies.
Their faces and expressions are severe,
pensive...
surprised.
What they have announced, inspired by the Lord,
is coming to pass in the scenes painted around them.
The nine scenes in the central panels tell the stories
of the Book of Genesis in chronological order:
the Origins of the Universe, of Mankind and of Sin.
God sunders the light from the darkness, marking the start of the world.
He creates the stars and the planets, suspended in space.
The supreme architect, he prepares matter
by dividing land from water.
In the Creation of Eve, the woman emerges from one of Adam's ribs as he sleeps.
God beckons her, inviting her to rise.
In the Original Sin, a fig tree forever changes the fate of humankind.
Entwined in its branches, the two-faced snake, the devil of temptation,
while Archangel Michael, holding his sword of justice,
runs Adam and Eve out of Earthly Paradise.
Guilt takes form in the shocking transfiguration of the first woman
and the first man, becoming grotesque caricatures deformed by sin.
In the Flood, groups of the naked flee the thunderous waters
and the wrath of God.
Terrified yet resigned to what will come,
they strive to save themselves and their loved ones.
However, the ceiling's most extraordinary fresco of all is the Creation of Adam.
As an image, it is both primordial and incredibly powerful.
With vigour and elegance, the Creator leans out into the infinity of space
to bestow life upon the first man.
Adam's beautiful body, "in the image of and resembling God",
is a concentration of all the gifts of creation.
The spark of Life
that is about to crackle from the hand of God to Adam's finger...
Hands outstretched towards one another without ever truly managing to touch...
Analogous to the extreme tension man feels as he tries to reach God.
It is as if, in that infinitesimal space between the two index fingers,
Michelangelo attempts to define his art:
that unbridgeable gap between the human and the divine.
There was a commission during that period that would not let me be.
An entombment.
Like that of Julius II.
It all brought me back to death,
that enemy to fear and to challenge.
But also,
finally the end of our toil in this world.
Leo X was elected Pope in 1513.
The son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, he commissioned Michelangelo
to erect a temple in the Basilica of San Lorenzo
to bestow eternity upon the Medici family.
Michelangelo created a place of great spirituality
in which - by a quirk of fate - the one thing he failed to complete
was the sarcophagus of his patron, Lorenzo the Magnificent.
Sculptures representing the four phases of the day recline on the sarcophagi,
transformed into beds, crowned by statues
of Dukes Giuliano di Nemours and Lorenzo di Urbino.
They allude to the passage of time on this Earthly coil.
They also refer to an age of eternity and salvation.
Night sleeps deeply, beyond consciousness or memory;
Day shows off his powerful anatomy in a twisting motion.
Dusk appears resigned to eternal torpor.
Dawn raises herself on a bed of feathers,
twisting in grief at the death of the young Medicis.
"Midway along this path of our life I found myself in a dark forest
The pathway now astray".
Florence was being ripped apart by in-fighting.
Faced with the choice of siding with the Medici or the Repubblica,
Michelangelo chose the Republic.
In the summer of 1530, to avoid arrest and the risk of being put to death,
Michelangelo was forced into hiding, in fact, beneath the tomb
commissioned by the very man who now wanted to punish him
for his political leanings,
in a secret chamber beneath the Basilica of San Lorenzo.
In that dramatic moment, Michelangelo sketched away neurotically
with a stick of charcoal: figures floating in mid-air,
including the head of the legendary Laocoön,
something that had inspired him greatly in the past.
These quick sketches, hastily made,
indicate that perhaps he only spent a short time in this refuge.
The graffiti was discovered in 1975,
in a room that had been used to store firewood.
Laid centuries earlier, the plaster preserved these precious drawings,
which rank among the most fascinating modern-day discoveries
of this master's works.
"And so once more to see the light of the stars."
Aged early by all the hard toil in my life.
Unhappy always,
for all the things I was unable to finish the way I saw them in my mind.
Suffering...
for the money I didn't spend and that never seemed to be enough.
I became sure the moment had come to meet with my Maker...
then he...
blessed me with love.
"How can it be that me is no longer my own?
O God, God, God,
what is this Love that goes from eye to heart,
filling the tightest space until it grows and floods out?"
God gave me love in the form of a gentleman and a Madonna.
He, as handsome as David; the other, as noble and pure as the Virgin.
Tommaso filled my eyes;
Vittoria, my very soul.
Infinitely more than all, he loved Messer Tommaso de' Cavalieri,
a gentleman of Rome, who though young loved the arts.
And Michelangelo gave him beauteous drawings
of divine heads in black and red pencil...
He drew him a Ganymede carried off to the heavens,
Tityus whose heart is being eaten by a vulture,
the chariot of the sun plummeting with Phaeton into the Po...
He portrayed Messer Tommaso in a life-sized cartoon,
his sole portrait from life,
because he loathed everything that was alive unless it was of infinite beauty.
A man and a woman,
pardon,
a god through her mouth speaks,
oh god, to listen to her I made myself such that...
never more mine she'll be.
From my love of Vittoria came drawings of a Crucifixion and a Pietà.
Our friendship so tender changed me profoundly.
I learned that he who has known no evil
cannot know goodness.
I found comfort in her circle of spiritualists.
I was dazzled by their promise of redemption.
They had this idea of a church renewed,
in which the spirit becomes illuminated by divine grace
only if one strives to listen.
If I succeeded in that effort,
God alone could have judged me...
could have found me...
guilty...
or innocent.
Around that time, the Pope decided to invite him to paint
the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel.
He wanted Michelangelo to portray the Last Judgement,
to imbue that story of everything with all that
the art of drawing could bring to it.
And so it was that Pietro Perugino's Assumption of the Madonna for Pope Sixtus
was sacrificed to make way for art by the divine Michelangelo.
No sooner did I start in on the cartoons, Clement VII died.
As did my father.
The new Pope, Paul III, elevated me to supreme architect,
painter and sculptor to the apostolic palaces.
I returned to Rome,
to stay for the rest of my days.
Five years alone again, aloft, near the gods.
I got rid of all of the paintings on the wall, including my own,
I walled in two windows and added a slope to the wall
to make it look like the Judgement was truly pending
on any who dared to look up to the skies.
The whole thing was to revolve around a Jesus of great beauty,
immersed in the lapis lazuli blue Giotto loved so well.
"Through me is the way to the city of woe;
Through me is the way to eternal pain;
Through me is the way among people lost.
Before me there were no created things,
Only eternal, and I eternal last.
All hope abandon, ye who enter in!"
The Last Judgement is a warning to the world,
at a time of tragedy when no certainties seemed to survive:
the Church, having just recovered after the Sack of Rome,
trembles under the blows of the Protestant Reformation.
Against this backdrop, now in his sixties, Michelangelo
created an immense, mind-blowing and revolutionary work.
The scene has no boundaries, bathed in lapis lazuli blue light,
suspended in time and space.
It is dominated by the imperious figure of Christ the Judge: a beautiful wrestler
who has been given the task of judging the living and the dead
with steadfastness and justice.
Once he lowers that muscle-bound arm,
the fate that his father bestowed on him shall be complete.
By his side, the Madonna turns away, not wanting to witness
the frightful spectacle of the punishment of the reprobates.
The whole monumental composition revolves around the figure of Christ.
It is populated by hundreds of figures, who defy the laws of gravity.
Michelangelo's depiction of the male body is a declaration of love to God.
Human beauty is, here, a reflection of heavenly beauty.
The Elect awaken from the sleep of death, some still in skeletal form.
Scooped up by wingless angels, they make their ascent to Heaven.
Sinners' bodies tumble down towards Hell,
as described by the beloved Dante:
a cave reddened by flame, in which devils wait their chance to grab the damned.
Charon, his eyes a-fire, ferries lost souls like animals
to the slaughter across a river reduced to a marshy stream.
Minos judges souls, girdled by a snake:
his face is a grotesque portrait of Biagio da Cesena,
the Pope's Master of Ceremonies.
The Maestro got his revenge on him for considering the nudity
of the suffering bodies to be inappropriate.
The blessed hear the clarion call of the seven trumpets
of judgement as sweet music;
the poor souls being pushed forcedly by the devils towards the Underworld
plug their ears to avoid going deaf.
One and all, reprobates and blessed, struggle desperately
either to escape the underworld
or to grab their spot in heaven.
Saint Peter hands back the keys,
now just a pointless burden.
Saint Bartholomew displays his flayed skin,
sporting the lifeless face of Michelangelo.
who hopes to atone for his own sins by presenting himself to God annihilated,
in lifeless form.
"A flash of vermilion light
Overcomes all feeling in me;
And I dropped like a man falling into deep sleep."
"Men do not care what blood it costs to sow."
When it was publicly unveiled, the Last Judgement
aroused both admiration and shock.
It came close to being destroyed immediately,
for being indecorous and unseemly.
A few years after Michelangelo died,
the decision was taken to alter just the most scandalous figures.
Daniele da Volterra, who was given this thankless task,
was from then on nicknamed "Braghettone".
Fortunately, Marcello Venusti had made a copy of the Last Judgement
soon after it was painted, before the enforced trousering:
a small painting, today in Naples,
preserves the Maestro's original creation.
Revealed or covered up,
those bodies revolutionized and stunned his contemporaries,
thanks to the incredible freedom of Michelangelo's approach
to an ancient and sacred theme...
One that, in his hands, becomes modern,
angst-ridden
and eternal.
Blessed and mightily fortunate was Paul III,
because God conceded to his protection true judgement,
true damnation and resurrection.
Michelangelo infused such power in his painting that "the dead were dead,
and the living seemed living".
It took him almost eight years to complete his Judgement,
finally unveiled on Christmas Day 1541,
to wonder and amazement among all beholders.
But even though fresco painting is no job for the old,
his toils in the Vatican palazzos showed no sign of ending.
Pope Paul III could not imagine dispensing with Michelangelo's services.
He commissioned the ageing maestro, now in his seventies, to paint
new cycle of frescoes for his private chapel in the Apostolic Palace.
Michelangelo painted for almost ten years, taking long breaks
because of poor health and failing eyesight.
Once again, he wins the challenge against himself;
this would be his final pictorial work.
Like Saul, Michelangelo would obey the law of the Lord.
And, like Saint Peter, before God and man he was ready
to accept what was to come.
And after having served the popes, the time came to serve just God.
And so I became God's hand.
After being named architect of Saint Peter's Basilica, Michelangelo
dedicated himself to this job until the end of his days.
In a stroke of genius, he designed the final form of the dome,
filling it with all available light.
Work on Michelangelo's design, one of the most revolutionary ever conceived
was only completed posthumously, at the end of the sixteenth century.
I was striving so hard to complete the job at Saint Peter's,
for the Church as a whole and for our Lord...
making sure there was no trickery or pilfering.
My one comfort came from sculpting,
in my home,
without any projects in particular.
They were Pietàs,
like the first I ever sculpted.
Sometimes by night I would take just a peek, astounded
that they were so... light-filled, finished and...
And yet I was just hacking,
breaking things, mutilating...
I sheared away marble, despairing that the stone...
was somehow becoming suddenly mute.
I no longer succeeded in stripping away,
I couldn't add,
I was unable to finish things.
With this sulphurous heart,
with this flesh of tow,
no peace could there be for me.
How can a miserable man...
ever succeed in equalling the perfection of divine design?
The Rondanini Pietà, today housed at the Castello Sforzesco,
was Michelangelo's last poignant work of sculpture.
This marble piece looks like it has been wounded and mutilated
through repeated blows by the Maestro,
who in a veritable destructive rage profoundly transformed his initial idea
to produce a totally different composition:
unfinished, modern in the extreme,
bearing witness to a creative raptus that has enthralled critics
and contemporary artists alike.
Whereas from the rear the form of the original block of stone
is evident in all of its raw materiality,
from the front we make out the figures of Christ and Mary.
However, the demarcation between the person doing the holding
and the person being held is completely wiped out.
The group is supple and spiritual,
the two bodies tending to melt and flow into one another,
as if the mother wanted to call her son back into the womb,
to find peace and solace there.
Before dying, Michelangelo pared things back to the essential,
sculpting an intimate, tormented prayer
in the final piece of marble he was to challenge.
Ah, happy, truly happy is our age,
we have been able to cast so much light to brighten up the shadows.
Michelangelo pulled the blindfold from the eyes of our minds,
he cast aside the veil of falsity that darkened the halls of the intellect.
Praise be to the Heavens,
and let us strive to imitate Michelangelo in all things.
But why do I jump from place to place, a-leaping?
All I have to say is:
wherever he laid his divine hand, he resurrected things,
infusing them with life eternal.
Confound these hands,
confound the passage of time.
Confound my loneliness,
and confound you, marble.
May nothing remain of the things I have made, because...
what I have made has not been enough.
Confound me, because I wanted to be like God,
to try and make life
rather than fully living my own.
Confound this...
It's over...
It's over!
So what's left?
Come on, tell me!
Can you tell me what it was for, this immense hard labour?
But why?
Why won't you speak?
All his statues are so constrained by agony
that they seem to wish to break themselves.
When Michelangelo was old he actually broke them.
Art did not content him. He wanted infinity.
MICHELANGELO ENDLESS