Would you like to inspect the original subtitles? These are the user uploaded subtitles that are being translated:
1
00:00:02,000 --> 00:00:07,000
Downloaded from
YTS.MX
2
00:00:08,000 --> 00:00:13,000
Official YIFY movies site:
YTS.MX
3
00:01:34,416 --> 00:01:38,750
From a thing of graceful and exotic beauty,
4
00:01:38,750 --> 00:01:42,041
from a fountain of mercy,
5
00:01:42,125 --> 00:01:44,458
my suffering is born.
6
00:02:23,375 --> 00:02:29,125
I thank God to have been born in the time Michelangelo was alive
7
00:02:29,125 --> 00:02:33,416
and for him to have been on such friendly terms with me.
8
00:02:34,666 --> 00:02:38,958
I have been able to write many details about his life,
9
00:02:38,958 --> 00:02:41,250
all of which are true.
10
00:02:44,458 --> 00:02:47,458
In the year 1475,
11
00:02:47,458 --> 00:02:52,000
there was born a son, from an excellent and noble mother,
12
00:02:52,000 --> 00:02:57,083
to Lodovico di Leonardo Buonarroti Simoni,
13
00:02:57,083 --> 00:02:59,791
a descendant, so it is said,
14
00:02:59,875 --> 00:03:05,041
of the most noble and most ancient family of the Counts of Canossa.
15
00:03:08,375 --> 00:03:14,833
To that Lodovico, judicial officer of the township of Chiusi and Caprese,
16
00:03:14,833 --> 00:03:17,375
in the diocese of Arezzo,
17
00:03:17,375 --> 00:03:22,083
a son was born on 6 March, a Sunday.
18
00:03:31,708 --> 00:03:36,166
I think there are a handful of artists who are the greatest.
19
00:03:36,250 --> 00:03:40,833
There's Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Picasso.
20
00:03:41,833 --> 00:03:45,083
But I think Michelangelo is the artist that,
21
00:03:45,083 --> 00:03:50,333
once you start looking at his work and start thinking about his work,
22
00:03:50,333 --> 00:03:55,125
your sense of awe increases more and more.
23
00:03:55,125 --> 00:04:02,625
And really, whether he's doing a small drawing, a poem or a massive sculpture,
24
00:04:02,625 --> 00:04:07,833
he's always dealing with the strangest, darkest and most difficult thoughts.
25
00:04:07,833 --> 00:04:12,541
He's always dealing with what it is to be alive and with mortality
26
00:04:12,625 --> 00:04:17,750
and with the fragility of existence and with the deep, serious stuff.
27
00:04:18,582 --> 00:04:22,500
The thing about Michelangelo is he's the original famous artist.
28
00:04:22,582 --> 00:04:24,791
He's extremely famous today.
29
00:04:24,875 --> 00:04:27,457
He was extremely famous in his own lifetime.
30
00:04:27,541 --> 00:04:30,125
He was the first celebrity artist.
31
00:04:30,207 --> 00:04:35,500
He had two biographies of himself published in his own lifetime
32
00:04:35,582 --> 00:04:40,082
and took a big interest in their publication and helped with them both.
33
00:04:40,166 --> 00:04:44,416
And he was regarded as a godlike figure.
34
00:04:44,500 --> 00:04:47,957
Michelangelo did everything. He painted.
35
00:04:48,041 --> 00:04:50,000
He sculpted.
36
00:04:50,082 --> 00:04:53,666
He built architecture. He wrote poetry.
37
00:04:53,750 --> 00:04:56,332
He designed military fortifications rather brilliantly,
38
00:04:56,416 --> 00:04:58,375
which is his least-known skill.
39
00:05:01,583 --> 00:05:05,750
Previously, let's say in the late medieval, early Renaissance period,
40
00:05:05,750 --> 00:05:08,750
artists were still very much conceived as craftsmen,
41
00:05:08,750 --> 00:05:10,833
albeit very skilled craftsmen.
42
00:05:10,833 --> 00:05:14,708
It's really in the period of Leonardo and Michelangelo
43
00:05:14,708 --> 00:05:18,666
that artists start being understood as creative geniuses,
44
00:05:18,750 --> 00:05:20,957
and of course this comes up again and again
45
00:05:21,041 --> 00:05:24,166
in The Lives of the Artists written by Giorgio Vasari,
46
00:05:24,250 --> 00:05:28,166
who describes Michelangelo repeatedly as divino.
47
00:05:28,250 --> 00:05:32,457
He is divine, and he both paints and draws divinely.
48
00:05:50,582 --> 00:05:55,541
The Buonarroti family had been upwardly mobile in the 14th century
49
00:05:55,625 --> 00:05:59,041
and at the start of the 15th century doing quite well,
50
00:05:59,125 --> 00:06:03,250
possibly even as well as another up-and-coming family called Medici.
51
00:06:04,500 --> 00:06:05,791
And by the time he was born
52
00:06:05,875 --> 00:06:09,916
they actually didn't have very much left except a bit of status.
53
00:06:10,000 --> 00:06:14,875
They had a farm in Settignano outside Florence with a few rents.
54
00:06:15,500 --> 00:06:18,916
His mother died when he was seven. He had five brothers
55
00:06:19,000 --> 00:06:22,750
and was brought up by his father and his uncle.
56
00:06:22,832 --> 00:06:26,375
Subsequently he lived in a pretty male world
57
00:06:26,457 --> 00:06:29,625
of artists' workshops, the papal court.
58
00:06:49,957 --> 00:06:54,832
Michelangelo was sent to be nursed by the wife of a stonecutter.
59
00:06:54,916 --> 00:06:57,125
Wherefore the same Michelangelo,
60
00:06:57,207 --> 00:07:00,916
talking with me once, said in good humour,
61
00:07:01,000 --> 00:07:05,500
"Giorgio, if I have anything good in my brain,"
62
00:07:05,500 --> 00:07:11,291
it has come from my being born in the pure air of your country of Arezzo,
63
00:07:11,375 --> 00:07:15,041
even as I also sucked in with my nurse's milk
64
00:07:15,125 --> 00:07:19,457
"the chisels and hammer with which I now make my figures."
65
00:07:32,250 --> 00:07:35,416
15th-century Florence was a major commercial centre
66
00:07:35,500 --> 00:07:39,332
and for 15th-century Europe quite a big town.
67
00:07:39,416 --> 00:07:44,000
Population, we're not quite sure, somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000,
68
00:07:44,082 --> 00:07:47,582
fluctuating depending on plague and various other disasters.
69
00:07:47,666 --> 00:07:49,582
It was a workaday place.
70
00:07:49,666 --> 00:07:52,875
The Florentines were hard-nosed merchants
71
00:07:52,957 --> 00:07:57,500
and that comes out very strongly in Michelangelo's own character
72
00:07:57,582 --> 00:08:01,458
because whatever else he was, great genius, poet and so forth,
73
00:08:01,458 --> 00:08:03,750
he was tremendously interested in money
74
00:08:03,750 --> 00:08:08,208
and he ended up with a great deal of money and a huge amount of property,
75
00:08:08,208 --> 00:08:10,833
mainly in the Florence area.
76
00:08:12,625 --> 00:08:16,791
The Medici were a family of bankers and merchants,
77
00:08:16,875 --> 00:08:18,957
who had prospered
78
00:08:19,041 --> 00:08:23,666
by using a considerable amount of political skill and corruption
79
00:08:23,750 --> 00:08:26,582
to become, by the end of the 15th century,
80
00:08:26,666 --> 00:08:28,625
de facto the rulers of Florence.
81
00:08:28,707 --> 00:08:31,375
They'd fixed the Florentine constitution
82
00:08:31,457 --> 00:08:34,750
so that they could pull the levers of power behind the scenes,
83
00:08:34,832 --> 00:08:40,540
except everyone knew that the boss was the head of Medici clan,
84
00:08:40,625 --> 00:08:44,207
and the head of the Medici clan when Michelangelo was a teenager
85
00:08:44,207 --> 00:08:45,500
was Lorenzo.
86
00:08:45,500 --> 00:08:48,790
A very complicated man, a bit of a mafioso,
87
00:08:48,875 --> 00:08:51,290
but also a great intellectual and a poet
88
00:08:51,375 --> 00:08:54,208
and a man of enormous cultivation.
89
00:08:54,290 --> 00:09:02,291
Michelangelo's complex, intimate and, in some ways, antagonistic relationship
90
00:09:02,583 --> 00:09:05,458
with the Medici family lasts for most of his life
91
00:09:06,333 --> 00:09:08,583
and explains a lot of his work.
92
00:09:08,583 --> 00:09:11,375
Indeed a great deal of his work was commissioned by them.
93
00:09:11,375 --> 00:09:14,791
It's clear from Condivi's Life of Michelangelo,
94
00:09:14,875 --> 00:09:18,458
which is not exactly an autobiography but getting a bit close,
95
00:09:18,458 --> 00:09:21,500
Michelangelo really wanted to emphasise this relationship,
96
00:09:21,500 --> 00:09:23,791
that Lorenzo was...
97
00:09:23,875 --> 00:09:26,208
If anyone was going to be his teacher,
98
00:09:26,208 --> 00:09:31,750
it was not some painter in Florence, it was Lorenzo the Magnificent.
99
00:09:40,000 --> 00:09:44,208
Lodovico, being a friend of the painter Ghirlandaio,
100
00:09:44,290 --> 00:09:49,540
went to his workshop and spoke to him about his student Michelangelo.
101
00:09:52,250 --> 00:09:56,165
At that time Lorenzo the Magnificent had a garden
102
00:09:56,250 --> 00:10:01,500
where he kept many fine antiques that he had collected at great expense.
103
00:10:02,083 --> 00:10:03,625
It was his great wish
104
00:10:03,625 --> 00:10:08,166
to create a school of excellence for painters and sculptors.
105
00:10:08,250 --> 00:10:14,375
So, along with his best pupils, Ghirlandaio sent Michelangelo.
106
00:10:21,583 --> 00:10:26,083
In his garden close to San Marco,
107
00:10:26,083 --> 00:10:31,458
Lorenzo the Magnificent had a school, an academy for young artists,
108
00:10:31,458 --> 00:10:37,708
under the supervision of Bertoldo, the last sculptor-disciple of Donatello.
109
00:10:37,790 --> 00:10:40,083
The reference points for these young men
110
00:10:40,165 --> 00:10:43,625
were, on the one hand, antiquity and, on the other, Donatello.
111
00:10:43,625 --> 00:10:48,415
Among them there was a really young Michelangelo, 15 to 17 years old.
112
00:10:52,250 --> 00:10:55,790
The Madonna of the Stairs and The Battle of the Centaurs.
113
00:10:55,875 --> 00:11:03,458
They show what a prodigious gift he had.
114
00:11:03,458 --> 00:11:11,541
We can already see his young genius.
115
00:11:15,666 --> 00:11:20,375
These are the first items in Michelangelo's oeuvre.
116
00:11:20,375 --> 00:11:27,333
They are some of his earliest works, even if they were never completed.
117
00:11:27,333 --> 00:11:35,415
Especially this relief which was commissioned by Lorenzo the Magnificent,
118
00:11:36,165 --> 00:11:38,250
who had taken him under his wing.
119
00:11:38,250 --> 00:11:45,415
Michelangelo was one of those who lived in Lorenzo's own home.
120
00:11:45,500 --> 00:11:48,875
This is one of Michelangelo's juvenile pieces
121
00:11:48,875 --> 00:11:53,625
and we can really see how he was mastering the technique of sculpting.
122
00:11:53,625 --> 00:12:00,583
We can see how the material is chiselled with different tools.
123
00:12:00,583 --> 00:12:06,291
There are big tools to rough-hew the marble
124
00:12:06,375 --> 00:12:10,541
and then the shapes are gradually smoothed-out.
125
00:12:10,625 --> 00:12:16,208
The heads in the background are reminiscent of Donatello,
126
00:12:16,208 --> 00:12:20,000
because they barely emerge from the background.
127
00:12:20,000 --> 00:12:25,166
He managed to create gradually-layered planes in this marble slab
128
00:12:25,250 --> 00:12:29,125
which was left like that, incomplete, roughly-hewn.
129
00:12:29,125 --> 00:12:37,125
He used several tools showing incredible technical mastery.
130
00:12:37,125 --> 00:12:42,415
There is such dexterity in the way he chiselled the marble.
131
00:12:42,500 --> 00:12:48,958
It was immediately clear that he had discovered his true vocation.
132
00:12:52,000 --> 00:12:53,875
His Battle of the Centaurs,
133
00:12:53,875 --> 00:12:56,708
it's like a young man's work of art, a teenager's work of art.
134
00:12:56,790 --> 00:13:00,375
It's got a kind of adolescent brooding intensity to it
135
00:13:00,375 --> 00:13:06,625
and nobody before that had put adolescence into a work of art.
136
00:13:06,625 --> 00:13:09,208
It's full of sexual turbulence.
137
00:13:09,208 --> 00:13:12,583
Michelangelo is dealing with his sexuality.
138
00:13:12,583 --> 00:13:15,500
He preferred men to women, that's very clear.
139
00:13:19,541 --> 00:13:23,166
He had barely finished the "Battle of the Centaurs"
140
00:13:23,250 --> 00:13:27,375
when Lorenzo the Magnificent passed from this life
141
00:13:27,375 --> 00:13:31,833
and Michelangelo returned to his father's house.
142
00:13:31,833 --> 00:13:36,083
So much grief did he feel for his patron's death
143
00:13:36,165 --> 00:13:39,958
that it was many days before he returned to work.
144
00:14:17,166 --> 00:14:22,541
Michelangelo carved a very beautiful wooden sculpture, a crucifixion,
145
00:14:22,625 --> 00:14:25,958
for the church of Santo Spirito in Florence
146
00:14:25,958 --> 00:14:30,125
and that sculpture today appears very simple and plain
147
00:14:30,125 --> 00:14:33,125
and that's in part because we're missing a lot of the polychromy
148
00:14:33,125 --> 00:14:34,750
that would have been on there.
149
00:14:34,750 --> 00:14:38,125
So we can imagine that actually the wounds of Christ would have had blood
150
00:14:38,125 --> 00:14:42,625
and there would have been far more detail than what we can see today.
151
00:14:42,625 --> 00:14:47,625
That notwithstanding, the smooth, very serene face of Christ
152
00:14:47,625 --> 00:14:51,625
is something that we see elsewhere in Michelangelo's later work.
153
00:14:51,625 --> 00:14:56,625
And his attention to the anatomy of the body is very particular
154
00:14:56,625 --> 00:15:01,625
and we actually know that he was at Santo Spirito studying dead bodies.
155
00:15:01,625 --> 00:15:03,875
He was particularly interested in their anatomy.
156
00:15:03,875 --> 00:15:07,250
And he actually carved that sculpture for the church
157
00:15:07,250 --> 00:15:11,083
in thanks for them granting him access to these dead bodies.
158
00:15:14,041 --> 00:15:20,208
I think initially Michelangelo wanted to understand how the human body works
159
00:15:20,208 --> 00:15:23,875
and in doing that he had to find out what was underneath.
160
00:15:23,875 --> 00:15:29,500
He wanted to understand how the expressive bulges and movements
161
00:15:29,500 --> 00:15:31,416
were actually created.
162
00:15:31,500 --> 00:15:35,500
So I think it was to have a deeper understanding of expression,
163
00:15:35,500 --> 00:15:37,790
because he is a very expressive artist.
164
00:15:37,875 --> 00:15:40,083
If you look at it over his lifetime,
165
00:15:40,165 --> 00:15:44,458
the format of his anatomy gets more and more expressive.
166
00:15:45,458 --> 00:15:47,915
There's more than aesthetics
167
00:15:48,000 --> 00:15:51,708
in the case of both Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.
168
00:15:51,790 --> 00:15:54,915
These were two people who did dissect the human body,
169
00:15:55,000 --> 00:15:57,458
who were fascinated by the human body
170
00:15:57,540 --> 00:16:02,791
and, I must add, were ahead of the medical scientists of their time.
171
00:16:02,875 --> 00:16:06,958
In other words, artists were dissecting and looking at the human body
172
00:16:06,958 --> 00:16:11,291
50 years before any of the scientists did it seriously.
173
00:16:38,540 --> 00:16:42,125
Jacopo Galli, a Roman gentleman,
174
00:16:42,125 --> 00:16:48,665
recognised Michelangelo's talent and had him carve a Bacchus in marble,
175
00:16:48,750 --> 00:16:52,208
holding a cup in his right hand
176
00:16:52,290 --> 00:16:57,750
and in the left a tiger's skin, along with a cluster of grapes,
177
00:16:57,750 --> 00:17:00,125
which a little satyr is trying to eat.
178
00:17:02,750 --> 00:17:06,958
In this figure it is clear that Michelangelo wanted to attain
179
00:17:07,040 --> 00:17:11,458
a marvellous combination of various parts of the body
180
00:17:11,540 --> 00:17:18,500
and, particularly, to give it both the slenderness of the young male figure
181
00:17:18,500 --> 00:17:22,875
and the fleshiness and roundness of the female.
182
00:17:22,875 --> 00:17:28,540
It was such an astounding work that it showed Michelangelo to be more skilled
183
00:17:28,625 --> 00:17:33,666
than any other modern sculptor who had ever worked up to that time.
184
00:17:39,291 --> 00:17:43,166
Bacchus is the god of ecstasy, the god of unreason,
185
00:17:43,250 --> 00:17:47,083
but in Michelangelo's statue he gives the god these mad eyes.
186
00:17:47,083 --> 00:17:49,416
He's got these weird, mad eyes,
187
00:17:49,500 --> 00:17:55,250
his head is tilting in a slightly odd, bizarre way.
188
00:17:55,250 --> 00:17:59,166
There's really a sense of madness and actually it's frightening.
189
00:17:59,250 --> 00:18:03,333
There's a frightening irrationality to Michelangelo's image of Bacchus.
190
00:18:03,333 --> 00:18:07,000
Whereas other artists take this myth of the god of wine
191
00:18:07,000 --> 00:18:09,000
and might make it quite funny or jolly,
192
00:18:09,000 --> 00:18:15,750
Michelangelo makes it a deeply, deeply personal image
193
00:18:15,750 --> 00:18:19,458
of what it would be like to lose yourself totally
194
00:18:19,458 --> 00:18:21,833
in the senses and in the irrational.
195
00:18:23,916 --> 00:18:28,916
He is demonstrating his ability to rival the art of the ancients
196
00:18:29,000 --> 00:18:32,208
or perhaps even surpass the art of the ancients,
197
00:18:32,208 --> 00:18:34,625
and similarly that seems to be a comment
198
00:18:34,625 --> 00:18:39,875
on a kind of domination over the pagan past.
199
00:18:40,416 --> 00:18:45,125
Part of Michelangelo's preoccupation with the ideal male nude
200
00:18:45,125 --> 00:18:49,791
comes from his access to the antiquities in Rome.
201
00:18:49,875 --> 00:18:52,208
These are objects that are being dug up
202
00:18:52,208 --> 00:18:56,291
in this period of the early years of the 16th century.
203
00:18:57,000 --> 00:18:59,625
Things like the Laocoön, for example.
204
00:18:59,625 --> 00:19:05,083
And he has access to the finest works of ancient Greece and Rome.
205
00:19:13,208 --> 00:19:18,250
During his stay in Rome, he made such progress in the study of his art
206
00:19:18,250 --> 00:19:21,458
that it was incredible to see.
207
00:19:21,458 --> 00:19:25,125
As a result, when the French Cardinal of Rouen
208
00:19:25,125 --> 00:19:29,041
wanted to leave a fitting memorial of himself in Rome,
209
00:19:29,125 --> 00:19:32,916
he was eager to employ such a rare artist.
210
00:19:33,000 --> 00:19:36,375
And he commissioned a marble pietà in the round,
211
00:19:36,375 --> 00:19:40,541
which, when finished, was placed in St Peter's.
212
00:20:15,041 --> 00:20:23,041
The Pietà is an astonishing feat of skill and design and emotional empathy
213
00:20:24,833 --> 00:20:27,500
and it is also, we can be quite certain,
214
00:20:27,500 --> 00:20:33,583
intended by the 25-year-old or so Michelangelo
215
00:20:33,583 --> 00:20:36,750
as an advertisement for himself.
216
00:20:36,750 --> 00:20:40,625
It's the only work which he signs.
217
00:20:47,625 --> 00:20:51,625
Mary is a mountain in that work.
218
00:20:52,708 --> 00:20:58,458
The incredible folds of her fabric have a whole kind of topography,
219
00:20:58,458 --> 00:21:00,333
they are a landscape,
220
00:21:00,333 --> 00:21:04,666
and she forms this immense sort of pyramid
221
00:21:04,750 --> 00:21:12,750
that gathers up this completely limp and languishing dead Christ.
222
00:21:14,500 --> 00:21:22,500
Everything that's become embodied in that stone has failed
223
00:21:22,875 --> 00:21:25,625
and is laid across her
224
00:21:25,625 --> 00:21:31,291
and she supports his weight so kind of easily, effortlessly.
225
00:21:31,375 --> 00:21:36,500
You know, her kind of strength at the moment of his weakness
226
00:21:36,500 --> 00:21:39,375
is so emotionally powerful.
227
00:21:39,375 --> 00:21:43,875
And there she is as kind of "Mother Church"
228
00:21:43,875 --> 00:21:50,250
supporting this figure that has died in such anguish.
229
00:22:00,625 --> 00:22:03,916
It's a German tradition to represent the body of Christ
230
00:22:04,000 --> 00:22:05,541
in the lap of the Virgin.
231
00:22:05,625 --> 00:22:09,500
This was not something that the Romans would have seen very often
232
00:22:09,500 --> 00:22:14,166
and in that German tradition it's often a very grief-stricken Virgin
233
00:22:14,250 --> 00:22:18,750
who's tearing out her hair, and this emaciated body of Christ.
234
00:22:18,750 --> 00:22:23,041
What Michelangelo does is absolutely transformative.
235
00:22:23,125 --> 00:22:26,208
The face of the Virgin which has been often commented on
236
00:22:26,208 --> 00:22:29,791
is extremely young and beautiful, smooth in fact,
237
00:22:29,875 --> 00:22:31,500
and she looks very serene.
238
00:22:31,500 --> 00:22:35,958
And there's something very touching, literally and figuratively,
239
00:22:35,958 --> 00:22:40,416
about the way that she sort of touches Christ's wound.
240
00:22:40,500 --> 00:22:44,583
It makes you want to reach out and touch that sculpture as well.
241
00:22:44,583 --> 00:22:46,625
I think there's something also
242
00:22:46,625 --> 00:22:51,166
about the very finely polished finish of that sculpture
243
00:22:51,250 --> 00:22:54,625
that also renders it extremely tactile and appealing.
244
00:23:03,250 --> 00:23:08,583
It's carved from one block of marble which in itself is quite a feat,
245
00:23:08,583 --> 00:23:14,541
producing a work that size from one block which he quarried himself,
246
00:23:14,625 --> 00:23:17,375
or had quarried under his personal supervision,
247
00:23:17,375 --> 00:23:21,958
in the mountains at Carrara and had transported to Rome.
248
00:23:21,958 --> 00:23:25,875
It's finished and polished in the most extraordinary way,
249
00:23:25,875 --> 00:23:31,041
actually fantastically smooth, almost glassy.
250
00:23:31,125 --> 00:23:34,250
It would have reflected light in a beautiful way.
251
00:24:01,333 --> 00:24:04,750
I belong to a family tradition
252
00:24:04,750 --> 00:24:10,083
that lasts since the beginning of the 18th century
253
00:24:10,083 --> 00:24:16,291
and the reason why these marble workshops were built in Carrara
254
00:24:16,375 --> 00:24:19,958
is because we have such an important marble tradition
255
00:24:19,958 --> 00:24:23,875
connected, of course, with the exploitation of the marble quarries.
256
00:24:23,875 --> 00:24:29,583
In Carrara we've got a very fine chemical composition of the particles.
257
00:24:29,583 --> 00:24:35,250
They are, one side to the other, very close and very, very fine.
258
00:24:35,250 --> 00:24:39,583
But it's micro-crystals in composition
259
00:24:39,583 --> 00:24:45,333
and this makes the white marble of Carrara more suitable for sculpture
260
00:24:45,333 --> 00:24:53,416
because it resists very fine profiles, very fine, tiny, very tiny details.
261
00:24:54,541 --> 00:24:58,916
You don't have that big grain, like a grain of salt.
262
00:24:59,000 --> 00:25:06,333
With Carrara marble it's particularly suitable for the marble carving.
263
00:25:06,333 --> 00:25:09,083
Faced with a large marble block,
264
00:25:09,083 --> 00:25:12,458
you need to have a very clear idea in mind
265
00:25:12,458 --> 00:25:15,750
and this is exactly what Michelangelo had.
266
00:25:15,750 --> 00:25:19,375
He was not improvising, he was not an expressionist,
267
00:25:19,375 --> 00:25:21,708
he knew exactly what he was going to do
268
00:25:21,708 --> 00:25:25,208
because he was idealistic, pure Platonic.
269
00:25:26,708 --> 00:25:32,208
The first stage is the roughing-out of the block.
270
00:25:32,208 --> 00:25:39,375
So imagine a very regular square block, you remove the angles.
271
00:25:39,375 --> 00:25:44,291
Then the most crucial phase is called modelling.
272
00:25:44,791 --> 00:25:51,416
Modelling is the most important thing. It's what we do also in clay modelling,
273
00:25:51,500 --> 00:25:56,583
whereas marble carving is only to remove material.
274
00:25:56,583 --> 00:26:00,833
You cannot add what's been removed before.
275
00:26:00,833 --> 00:26:04,833
After that you reach the finishing phase and the polishing.
276
00:26:07,458 --> 00:26:10,250
So this sense of taking away and taking away
277
00:26:10,250 --> 00:26:15,958
until he got to the point where he found the skin of his subject.
278
00:26:15,958 --> 00:26:20,083
And then that boundary of the body
279
00:26:20,083 --> 00:26:23,291
actually becoming the form of the sculpture,
280
00:26:23,375 --> 00:26:29,333
and the idea that that's buried inside this inert lump of marble is magical.
281
00:26:31,875 --> 00:26:36,541
When I am driven away from and deprived of fire,
282
00:26:36,625 --> 00:26:39,333
I'm compelled to die,
283
00:26:39,333 --> 00:26:42,000
where others survive and live.
284
00:26:42,583 --> 00:26:46,916
For my only food is what flares up and burns,
285
00:26:47,000 --> 00:26:52,333
and that which others die from, I need to live.
286
00:26:56,166 --> 00:27:02,375
The poetry was the element of his work which he was most worried about
287
00:27:02,375 --> 00:27:05,916
and most pleased by praise of,
288
00:27:06,000 --> 00:27:08,833
which suggests that he was rather uncertain about it
289
00:27:08,833 --> 00:27:11,625
because he wasn't a professional literary man.
290
00:27:11,625 --> 00:27:17,416
His poetry has had quite an erratic reception over the centuries.
291
00:27:18,500 --> 00:27:21,583
Michelangelo saw himself as an intellectual.
292
00:27:21,583 --> 00:27:24,875
He knew some of the leading Neoplatonists
293
00:27:24,875 --> 00:27:28,500
and philosophers and poets as a teenager,
294
00:27:28,500 --> 00:27:32,666
so it's part of his essential education.
295
00:27:32,750 --> 00:27:36,541
The other great value of Neoplatonism for Michelangelo
296
00:27:36,625 --> 00:27:38,666
and for other people in the Renaissance
297
00:27:38,750 --> 00:27:45,208
was that it gave a way of talking about love that was sincere
298
00:27:45,208 --> 00:27:48,958
and yet also rather useful if you lived in a Christian society.
299
00:27:48,958 --> 00:27:51,833
The Neoplatonists said that by loving beauty
300
00:27:51,833 --> 00:27:55,958
you could ascend to a higher spiritual realm, ultimately to heaven.
301
00:27:57,791 --> 00:28:01,416
In other words, the love of physical beauty
302
00:28:01,500 --> 00:28:06,375
could lead you to an equivalent of Christian redemption.
303
00:28:06,375 --> 00:28:11,625
Now, Michelangelo loved men, he adored men.
304
00:28:11,625 --> 00:28:14,916
He was gay. In our terms, he was gay.
305
00:28:15,000 --> 00:28:16,833
He wrote love poems to men.
306
00:28:16,833 --> 00:28:21,166
But he insisted it was platonic.
307
00:28:21,250 --> 00:28:23,916
He was celibate, he claimed to be completely celibate,
308
00:28:24,000 --> 00:28:29,083
so that he could go around idolising the male body
309
00:28:29,083 --> 00:28:31,083
and idolising particular men,
310
00:28:31,083 --> 00:28:37,833
but he could say, "It's a Neoplatonic love of spiritual beauty."
311
00:28:37,833 --> 00:28:40,583
So this was crucial to Michelangelo.
312
00:28:40,583 --> 00:28:45,708
This allowed him to be, in effect, openly gay
313
00:28:45,708 --> 00:28:49,000
at a time when you could be burnt at the stake
314
00:28:49,000 --> 00:28:50,625
as what they called a sodomite.
315
00:28:52,041 --> 00:28:59,625
How, then, could I ever dare
316
00:28:59,625 --> 00:29:07,708
Without you, my beloved, to keep hold on life
317
00:29:09,333 --> 00:29:17,333
If, at our parting, I cannot find help within myself?
318
00:29:24,458 --> 00:29:32,458
Those sobs, those cries, those sighs
319
00:29:37,833 --> 00:29:45,833
That accompanied my miserable heart to you
320
00:29:52,958 --> 00:30:00,958
My lady, harshly confirmed
321
00:30:07,083 --> 00:30:15,083
My approaching death and my torments
322
00:30:20,416 --> 00:30:28,416
But if it is true that once I am gone
323
00:30:32,500 --> 00:30:40,500
My faithful servitude may be forgotten
324
00:30:44,166 --> 00:30:52,166
My heart Anticipating my afflictions
325
00:30:56,458 --> 00:31:04,458
To fulfil your empty wish
326
00:31:05,833 --> 00:31:13,833
Prepares the funerary rituals for my grave
327
00:31:36,250 --> 00:31:39,000
We're here in the church of Sant'Agostino,
328
00:31:39,000 --> 00:31:44,500
for which Michelangelo did one of his first paintings, The Entombment,
329
00:31:44,500 --> 00:31:50,291
which was an altarpiece for one of the chapels in this church.
330
00:31:50,375 --> 00:31:52,458
Of course, the work was never finished
331
00:31:52,458 --> 00:31:54,458
and it is no longer in the chapel.
332
00:31:54,458 --> 00:31:57,625
But in the context of the National Gallery in London
333
00:31:57,625 --> 00:32:01,000
where the picture is today, with The Manchester Madonna,
334
00:32:01,000 --> 00:32:07,416
it already shows an artist who does not go with the normal concepts,
335
00:32:07,500 --> 00:32:11,083
so it's a very unusual iconography.
336
00:32:13,083 --> 00:32:16,416
Even though the altarpiece of The Entombment
337
00:32:16,500 --> 00:32:21,625
ostensibly represents a very familiar subject to visitors to that church...
338
00:32:21,625 --> 00:32:25,375
This is the moment after Christ's body has been lowered from the cross
339
00:32:25,375 --> 00:32:29,166
and it's about to be carried to the tomb in the far distance.
340
00:32:29,250 --> 00:32:34,625
Traditionally that scene of the burial, the entombment of the body of Christ,
341
00:32:34,625 --> 00:32:38,166
the body of Christ is represented horizontally,
342
00:32:38,250 --> 00:32:43,000
being carried off centre stage to left or right.
343
00:32:43,000 --> 00:32:46,875
In this case Michelangelo does an extraordinary thing.
344
00:32:46,875 --> 00:32:49,416
He actually pivots the body of Christ
345
00:32:49,500 --> 00:32:53,625
so that it's being held up to the viewer, frontally,
346
00:32:53,625 --> 00:32:58,083
and the viewer is confronted with this nude body of Christ.
347
00:32:58,083 --> 00:33:00,791
I think part of the genius of this altarpiece
348
00:33:00,875 --> 00:33:04,083
is that Michelangelo takes a very traditional subject
349
00:33:04,083 --> 00:33:06,000
and literally turns it on its head.
350
00:33:06,000 --> 00:33:09,875
He pivots the entire composition and transforms its meaning.
351
00:33:09,875 --> 00:33:11,708
It's not a literal reading.
352
00:33:11,708 --> 00:33:14,625
It's now an allegorical, a spiritual meaning.
353
00:33:14,625 --> 00:33:19,833
That body of Christ is being raised up in front of us, for us, the beholder,
354
00:33:19,833 --> 00:33:22,500
and it's been removed away from us.
355
00:33:22,500 --> 00:33:26,250
Those figures are stepping back into space.
356
00:33:42,083 --> 00:33:47,041
Some friends wrote from Florence urging him to come back
357
00:33:47,125 --> 00:33:51,791
because there was a good chance that he might be able to make a statue
358
00:33:51,875 --> 00:33:55,625
out of a block of marble that was standing spoiled
359
00:33:55,625 --> 00:33:57,750
in the Office of Works.
360
00:33:59,125 --> 00:34:02,708
Michelangelo would probably have known about the block of marble,
361
00:34:02,708 --> 00:34:07,333
out of which David was carved, from childhood.
362
00:34:08,708 --> 00:34:14,125
The block had been quarried in Carrara in the mid-15th century
363
00:34:14,125 --> 00:34:17,583
and transported with great difficulty probably
364
00:34:17,583 --> 00:34:21,333
by sea and along the river Arno to Florence
365
00:34:21,333 --> 00:34:25,708
with the idea of carving precisely a figure of David
366
00:34:25,708 --> 00:34:30,833
to be put right up on the skyline of the Duomo in Florence.
367
00:34:30,833 --> 00:34:33,166
That was why it was so big.
368
00:34:33,250 --> 00:34:35,916
But that project had come to nothing.
369
00:34:36,000 --> 00:34:38,125
The sculpture had been blocked out
370
00:34:38,125 --> 00:34:41,708
by a 15th-century sculptor, Agostino di Duccio,
371
00:34:41,708 --> 00:34:43,666
and then left mouldering
372
00:34:43,750 --> 00:34:50,583
in the yard of the Office of Works of Florence cathedral
373
00:34:50,583 --> 00:34:54,791
for 40 years and more.
374
00:34:54,875 --> 00:34:57,375
Suddenly the project had been revived.
375
00:34:57,375 --> 00:35:00,541
So Michelangelo effectively dropped everything,
376
00:35:00,625 --> 00:35:05,208
apparently stopped work on a painting he was doing in Rome of The Entombment,
377
00:35:05,208 --> 00:35:10,958
dashed up to Florence to make sure that he would get the commission.
378
00:35:11,625 --> 00:35:14,208
The problem that Michelangelo was faced with
379
00:35:14,208 --> 00:35:18,583
was that this block didn't really have very much scope
380
00:35:18,583 --> 00:35:23,791
to put a newly-designed figure in because it had already been worked.
381
00:35:26,458 --> 00:35:31,333
He does not call anyone to help, any assistant. Nobody.
382
00:35:31,333 --> 00:35:33,750
He had to be on his own.
383
00:35:33,750 --> 00:35:38,083
Then he closes all the area with tents
384
00:35:38,083 --> 00:35:45,666
so that nobody, nobody, could see what was going on within that place
385
00:35:45,750 --> 00:35:48,458
and he starts working night and day.
386
00:35:50,416 --> 00:35:55,166
With the passion that he had and all his ideas inside,
387
00:35:55,250 --> 00:35:58,458
he had to be connected forever.
388
00:35:58,458 --> 00:36:03,375
His name, Michelangelo, had to be connected forever with the colossus
389
00:36:03,375 --> 00:36:07,458
and the colossus would make his name,
390
00:36:07,458 --> 00:36:11,125
the greatest sculptor forever, of all time.
391
00:36:13,875 --> 00:36:18,875
Everybody wanted to have access to the place and nobody could.
392
00:36:18,875 --> 00:36:20,666
So he kept working
393
00:36:20,750 --> 00:36:25,500
and in all the bars in Florence nobody could stop talking
394
00:36:25,500 --> 00:36:30,375
about Michelangelo working like mad, night and day for months,
395
00:36:30,375 --> 00:36:32,916
and days and nights and nights and days.
396
00:36:33,000 --> 00:36:36,458
He couldn't care less that there is a defect.
397
00:36:36,458 --> 00:36:38,166
He was mad.
398
00:36:38,250 --> 00:36:41,916
He was made mad by creation. He couldn't care less.
399
00:36:42,958 --> 00:36:47,041
Michelangelo's brilliant insight
400
00:36:47,125 --> 00:36:50,458
and the way he was able to convince the patrons
401
00:36:50,458 --> 00:36:55,250
that he could get a sculpture out of this already-worked stone
402
00:36:55,250 --> 00:36:59,541
was that he was going to take David's clothes off.
403
00:36:59,625 --> 00:37:02,375
He was going to present him as naked,
404
00:37:02,375 --> 00:37:07,208
which was a sensational idea really for a public sculpture at that date
405
00:37:07,208 --> 00:37:10,750
and also gave him more space.
406
00:38:15,750 --> 00:38:17,416
The hand.
407
00:38:17,500 --> 00:38:20,291
This is an incredible piece of art.
408
00:38:20,375 --> 00:38:23,791
The hand alone is an incredible piece of art,
409
00:38:23,875 --> 00:38:28,500
with all the concentration and the stress and the reflection
410
00:38:28,500 --> 00:38:32,916
and all the thinking of David, his concentration on this gesture,
411
00:38:33,000 --> 00:38:37,708
and the strength and all the blood coming through the veins.
412
00:38:37,708 --> 00:38:39,625
And the eyes.
413
00:38:39,625 --> 00:38:43,166
So in those details you can tell
414
00:38:43,250 --> 00:38:48,083
it's probably the highest achievement in marble sculpture.
415
00:38:49,375 --> 00:38:52,250
Sculpture is about problem-solving.
416
00:38:52,250 --> 00:38:59,083
It's about process and managing a material, testing it to its limits.
417
00:38:59,083 --> 00:39:04,333
It's also the engineering of the imagination,
418
00:39:04,333 --> 00:39:11,125
so trying to match the intention with all the problems of making.
419
00:39:12,083 --> 00:39:13,791
And the other thing you throw in
420
00:39:13,875 --> 00:39:19,875
as soon as you start putting real stuff in real places is scale,
421
00:39:19,875 --> 00:39:24,625
and the scale of Michelangelo's work is overwhelming.
422
00:39:24,625 --> 00:39:29,333
It's designed to overwhelm you, it's designed to reduce you.
423
00:39:29,333 --> 00:39:32,833
David against Goliath, the giant,
424
00:39:32,833 --> 00:39:35,833
and yet David is the giant.
425
00:39:35,833 --> 00:39:43,208
He's a monumental, magnificent, human figure,
426
00:39:43,208 --> 00:39:47,583
even though he's meant to portray or symbolise
427
00:39:47,583 --> 00:39:53,125
the smaller one in the battle, the weaker one in the battle.
428
00:39:53,125 --> 00:39:57,541
There's nothing weak or humble about that as a sculpture.
429
00:39:57,625 --> 00:40:03,833
It became apparent that this was just far too good a work to waste
430
00:40:03,833 --> 00:40:07,875
by putting it out of the way on the roof of the cathedral.
431
00:40:07,875 --> 00:40:10,583
It needed to be seen from closer up.
432
00:40:10,583 --> 00:40:15,083
What happened here is they had a great work and didn't know where to put it.
433
00:40:15,083 --> 00:40:20,791
So, at the end of 1504, January, in the bitter cold,
434
00:40:20,875 --> 00:40:23,125
when the work was almost completed,
435
00:40:23,125 --> 00:40:25,125
a committee was assembled
436
00:40:25,125 --> 00:40:31,833
which might be by a mile or so the most star-studded art committee
437
00:40:31,833 --> 00:40:35,583
ever put together, anywhere, ever,
438
00:40:35,583 --> 00:40:39,250
containing among other people Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli
439
00:40:39,250 --> 00:40:42,500
and most of the great artists in Florence,
440
00:40:42,500 --> 00:40:47,416
"Where do we put David?"
441
00:40:47,500 --> 00:40:51,750
One of the strange things about that committee meeting
442
00:40:51,750 --> 00:40:54,333
with Leonardo and so forth,
443
00:40:54,333 --> 00:40:57,000
which actually a lot of the participants mention,
444
00:40:57,000 --> 00:41:00,500
is that, for some reason unknown to posterity
445
00:41:00,500 --> 00:41:05,333
and in fact to them, apparently, Michelangelo wasn't there.
446
00:41:05,333 --> 00:41:07,750
The whole question was debated,
447
00:41:07,750 --> 00:41:11,583
and probably it wasn't decided until even after that
448
00:41:11,583 --> 00:41:15,500
that finally in May 1504
449
00:41:15,500 --> 00:41:19,500
it would be put right outside the palace of government
450
00:41:19,500 --> 00:41:22,458
as an emblem of the Florentine state.
451
00:41:29,750 --> 00:41:34,333
In Florence in the 1850s there was a great, skilled plaster caster
452
00:41:34,333 --> 00:41:37,583
whose name was Clemente Papi.
453
00:41:37,583 --> 00:41:43,416
He was asked to make a copy of Michelangelo's David for Florence
454
00:41:43,500 --> 00:41:46,583
because they were worried about the original marble
455
00:41:46,583 --> 00:41:48,375
being exposed to the weather.
456
00:41:48,375 --> 00:41:53,875
So they wanted a copy which is indeed in the main square of Florence,
457
00:41:53,875 --> 00:41:56,208
the Piazza della Signoria, even today.
458
00:41:56,916 --> 00:42:01,791
When Clemente Papi made this marble copy,
459
00:42:01,875 --> 00:42:08,291
he made a mould which could be used to reproduce plaster copies as well
460
00:42:08,375 --> 00:42:12,750
and it was literally thousands of pieces
461
00:42:12,750 --> 00:42:17,000
that were put together and then sealed.
462
00:42:17,000 --> 00:42:21,791
And if you look closely at the cast that we have here
463
00:42:21,875 --> 00:42:26,000
there are faint lines, casting lines,
464
00:42:26,000 --> 00:42:29,666
where you can see how all these pieces were fitted together.
465
00:42:29,750 --> 00:42:33,208
In fact, the particular copy we have here
466
00:42:33,208 --> 00:42:40,375
was presented by the Florentine government to Queen Victoria as a gift.
467
00:42:40,375 --> 00:42:44,833
I think the other thing that people love about Michelangelo,
468
00:42:44,833 --> 00:42:46,875
especially today,
469
00:42:46,875 --> 00:42:49,708
is what is known as non finito,
470
00:42:49,708 --> 00:42:56,708
this sense that some of his sculptures seem, or indeed are, unfinished,
471
00:42:56,708 --> 00:43:02,125
so you've not only got this wonderful smooth, polished marble
472
00:43:02,125 --> 00:43:07,875
with this illusionistic sense of drapery or hair or skin,
473
00:43:07,875 --> 00:43:13,500
but you've got very rough, half-worked stone.
474
00:43:13,500 --> 00:43:16,583
The sense of the artist at work, the sense of process.
475
00:43:16,583 --> 00:43:19,916
I think that's one of the things you can also see very well
476
00:43:20,000 --> 00:43:22,708
in these plaster casts because you can get up close to them,
477
00:43:22,708 --> 00:43:26,041
you can look at the surface
478
00:43:26,125 --> 00:43:30,500
and the surface reflects very accurately the original marble.
479
00:43:53,916 --> 00:43:57,750
Pope Julius II called Michelangelo to Rome
480
00:43:57,750 --> 00:44:00,041
and Michelangelo came.
481
00:44:00,125 --> 00:44:06,041
But many months passed before Julius II resolved in what way to employ him.
482
00:44:06,125 --> 00:44:10,875
Ultimately it came into his head to ask him to make his monument.
483
00:44:13,208 --> 00:44:17,333
When he saw Michelangelo's design it pleased him so much
484
00:44:17,333 --> 00:44:22,500
that he at once sent him to Carrara to quarry the necessary marbles.
485
00:44:22,500 --> 00:44:26,958
Michelangelo stayed in those mountains for more than eight months
486
00:44:26,958 --> 00:44:30,250
with just two workmen and a horse,
487
00:44:30,250 --> 00:44:33,750
and without any salary except his food.
488
00:44:37,958 --> 00:44:41,083
I have placed orders for much of the marble
489
00:44:41,083 --> 00:44:47,083
and have paid out money, setting the men to work in various places.
490
00:44:47,083 --> 00:44:49,625
Some of the places on which I have spent money
491
00:44:49,625 --> 00:44:52,250
have failed to yield suitable marble.
492
00:44:52,250 --> 00:44:58,750
One block which I had already begun to excavate proved to be faulty.
493
00:44:58,750 --> 00:45:02,875
And those barges I chartered at Pisa never arrived.
494
00:45:05,500 --> 00:45:08,833
The central disaster of Michelangelo's life,
495
00:45:08,833 --> 00:45:10,833
certainly as he saw it
496
00:45:10,833 --> 00:45:16,625
and as it's presented in the authorised biography by Condivi,
497
00:45:16,625 --> 00:45:21,458
was what he called, what Condivi calls, the tragedy of the tomb.
498
00:45:21,458 --> 00:45:26,416
It took just on 40 years to complete.
499
00:45:26,500 --> 00:45:31,875
What was completed was a very, very reduced version
500
00:45:31,875 --> 00:45:35,416
of Michelangelo's original conception.
501
00:45:35,500 --> 00:45:37,166
A lot of the sculptures
502
00:45:37,250 --> 00:45:42,333
which we now value most by Michelangelo and know best,
503
00:45:42,333 --> 00:45:45,166
such as the Slaves, the two Slaves in the Louvre,
504
00:45:45,250 --> 00:45:49,416
the four in the Accademia in Florence, are unfinished.
505
00:45:49,500 --> 00:45:51,500
The ones in the Accademia are very unfinished,
506
00:45:51,500 --> 00:45:55,000
some of then scarcely emerging from the marble block.
507
00:45:55,000 --> 00:45:57,000
The reason why they're unfinished
508
00:45:57,000 --> 00:46:01,541
is because Michelangelo was constantly diverted
509
00:46:01,625 --> 00:46:04,666
from projects which he couldn't complete.
510
00:46:04,750 --> 00:46:06,833
The reason why he didn't complete them
511
00:46:06,833 --> 00:46:10,833
was a combination of the over-ambition of the projects,
512
00:46:10,833 --> 00:46:16,833
his own disinclination to delegate tasks, so he was a control freak.
513
00:46:16,833 --> 00:46:22,833
And very soon Pope Julius wanted to divert him onto the Sistine Chapel.
514
00:46:22,833 --> 00:46:25,833
Secondarily, he started complaining
515
00:46:25,833 --> 00:46:30,125
about the sheer cost of just quarrying the stone for this thing.
516
00:46:30,125 --> 00:46:32,791
He had other expenses.
517
00:46:32,875 --> 00:46:35,833
Constant warfare, running the Church,
518
00:46:35,833 --> 00:46:40,041
rebuilding St Peter's which was the largest building in Christendom.
519
00:46:40,125 --> 00:46:46,333
The whole thing is still perhaps the best papal tomb
520
00:46:46,333 --> 00:46:50,666
or even the best Italian Renaissance tomb of the 16th century altogether,
521
00:46:50,750 --> 00:46:55,083
but Michelangelo must have felt it was botched and unsatisfactory.
522
00:46:55,083 --> 00:46:57,541
He certainly indicated as much.
523
00:46:57,625 --> 00:47:03,208
It filled him, I'm sure, when he looked at it, with a sense of dissatisfaction.
524
00:47:11,500 --> 00:47:15,125
The pope ordered that the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel
525
00:47:15,125 --> 00:47:17,208
should now be painted.
526
00:47:17,208 --> 00:47:22,166
It seems that Bramante, the architect, as a friend and relative of Raphael,
527
00:47:22,250 --> 00:47:26,541
had tried to prevent the project being assigned to Michelangelo.
528
00:47:26,625 --> 00:47:30,958
But by the pope's commission, Michelangelo was summoned.
529
00:47:34,875 --> 00:47:41,750
The Sistine Chapel was organised, was rebuilt, as it stands today,
530
00:47:41,750 --> 00:47:43,666
by Sixtus IV
531
00:47:43,750 --> 00:47:48,208
and it was also decorated completely at the time of Sixtus IV.
532
00:47:49,208 --> 00:47:57,208
Michelangelo is told which iconography he should put onto that ceiling
533
00:47:57,625 --> 00:48:03,291
and it's an iconography that has to fit
534
00:48:03,375 --> 00:48:07,291
into the iconography that already is in the chapel,
535
00:48:07,375 --> 00:48:11,625
i.e. the Old and the New Testament, and what is lacking is Genesis.
536
00:48:11,625 --> 00:48:16,333
So he's asked to tell the story of Genesis in the ceiling
537
00:48:16,333 --> 00:48:19,833
and he's asked to do this in nine scenes.
538
00:48:21,000 --> 00:48:26,916
The thing about the Sistine ceiling is that you cannot look at it
539
00:48:27,000 --> 00:48:33,333
without thinking about Michelangelo's pain and danger when he made it.
540
00:48:33,333 --> 00:48:36,416
Looking at it is a physical experience.
541
00:48:36,500 --> 00:48:41,375
There was a poem where he actually caricatures himself standing...
542
00:48:41,375 --> 00:48:43,916
He's sort of standing with one arm on his hip
543
00:48:44,000 --> 00:48:47,125
and the other with his paintbrush reaching up to the roof.
544
00:48:47,125 --> 00:48:50,208
And he talks in the poem about his face covered in paint,
545
00:48:50,208 --> 00:48:52,541
he says he's spattered in colours.
546
00:48:55,791 --> 00:48:59,583
I have already grown a goitre at this drudgery,
547
00:48:59,583 --> 00:49:02,791
as the water gives the cats in Lombardy,
548
00:49:02,875 --> 00:49:06,333
or else it may be in some other country,
549
00:49:06,333 --> 00:49:10,416
which sticks my stomach by force beneath my chin.
550
00:49:11,291 --> 00:49:16,708
With my beard toward heaven, I feel my memory-box atop my hump.
551
00:49:17,666 --> 00:49:20,708
I'm getting a harpy's breast.
552
00:49:20,708 --> 00:49:25,000
And the brush that is always above my face,
553
00:49:25,000 --> 00:49:29,833
by dribbling down, makes it an ornate pavement.
554
00:49:30,708 --> 00:49:34,000
My loins have entered my belly,
555
00:49:34,000 --> 00:49:38,833
and I make my arse into a crupper as a counterweight.
556
00:49:38,833 --> 00:49:43,583
Without my eyes, my feet move aimlessly.
557
00:49:44,416 --> 00:49:47,375
In front of me my hide is stretching out
558
00:49:47,375 --> 00:49:52,583
and, to wrinkle up behind, it forms a knot,
559
00:49:52,583 --> 00:49:56,666
and I am bent like a Syrian bow.
560
00:49:57,583 --> 00:50:01,083
Therefore the reasoning that my mind produces
561
00:50:01,083 --> 00:50:05,458
comes out unsound and strange,
562
00:50:05,458 --> 00:50:09,916
for one shoots badly through a crooked barrel.
563
00:50:10,000 --> 00:50:16,125
Giovanni, from now on defend my dead painting and my honour
564
00:50:16,125 --> 00:50:21,416
since I'm not in a good position, nor a painter.
565
00:51:48,125 --> 00:51:53,333
The ceiling basically is divided in three sections
566
00:51:53,333 --> 00:51:56,916
and they are subdivided into three scenes.
567
00:51:57,000 --> 00:52:01,291
So the first part is the creation of the world,
568
00:52:01,375 --> 00:52:03,833
the second part is the creation of man
569
00:52:03,833 --> 00:52:11,416
and the third part is the covenant, the alliance between God and man.
570
00:52:14,375 --> 00:52:18,000
So it's not the seven days of creation.
571
00:52:18,000 --> 00:52:20,666
They're condensed into the three scenes
572
00:52:20,750 --> 00:52:24,708
with the division of light and darkness,
573
00:52:24,708 --> 00:52:28,375
the creation of sun and moon,
574
00:52:28,375 --> 00:52:32,875
and then he goes on to the creation of man with Adam and Eve
575
00:52:32,875 --> 00:52:36,458
and with, of course, the fall of man, which you have to have.
576
00:52:36,458 --> 00:52:40,500
And then you have three scenes for Noah
577
00:52:40,500 --> 00:52:45,166
and of course it's much more difficult to subdivide Noah into three scenes,
578
00:52:45,250 --> 00:52:48,083
so he ends up with the drunkenness of Noah
579
00:52:48,083 --> 00:52:51,625
and he has the deluge in the centre
580
00:52:51,625 --> 00:52:54,833
and that's probably the first fresco
581
00:52:54,833 --> 00:52:57,583
with which he started painting on the ceiling.
582
00:52:58,583 --> 00:53:03,250
He worked in the chapel from 1508 to 1512,
583
00:53:03,250 --> 00:53:08,958
so there is a kind of natural evolution of what he's doing.
584
00:53:08,958 --> 00:53:12,750
He also painted the ceiling in two halves.
585
00:53:12,750 --> 00:53:16,000
So he started off over the entrance door
586
00:53:16,000 --> 00:53:18,541
and he probably started off with the deluge.
587
00:53:18,625 --> 00:53:22,708
And then, as you do in fresco, you work down,
588
00:53:22,708 --> 00:53:27,250
so the lunettes with the ancestors of Christ
589
00:53:27,250 --> 00:53:30,250
he did when he finished the bay.
590
00:53:30,250 --> 00:53:36,000
He also painted them, these ancestors, fairly quickly.
591
00:53:36,000 --> 00:53:37,791
There is no cartoon.
592
00:53:37,875 --> 00:53:41,083
These huge lunettes were painted in three days,
593
00:53:41,083 --> 00:53:45,041
so it's quite a dynamic process also,
594
00:53:45,125 --> 00:53:49,875
despite the fact that he prepares the central scenes very carefully.
595
00:53:56,041 --> 00:54:01,208
While he was painting, Pope Julius went to see the work many times,
596
00:54:01,208 --> 00:54:03,833
ascending the scaffolding by a ladder,
597
00:54:03,833 --> 00:54:09,375
Michelangelo giving him his hand to assist him onto the highest platform.
598
00:54:09,375 --> 00:54:12,291
It is true that I have heard Michelangelo complain
599
00:54:12,375 --> 00:54:15,625
that the work was not finished as he would have wished,
600
00:54:15,625 --> 00:54:18,500
as the pope was in such a hurry.
601
00:54:18,500 --> 00:54:22,291
One day he demanded when he would finish the chapel.
602
00:54:22,375 --> 00:54:25,916
Michelangelo replied, "When I can."
603
00:54:26,000 --> 00:54:28,666
The pope, angered, added,
604
00:54:28,750 --> 00:54:34,000
"Do you want me to have you thrown down off this scaffolding?"
605
00:54:34,000 --> 00:54:40,916
Michelangelo, hearing this, said to himself, "No, that will not happen."
606
00:54:41,000 --> 00:54:46,000
And as soon as the pope had left he had the scaffolding taken down
607
00:54:46,000 --> 00:54:49,375
and presented his work on All Saints Day.
608
00:54:55,458 --> 00:54:58,791
He uses all his understanding
609
00:54:58,875 --> 00:55:03,083
of three-dimensional experience and reality
610
00:55:03,083 --> 00:55:07,375
to paint these figures in such a kind of sculptural way,
611
00:55:07,375 --> 00:55:09,875
they're almost not paintings.
612
00:55:11,250 --> 00:55:14,041
There's just so much happening.
613
00:55:14,125 --> 00:55:18,500
It's sort of deranged compositionally.
614
00:55:18,500 --> 00:55:21,083
There's obviously a narrative
615
00:55:21,083 --> 00:55:25,583
and different stories being told around the ceiling,
616
00:55:25,583 --> 00:55:27,083
but the thing that anchors
617
00:55:27,083 --> 00:55:35,166
the whole crazy, teeming orgy of figures and action
618
00:55:35,500 --> 00:55:38,583
is that moment of touch at the centre
619
00:55:38,583 --> 00:55:42,041
and I find that just so compelling.
620
00:55:42,125 --> 00:55:45,708
And it does make you go back to the Sistine Chapel
621
00:55:45,708 --> 00:55:50,500
just again to see that point of contact
622
00:55:50,500 --> 00:55:58,125
between the two chief protagonists in the narrative, between God and Adam.
623
00:55:58,125 --> 00:56:01,250
It is an artistic cliché as well
624
00:56:01,250 --> 00:56:03,500
but it does generate everything.
625
00:56:03,500 --> 00:56:06,708
And to understand Michelangelo,
626
00:56:07,291 --> 00:56:12,875
to kind of penetrate his kind of way of looking at the world,
627
00:56:12,875 --> 00:56:15,083
you have to start with touch,
628
00:56:15,083 --> 00:56:18,416
you have to start with him touching the material,
629
00:56:18,500 --> 00:56:22,708
touching the paper, touching space,
630
00:56:22,708 --> 00:56:28,041
how he manipulated architectural space as well,
631
00:56:28,125 --> 00:56:31,958
but I think it all comes back to that tactile reality.
632
00:56:52,291 --> 00:56:57,500
This drawing is a study of a male nude seen from behind.
633
00:56:57,500 --> 00:57:02,583
It is one of the most important of the Casa Buonarroti collection.
634
00:57:02,583 --> 00:57:07,875
It is a preparatory study for The Battle of Cascina,
635
00:57:07,875 --> 00:57:15,333
intended for The Palazzo Vecchio.
636
00:57:15,333 --> 00:57:21,958
We can gain a perfect understanding of how Michelangelo drew the human body,
637
00:57:21,958 --> 00:57:29,125
how he paid particular attention to the anatomy of muscles, of tendons
638
00:57:29,125 --> 00:57:36,333
because you can see a real mastery of the subject.
639
00:57:36,333 --> 00:57:44,416
He had obviously studied human bodies, and perhaps also corpses
640
00:57:46,166 --> 00:57:48,958
because you can so clearly identify all the muscles.
641
00:57:48,958 --> 00:57:55,916
Michelangelo was fascinated by movement,
642
00:57:56,000 --> 00:57:58,083
with muscles tensed.
643
00:57:58,083 --> 00:58:02,750
He never depicted a nude in a resting position
644
00:58:02,750 --> 00:58:07,000
but always in action,
645
00:58:07,000 --> 00:58:14,125
sometimes in quite brutal movement.
646
00:58:14,125 --> 00:58:15,666
There is a formalism,
647
00:58:15,750 --> 00:58:23,750
which inspired and laid the foundations for mannerism.
648
00:58:25,916 --> 00:58:29,125
His deep interest founds a study of anatomy,
649
00:58:29,125 --> 00:58:37,208
a quest to understand perfectly the human body.
650
00:58:39,291 --> 00:58:47,291
At this time, Michelangelo drew using a pen and the hatching technique.
651
00:58:47,916 --> 00:58:54,375
Later, he changed to using a pen for making quick sketches.
652
00:59:13,750 --> 00:59:18,958
The materials that Michelangelo used were very varied.
653
00:59:18,958 --> 00:59:22,333
This was not completely unusual for the time.
654
00:59:22,333 --> 00:59:26,708
An artist would have been trained to work in many different media.
655
00:59:26,708 --> 00:59:34,000
He's incredibly famous for his sculptures, the stone carving,
656
00:59:34,000 --> 00:59:37,958
really incredibly tough-guy stuff,
657
00:59:37,958 --> 00:59:44,041
but he also worked in much quieter materials.
658
00:59:44,125 --> 00:59:47,541
He used different kinds of paint.
659
00:59:47,625 --> 00:59:51,375
He worked in egg tempera early in his career,
660
00:59:51,375 --> 00:59:53,750
later on he worked in fresco,
661
00:59:53,750 --> 00:59:58,416
so he's working very famously on the Sistine Chapel,
662
00:59:58,500 --> 01:00:01,833
and different drawing materials.
663
01:00:01,833 --> 01:00:07,708
When he's planning his sculptures, he's planning by drawing
664
01:00:07,708 --> 01:00:09,625
and he's making little maquettes,
665
01:00:09,625 --> 01:00:16,416
little versions of the bigger things using clay, using wax.
666
01:00:16,500 --> 01:00:19,666
Some of these things still survive.
667
01:00:22,291 --> 01:00:25,500
The ink that Michelangelo would have used
668
01:00:25,500 --> 01:00:29,416
is made from these oak galls
669
01:00:29,500 --> 01:00:33,166
and they're very rich in tannic acid
670
01:00:33,250 --> 01:00:37,666
and you soak them in rainwater for a couple of weeks.
671
01:00:37,750 --> 01:00:42,125
There they are. They look like gallstones or something.
672
01:00:42,125 --> 01:00:46,750
And you combine the juice...
673
01:00:46,750 --> 01:00:48,500
There it is.
674
01:00:48,500 --> 01:00:51,791
With iron sulphate.
675
01:00:53,875 --> 01:01:00,041
If it's going to be ink you also add in some gum arabic.
676
01:01:01,333 --> 01:01:05,125
You put the lid on and you shake it
677
01:01:07,125 --> 01:01:13,083
and the mixture of the two produces black ink.
678
01:01:16,083 --> 01:01:22,333
And then it should go as black as that one.
679
01:01:28,291 --> 01:01:34,250
Buonarroto, we have cast my statue and I was not over-fortunate with it,
680
01:01:34,250 --> 01:01:36,500
the reason being that Maestro Bernardino,
681
01:01:36,500 --> 01:01:42,708
either through ignorance or misfortune, failed to melt the metal sufficiently.
682
01:01:43,625 --> 01:01:46,583
It would take too long to explain how it happened.
683
01:01:46,583 --> 01:01:50,375
Enough that my figure has come out up to the waist,
684
01:01:50,375 --> 01:01:55,083
the remainder of the metal, half the bronze, that is to say,
685
01:01:55,083 --> 01:01:59,500
having caked in the furnace, as it had not melted.
686
01:02:00,375 --> 01:02:02,750
I was ready to believe that Maestro Bernardino
687
01:02:02,750 --> 01:02:08,208
could melt his metal without fire, so great was my confidence in him.
688
01:02:08,208 --> 01:02:12,333
His failure has been costly to him as well as to me,
689
01:02:12,333 --> 01:02:16,000
for he has disgraced himself to such an extent
690
01:02:16,000 --> 01:02:19,416
that he dare not raise his eyes in Bologna.
691
01:02:26,666 --> 01:02:32,875
There's lots of documented evidence of Michelangelo as a bronze maker
692
01:02:32,875 --> 01:02:35,875
but, sadly for us, they've all been lost.
693
01:02:35,875 --> 01:02:40,083
So we've got here two really enigmatic bronzes,
694
01:02:40,083 --> 01:02:45,375
two sexy, nude guys sitting on the back of these ferocious, growling panthers.
695
01:02:45,375 --> 01:02:46,458
There's a pair.
696
01:02:46,458 --> 01:02:49,333
Why are they sitting on the back of these panthers?
697
01:02:49,333 --> 01:02:52,750
Why have they got their mouths open in gestures of defiance?
698
01:02:52,750 --> 01:02:55,541
Why have they got their arms raised in victory?
699
01:02:55,625 --> 01:02:58,125
Really wonderful, but what do they mean?
700
01:02:58,125 --> 01:03:02,791
Who made them? Where were they made for? What was their purpose?
701
01:03:02,875 --> 01:03:04,708
The first notice we have of them
702
01:03:04,708 --> 01:03:09,916
is that they were purchased in Venice in 1878 by Madame Rothschild
703
01:03:10,000 --> 01:03:13,541
for a great deal of money with an attribution to Michelangelo.
704
01:03:13,625 --> 01:03:15,583
And for the last hundred or so years,
705
01:03:15,583 --> 01:03:17,375
people have been trying to work out,
706
01:03:17,375 --> 01:03:21,000
are they by Michelangelo or are they by somebody else?
707
01:03:22,458 --> 01:03:25,791
He has just finished carving the colossal David.
708
01:03:25,875 --> 01:03:27,291
He has just finished making
709
01:03:27,375 --> 01:03:33,000
a three-times life-size bronze portrait of Pope Julius II in bronze.
710
01:03:33,000 --> 01:03:35,708
He's about to embark on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
711
01:03:35,708 --> 01:03:37,875
He's full of fire, he's full of energy.
712
01:03:37,875 --> 01:03:43,958
We feel that these bronzes can be positioned at that point in his career.
713
01:03:44,708 --> 01:03:48,291
So we did the visual analysis with art historians.
714
01:03:48,375 --> 01:03:51,416
We got the Rijksmuseum conservation scientists in
715
01:03:51,500 --> 01:03:53,750
to do a lot of technical analysis.
716
01:03:53,750 --> 01:03:58,000
that they were very thick-walled casts,
717
01:03:58,000 --> 01:04:03,125
that the alloy is absolutely consistent with early Renaissance bronzes.
718
01:04:03,125 --> 01:04:06,833
The thick wall is also typical of the technology of the period.
719
01:04:06,833 --> 01:04:09,666
Basically, everything they discovered
720
01:04:09,750 --> 01:04:15,125
is consistent with bronzes made in the late 1400s and early 1500s.
721
01:04:16,291 --> 01:04:21,333
The thing that gobsmacked me was the perfection of the anatomy.
722
01:04:21,333 --> 01:04:25,458
Every little detail, every little bump was in the right place.
723
01:04:25,458 --> 01:04:29,750
It was almost as if someone had moulded a human in 3D
724
01:04:29,750 --> 01:04:31,208
and "shrinky-dinked" it.
725
01:04:31,208 --> 01:04:33,375
Now, we can do that nowadays
726
01:04:33,375 --> 01:04:36,625
but that couldn't be done in the beginning of the 1500s
727
01:04:36,625 --> 01:04:38,750
and that's what surprised me.
728
01:04:38,750 --> 01:04:41,791
It was before any textbook had been written
729
01:04:41,875 --> 01:04:43,916
about the anatomy of the human body.
730
01:04:45,500 --> 01:04:49,250
I think the truth is that the person who did this
731
01:04:49,250 --> 01:04:51,958
actually had dissected the human body.
732
01:04:51,958 --> 01:04:53,791
There are two or three areas
733
01:04:53,875 --> 01:04:56,500
where anyone who had not dissected the human body
734
01:04:56,500 --> 01:05:00,916
could not have made such beautiful statues.
735
01:05:01,375 --> 01:05:03,458
So here from this anatomy textbook
736
01:05:03,458 --> 01:05:06,208
we can see this beautiful triangle
737
01:05:06,208 --> 01:05:12,166
that is bounded by trapezius, latissimus dorsi and the scapula
738
01:05:12,250 --> 01:05:16,125
and you can see there are no muscles whatsoever in it.
739
01:05:16,125 --> 01:05:19,666
In other words, it is a complete bare triangle
740
01:05:19,750 --> 01:05:22,416
known as the triangle of auscultation.
741
01:05:22,500 --> 01:05:25,208
If we now look at the bronze,
742
01:05:25,208 --> 01:05:29,708
we can see the same triangle, in the same area.
743
01:05:29,708 --> 01:05:32,291
There is the scapula with the raised arm.
744
01:05:32,375 --> 01:05:35,708
And it shows that whoever did this bronze
745
01:05:35,708 --> 01:05:38,208
had been into the human body
746
01:05:38,208 --> 01:05:42,958
and realised that there was no muscle in that area.
747
01:05:45,291 --> 01:05:49,291
There were very few people in the art world who had done dissection
748
01:05:49,375 --> 01:05:52,250
and the only two that had got detailed dissection
749
01:05:52,250 --> 01:05:54,500
were Leonardo and Michelangelo.
750
01:05:54,500 --> 01:06:00,125
I am almost certain from other drawings I've seen of Michelangelo's
751
01:06:00,125 --> 01:06:02,791
that this is the work of Michelangelo.
752
01:06:05,041 --> 01:06:10,333
People have often said that Michelangelo idealises the human body.
753
01:06:10,333 --> 01:06:15,041
However, what he does is he hyper-anatomises the human body.
754
01:06:15,125 --> 01:06:19,750
And although all of the body looked as if it was a bodybuilder,
755
01:06:19,750 --> 01:06:21,750
which in fact it probably was,
756
01:06:21,750 --> 01:06:25,666
it was probably a stonemason that he used as his model,
757
01:06:25,750 --> 01:06:28,750
in fact the accuracy is perfect.
758
01:06:31,041 --> 01:06:33,416
I really do believe that at this date
759
01:06:33,500 --> 01:06:37,083
there is nobody else with the love of the male nude,
760
01:06:37,083 --> 01:06:39,750
that skill, the understanding of anatomy
761
01:06:39,750 --> 01:06:44,625
and the obsession with beauty, with these binary oppositions,
762
01:06:44,625 --> 01:06:46,500
who could have made them.
763
01:06:58,375 --> 01:07:03,208
In 1520 it came into the head of Pope Leo X,
764
01:07:03,208 --> 01:07:05,500
who had succeeded Julius II,
765
01:07:05,500 --> 01:07:09,583
to ornament the façade of San Lorenzo, in Florence,
766
01:07:09,583 --> 01:07:12,541
with sculpture and marble work.
767
01:07:12,625 --> 01:07:16,875
This was the church built by the great Cosimo de' Medici
768
01:07:16,875 --> 01:07:22,125
and, except for the façade mentioned above, was all completely finished.
769
01:07:23,041 --> 01:07:27,750
Pope Leo sent for Michelangelo, made him prepare a design
770
01:07:27,750 --> 01:07:30,875
and then go to Florence to oversee the work.
771
01:07:32,500 --> 01:07:35,166
A lot of things happened to him. He was working flat out,
772
01:07:35,250 --> 01:07:39,708
although very little was actually completed and installed.
773
01:07:39,708 --> 01:07:42,291
And one of the things which happened to him
774
01:07:42,375 --> 01:07:47,958
was that he became, willy-nilly, a great architect.
775
01:07:47,958 --> 01:07:50,541
He trained himself in the elements of architecture.
776
01:07:50,625 --> 01:07:54,000
He designed first of all the façade of San Lorenzo,
777
01:07:54,000 --> 01:07:56,375
which was a grand composition we don't have,
778
01:07:56,375 --> 01:07:57,875
except for a wooden model,
779
01:07:57,875 --> 01:08:00,833
so that would have been a great monument of his architecture.
780
01:08:00,833 --> 01:08:04,041
Then he moved on to the projects in the early 1520s.
781
01:08:04,125 --> 01:08:07,083
He moved on to the projects at San Lorenzo,
782
01:08:07,083 --> 01:08:11,375
the New Sacristy and the library
783
01:08:11,375 --> 01:08:18,332
in which he developed an entirely personal take on architecture.
784
01:08:18,416 --> 01:08:23,000
Altogether it's an extraordinary virtuoso display
785
01:08:23,082 --> 01:08:28,000
of his sculptural and architectural art at its height.
786
01:08:48,250 --> 01:08:51,875
Inside the sacristy, adorning the walls,
787
01:08:51,957 --> 01:08:54,666
Michelangelo built four tombs
788
01:08:54,750 --> 01:08:59,041
to hold the bodies of the elder Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano.
789
01:09:04,957 --> 01:09:08,457
To one tomb he gave "Night" and "Day"
790
01:09:12,125 --> 01:09:15,082
and to the other "Dawn" and "Dusk".
791
01:09:21,082 --> 01:09:24,457
But what shall I say of the "Dawn",
792
01:09:24,541 --> 01:09:27,000
a nude female figure
793
01:09:27,082 --> 01:09:31,250
that seems designed to arouse melancholy in the soul
794
01:09:31,332 --> 01:09:34,832
and confound all styles of sculpture?
795
01:09:45,041 --> 01:09:47,916
And what shall I say of the "Night",
796
01:09:48,000 --> 01:09:51,832
a statue not so much rare as unique?
797
01:09:52,916 --> 01:10:00,916
Who at any time, ancient or modern, has ever seen a statue made like this?
798
01:10:03,208 --> 01:10:10,375
For in her may be seen not only the stillness of one who sleeps,
799
01:10:11,708 --> 01:10:14,125
but the sorrow and melancholy
800
01:10:14,125 --> 01:10:18,041
of one who has lost something great and worthy.
801
01:10:21,458 --> 01:10:28,083
While Michelangelo was giving all his love and care to these great works,
802
01:10:28,083 --> 01:10:34,291
he was suddenly in the year 1530 interrupted by the siege of Florence
803
01:10:34,375 --> 01:10:39,125
by the Medici Pope Clement VII seeking to regain power.
804
01:10:40,208 --> 01:10:43,875
Michelangelo had to put the statues to one side
805
01:10:43,875 --> 01:10:48,250
for he was now given the task of fortifying the territory.
806
01:10:54,291 --> 01:10:59,000
The citizens of Florence had entrusted to Michelangelo's care
807
01:10:59,000 --> 01:11:01,791
the fortifications of the city,
808
01:11:01,875 --> 01:11:04,375
but a surrender agreement was signed
809
01:11:04,375 --> 01:11:08,250
and the pope's commissioners had orders to arrest and imprison
810
01:11:08,250 --> 01:11:13,791
citizens most involved in the opposing factions, including Michelangelo.
811
01:11:16,583 --> 01:11:22,000
But Michelangelo had secretly fled to the home of one of his closest friends
812
01:11:22,000 --> 01:11:26,708
where he remained hidden until the uproar had blown over
813
01:11:26,708 --> 01:11:30,625
and Pope Clement had remembered Michelangelo's talents
814
01:11:30,625 --> 01:11:33,583
and had ordered that he be left alone.
815
01:11:37,333 --> 01:11:42,541
Michelangelo was hunted for having been an active defender of Florence.
816
01:11:42,625 --> 01:11:48,583
He hid somewhere in the cellars of San Lorenzo monastery for several months
817
01:11:48,583 --> 01:11:51,208
and he had time on his hands.
818
01:11:51,208 --> 01:11:52,375
While in hiding,
819
01:11:52,375 --> 01:11:55,750
he could well have found a piece of marble,
820
01:11:55,750 --> 01:12:00,125
not of particularly high quality and not the best shape,
821
01:12:00,125 --> 01:12:05,541
but enough to carry out a design he had in mind for years.
822
01:12:05,625 --> 01:12:09,083
And it's worth noting that he left the statue unfinished
823
01:12:09,083 --> 01:12:11,625
because things changed once again.
824
01:12:11,625 --> 01:12:19,208
He was released and continued living his normal life.
825
01:12:19,208 --> 01:12:27,250
Michelangelo remains a key artist of the Renaissance period.
826
01:12:27,250 --> 01:12:31,250
In the centre of his works is man,
827
01:12:31,250 --> 01:12:34,166
his emotional experiences, his sufferings and his joy.
828
01:12:34,250 --> 01:12:41,625
And this statue is a perfect example.
829
01:12:41,625 --> 01:12:46,000
Here we see a man who is in some sort of difficult position.
830
01:12:46,000 --> 01:12:53,375
He is being suppressed and yet, he preserves an inner force to resist.
831
01:12:58,458 --> 01:13:03,500
He was an armed rebel who might well have been executed.
832
01:13:03,500 --> 01:13:05,583
In fact Clement took the view
833
01:13:05,583 --> 01:13:10,541
that Michelangelo was simply too much of an asset to the house of Medici.
834
01:13:10,625 --> 01:13:13,166
He left strict instructions that Michelangelo
835
01:13:13,250 --> 01:13:16,541
should be treated with care and solicitude
836
01:13:16,625 --> 01:13:20,666
and he was put back to work on the Medici tombs in the New Sacristy
837
01:13:20,750 --> 01:13:22,416
as soon as possible.
838
01:13:33,583 --> 01:13:38,375
He was consistent as an architect, as a sculptor and as a painter.
839
01:13:38,375 --> 01:13:40,875
He possessed a unique and personal view,
840
01:13:40,875 --> 01:13:46,041
which attracted the admiration of other artists.
841
01:13:46,125 --> 01:13:50,208
Vasari used to talk about his terribilità,
842
01:13:50,208 --> 01:13:54,958
in other words, the terrific magnificence of his compositions
843
01:13:54,958 --> 01:13:57,458
which annihilated his contemporaries.
844
01:13:57,458 --> 01:14:01,500
Other artists admired his works, but they immediately understood
845
01:14:01,500 --> 01:14:05,750
the huge gap between them and the divine Michelangelo Buonarroti.
846
01:14:05,750 --> 01:14:10,750
You can see that also on these studies
847
01:14:10,750 --> 01:14:15,625
for the stairs of the Laurentian Library entrance.
848
01:14:15,625 --> 01:14:18,833
This was completed some years later,
849
01:14:18,833 --> 01:14:23,000
when Michelangelo was away from Florence.
850
01:14:23,000 --> 01:14:25,791
The Duke consulted him
851
01:14:25,875 --> 01:14:28,875
to come up with new ideas, new prototypes, new projects,
852
01:14:28,875 --> 01:14:31,666
such as this one,
853
01:14:31,750 --> 01:14:39,750
the study for the stairs of the vestibule in the Laurentian Library.
854
01:14:41,375 --> 01:14:45,875
This study displays various stages in the planning of this structure
855
01:14:45,875 --> 01:14:50,250
which was finally completed and nowadays forms part of San Lorenzo.
856
01:14:52,041 --> 01:14:56,583
One of the most extraordinary parts of the Laurentian Library is the staircase
857
01:14:56,583 --> 01:15:04,125
which flows out into the vestibule like lava from a volcano.
858
01:15:04,125 --> 01:15:09,541
It's not like any staircase that anyone had conceived before.
859
01:15:09,625 --> 01:15:14,916
It's like a living, moving, slightly alarming thing.
860
01:15:15,000 --> 01:15:19,166
It so fills the space that there's not much room for anything else.
861
01:15:19,250 --> 01:15:21,250
There's a slightly menacing quality to it
862
01:15:21,250 --> 01:15:27,541
but there's also a quality of enormous imaginative originality and grandeur.
863
01:15:29,208 --> 01:15:36,416
The column, of course, is the element in the architecture
864
01:15:36,500 --> 01:15:39,375
that's holding the building.
865
01:15:39,375 --> 01:15:41,708
Now, in the Laurentian Library,
866
01:15:42,458 --> 01:15:45,708
he is doing precisely the opposite.
867
01:15:45,708 --> 01:15:49,041
He's doing what the engineer is doing.
868
01:15:49,833 --> 01:15:54,833
He shows you that the wall is holding the building
869
01:15:54,833 --> 01:15:59,791
and that the column is just a decorative element
870
01:15:59,875 --> 01:16:02,500
so he puts that into a little niche.
871
01:16:04,291 --> 01:16:09,083
He can play with the language of architecture
872
01:16:09,083 --> 01:16:13,750
to an extent which very few architects
873
01:16:13,750 --> 01:16:16,333
in the history of architecture have done.
874
01:16:16,333 --> 01:16:21,791
And he takes this to the extreme in the Porta Pia
875
01:16:21,875 --> 01:16:28,000
at the same time when he is still vaulting the cupola of St Peter,
876
01:16:28,000 --> 01:16:32,708
and that shows you the enormous range that he has
877
01:16:32,708 --> 01:16:40,791
and the intellectual investment that he puts into all three genres of art,
878
01:16:42,041 --> 01:16:44,250
painting, sculpture and drawing.
879
01:16:44,250 --> 01:16:50,041
We mustn't forget his enormous creativity in drawings.
880
01:16:53,041 --> 01:16:57,666
Michelangelo has often produced beautiful drawings,
881
01:16:57,750 --> 01:17:02,666
like those he sent in the past to his friend, Gherardo Perini,
882
01:17:02,750 --> 01:17:06,958
or those sent more recently to Master Tommaso dei Cavalieri,
883
01:17:06,958 --> 01:17:11,250
a Roman gentleman, who has some stupendous examples.
884
01:17:15,166 --> 01:17:18,916
Michelangelo sketched throughout his life as studies for his works of art,
885
01:17:19,000 --> 01:17:21,625
for his sculptures and paintings and architecture,
886
01:17:21,625 --> 01:17:24,583
but the presentation drawings don't have any further purpose.
887
01:17:24,583 --> 01:17:27,166
They are finished works of art in their own right.
888
01:17:29,458 --> 01:17:32,916
He tends not to work very much in mythology in his other works.
889
01:17:33,000 --> 01:17:36,000
It's much more common in the presentation drawings
890
01:17:36,000 --> 01:17:38,583
than in his painting and sculpture, for example.
891
01:17:38,583 --> 01:17:42,958
And I think it's the underlying powerful human themes
892
01:17:42,958 --> 01:17:46,750
that you find throughout Greek and Roman mythology
893
01:17:46,750 --> 01:17:48,666
that must have appealed to Michelangelo
894
01:17:48,750 --> 01:17:52,416
in trying to put across some message, maybe an elusive message,
895
01:17:52,500 --> 01:17:55,541
but nonetheless some message in the presentation drawings.
896
01:17:56,416 --> 01:17:58,458
Phaeton was the son of Apollo, the sun god,
897
01:17:58,458 --> 01:18:02,291
and he begged his father for permission to drive the sun chariot for one day
898
01:18:02,375 --> 01:18:04,416
but he drove it too high and the earth froze,
899
01:18:04,500 --> 01:18:07,208
he drove it too low and the earth boiled,
900
01:18:07,208 --> 01:18:11,166
and the people of the earth begged Jupiter to do something about this
901
01:18:11,250 --> 01:18:13,666
and Jupiter struck Phaeton with a thunderbolt,
902
01:18:13,750 --> 01:18:15,791
knocked the chariot down to earth,
903
01:18:15,875 --> 01:18:18,666
and that's what Michelangelo has depicted in this drawing here.
904
01:18:18,750 --> 01:18:20,791
You see Jupiter astride the eagle,
905
01:18:20,875 --> 01:18:25,416
Phaeton falling with the chariot and four horses towards the earth,
906
01:18:25,500 --> 01:18:29,416
his sisters being transformed into trees in the next episode below,
907
01:18:29,500 --> 01:18:34,791
the god of the river Eridanus in which Phaeton fell
908
01:18:34,875 --> 01:18:38,791
and you can see the water flowing out of his urn there to make the river,
909
01:18:38,875 --> 01:18:42,916
and his cousin Cycnus who's been transformed into a swan.
910
01:18:44,625 --> 01:18:48,291
And this conjures up themes of hubris, of taking on more than one should,
911
01:18:48,375 --> 01:18:52,583
of maybe too much self-regard, too much grandiosity,
912
01:18:52,583 --> 01:18:57,500
and, in that context, it should be seen as a moral warning
913
01:18:57,500 --> 01:19:00,291
to the recipient of the drawing.
914
01:19:00,375 --> 01:19:03,166
Michelangelo, who was then in his late 50s,
915
01:19:03,250 --> 01:19:07,583
gave the drawing to the young Roman nobleman, Tommaso dei Cavalieri.
916
01:19:07,583 --> 01:19:10,791
Michelangelo had been writing to Tommaso from Florence
917
01:19:10,875 --> 01:19:13,958
over a period of about two months while he was working on this drawing
918
01:19:13,958 --> 01:19:15,958
and so Tommaso and other people in Rome
919
01:19:15,958 --> 01:19:18,791
who knew that Michelangelo was doing this sort of drawing
920
01:19:18,875 --> 01:19:20,041
were expecting it
921
01:19:20,125 --> 01:19:22,291
and clearly when they set eyes on it
922
01:19:22,375 --> 01:19:25,083
there was no disappointment in the splendour of the drawing,
923
01:19:25,083 --> 01:19:27,875
quite unlike anything Michelangelo had done before.
924
01:19:29,625 --> 01:19:32,083
Just as within pen and ink
925
01:19:32,083 --> 01:19:37,791
there exist the lofty and the low and the middling style,
926
01:19:37,875 --> 01:19:42,541
and within marbles are images rich or worthless,
927
01:19:42,625 --> 01:19:46,416
depending on what our talents can draw out of them,
928
01:19:46,500 --> 01:19:49,000
thus, my dear lord,
929
01:19:49,000 --> 01:19:55,291
there may be in your breast as much pride as acts of humility.
930
01:19:55,375 --> 01:20:01,250
But I only draw out of it what's suitable and similar to me,
931
01:20:01,250 --> 01:20:03,583
as my face shows.
932
01:20:05,208 --> 01:20:10,000
As earthly rain from heaven, single and pure,
933
01:20:10,000 --> 01:20:14,208
is turned into various forms by various seeds,
934
01:20:14,208 --> 01:20:18,958
one who sows sighs and tears and pains
935
01:20:18,958 --> 01:20:24,166
harvests and reaps from them sorrow and weeping,
936
01:20:24,250 --> 01:20:28,750
and one who looks on high beauty from great sadness
937
01:20:28,750 --> 01:20:34,833
is sure to draw from it harsh pain and suffering.
938
01:20:37,833 --> 01:20:39,833
The drawing depicts the Punishment of Tityus,
939
01:20:39,833 --> 01:20:42,958
one of the giants of Roman mythology
940
01:20:42,958 --> 01:20:46,958
who was condemned to be chained to a rock in Hades for all eternity
941
01:20:46,958 --> 01:20:49,916
and have his liver ripped out by a vulture each day.
942
01:20:50,000 --> 01:20:51,666
Every night the liver would grow back
943
01:20:51,750 --> 01:20:55,250
and the punishment would continue day after day.
944
01:20:55,250 --> 01:20:59,625
And Michelangelo has shown him on his rock
945
01:20:59,625 --> 01:21:02,625
with a vulture that looks very much like an eagle.
946
01:21:02,625 --> 01:21:05,416
The rock is sort of isolated.
947
01:21:05,500 --> 01:21:08,166
The idea is that this punishment is continuing
948
01:21:08,250 --> 01:21:10,458
without any possibility of succour.
949
01:21:10,458 --> 01:21:14,416
No one can relieve Tityus from this torment.
950
01:21:14,500 --> 01:21:16,708
The only other figure that we see
951
01:21:16,708 --> 01:21:20,541
is this screaming, mask-like face in a tree.
952
01:21:20,625 --> 01:21:23,291
It's clearly a soul that's been trapped in a tree,
953
01:21:23,375 --> 01:21:25,916
again suffering some eternal torment.
954
01:21:26,000 --> 01:21:29,166
And by working the drawing in a range of finish,
955
01:21:29,250 --> 01:21:32,416
starting with it quite sketchy around the outside
956
01:21:32,500 --> 01:21:34,208
and bringing it into focus
957
01:21:34,208 --> 01:21:40,958
on this extraordinarily richly-modelled torso and leg of Tityus,
958
01:21:40,958 --> 01:21:45,541
Michelangelo focuses attention on the suffering of Tityus
959
01:21:45,625 --> 01:21:47,708
at the centre of this composition.
960
01:21:47,708 --> 01:21:49,916
It's an absolute tour de force in modelling.
961
01:21:50,000 --> 01:21:53,625
The torso is done not by blending the strokes
962
01:21:53,625 --> 01:21:57,625
but by stippling of a finely-pointed chalk
963
01:21:57,625 --> 01:22:03,833
and Michelangelo has built the torso up almost as if he's carving into marble.
964
01:22:07,916 --> 01:22:12,291
Pope Paul III took Michelangelo into his service
965
01:22:12,375 --> 01:22:17,375
and desired him to continue what he had begun in the time of Pope Clement,
966
01:22:17,375 --> 01:22:20,916
namely, to paint the end wall of the Sistine Chapel,
967
01:22:21,000 --> 01:22:23,583
which had already been roughly covered
968
01:22:23,583 --> 01:22:27,500
and screened off with boards from floor to ceiling.
969
01:22:28,541 --> 01:22:33,375
There are infinite details which I pass over in silence.
970
01:22:33,375 --> 01:22:37,958
It is enough that, besides the divine composition,
971
01:22:37,958 --> 01:22:42,166
all that the human figure is capable of in the art of painting
972
01:22:42,250 --> 01:22:44,166
is here to be seen.
973
01:22:46,875 --> 01:22:51,375
With The Last Judgement he's punched a great hole effectively
974
01:22:51,375 --> 01:22:54,083
in the altar wall. There's no frame.
975
01:22:54,083 --> 01:22:59,125
It's just all picture as if the end of the chapel had been torn away
976
01:22:59,125 --> 01:23:05,750
and we see this vision of the end of the world with Christ in judgement
977
01:23:05,750 --> 01:23:08,875
and we see it, characteristically for Michelangelo,
978
01:23:08,875 --> 01:23:14,083
almost entirely in terms of the muscular nude body.
979
01:23:14,083 --> 01:23:19,625
So what you see there is a wall of flesh, intertwined nudes,
980
01:23:19,625 --> 01:23:27,708
expressing his conceptions and perhaps anxieties about salvation.
981
01:23:28,333 --> 01:23:33,416
Painted on the flayed skin of St Bartholomew,
982
01:23:33,500 --> 01:23:36,375
which is sort of wiggling there like a wetsuit,
983
01:23:36,375 --> 01:23:39,041
held by the saint as his attribute,
984
01:23:39,125 --> 01:23:43,875
Michelangelo has almost put a caricature of himself.
985
01:23:43,875 --> 01:23:45,875
It's his face.
986
01:23:45,875 --> 01:23:50,750
It's the only absolutely definite self-portrait we have,
987
01:23:50,750 --> 01:23:52,541
at least in painting.
988
01:23:52,625 --> 01:23:55,708
He was a man in his mid-to late-60s
989
01:23:55,708 --> 01:23:59,291
when he was painting this huge painting,
990
01:23:59,375 --> 01:24:03,291
almost single-handedly, with one assistant,
991
01:24:03,375 --> 01:24:07,291
and salvation must have been on his mind,
992
01:24:07,375 --> 01:24:11,500
or certainly death would have been on his mind at that point.
993
01:24:24,208 --> 01:24:26,541
The Pietà is a composition
994
01:24:26,625 --> 01:24:29,875
that is in between a deposition and a lamentation
995
01:24:29,875 --> 01:24:33,333
over the body of the dead Christ.
996
01:24:33,333 --> 01:24:38,208
And Michelangelo carved it, or started to carve it,
997
01:24:38,208 --> 01:24:41,791
for a very personal purpose.
998
01:24:41,875 --> 01:24:46,250
This group was supposed to be installed on his own tomb
999
01:24:46,250 --> 01:24:48,083
in one of the Roman churches.
1000
01:24:50,333 --> 01:24:53,666
In the composition we see four figures.
1001
01:24:53,750 --> 01:24:58,250
One is the dead body of Christ, the other one is Mary the Virgin,
1002
01:24:58,250 --> 01:25:01,333
and the other is Mary Magdalene,
1003
01:25:01,333 --> 01:25:03,625
and on the top of the composition
1004
01:25:03,625 --> 01:25:09,916
there is a hooded man who is assumed to be Nicodemus.
1005
01:25:10,000 --> 01:25:18,000
It was started by Michelangelo when he was already 72 years old, in 1547.
1006
01:25:19,291 --> 01:25:22,958
He was furious about this piece of marble.
1007
01:25:22,958 --> 01:25:24,375
It was full of flaws.
1008
01:25:24,375 --> 01:25:29,708
He couldn't obtain exactly what he was supposed to get from it
1009
01:25:29,708 --> 01:25:34,041
so he started to destroy it with hammer strokes.
1010
01:25:34,791 --> 01:25:39,208
His servants, his assistants, stopped him just in time,
1011
01:25:39,208 --> 01:25:41,375
but it was already broken.
1012
01:25:41,375 --> 01:25:47,958
Then Tiberio Calcagni, who was a young Florentine assistant of Michelangelo,
1013
01:25:47,958 --> 01:25:51,416
and Francesco Bandini, another Florentine, a banker...
1014
01:25:51,500 --> 01:25:54,791
Those two put together again the pieces,
1015
01:25:54,875 --> 01:25:59,166
and Francesco Bandini installed the group in his garden.
1016
01:25:59,250 --> 01:26:05,000
The hooded figure that we think is Nicodemus
1017
01:26:05,000 --> 01:26:10,291
is almost certainly a self-portrait of Michelangelo
1018
01:26:10,375 --> 01:26:17,458
and this has, of course, a profound and touching meaning,
1019
01:26:17,458 --> 01:26:25,000
because Nicodemus in the gospel is a wise man
1020
01:26:25,000 --> 01:26:32,458
who has doubts about Christ's words that we are supposed to be born again.
1021
01:26:32,458 --> 01:26:37,125
The Pietà deeply reflects Michelangelo's attitude
1022
01:26:37,125 --> 01:26:41,625
towards his own life and towards his own death.
1023
01:26:46,958 --> 01:26:50,750
When he built the cupola of St Peter's,
1024
01:26:50,750 --> 01:26:54,250
he was over 70 years old
1025
01:26:54,250 --> 01:26:56,833
and he still thought he could produce
1026
01:26:56,833 --> 01:27:01,500
24 pieces of sculpture bigger than Moses
1027
01:27:01,500 --> 01:27:04,833
to put around the dome of the cupola.
1028
01:27:04,833 --> 01:27:07,333
So what do you make of a man like this?
1029
01:27:07,333 --> 01:27:11,333
He knew he was mortal but he would never stop thinking,
1030
01:27:11,333 --> 01:27:14,333
he would never stop challenging himself.
1031
01:27:14,333 --> 01:27:22,041
And I think this gives you an idea of the tension that was in this person.
1032
01:27:22,125 --> 01:27:25,875
And, you know, he never resolved the Pietà
1033
01:27:25,875 --> 01:27:30,750
but he still had this vision for the cupola of St Peter's.
1034
01:27:31,625 --> 01:27:34,541
Towards the end of his life he destroyed quite a lot of work
1035
01:27:34,625 --> 01:27:36,625
that he wasn't happy with.
1036
01:27:36,625 --> 01:27:38,000
He wouldn't let something go
1037
01:27:38,000 --> 01:27:43,625
if he didn't feel it truly represented his genius.
1038
01:27:43,625 --> 01:27:48,541
Genius is a very problematic word for me to apply to an artist
1039
01:27:48,625 --> 01:27:51,583
but it's hard to avoid it when it comes to Michelangelo.
1040
01:27:55,666 --> 01:27:59,958
Those whose taste is whole and sound
1041
01:27:59,958 --> 01:28:03,958
draw much delight from works of the first art,
1042
01:28:03,958 --> 01:28:08,875
which reproduces for us the faces and gestures of the human body
1043
01:28:08,875 --> 01:28:12,125
in wax, clay, or stone,
1044
01:28:12,125 --> 01:28:15,875
with limbs even more alive.
1045
01:28:15,875 --> 01:28:19,708
If harsh, coarse and offensive time
1046
01:28:19,708 --> 01:28:25,708
should then disfigure, or break, or dismember it completely,
1047
01:28:25,708 --> 01:28:30,625
the beauty that once existed is remembered
1048
01:28:30,625 --> 01:28:36,291
and preserves our vain pleasure for a better place.
88601
Can't find what you're looking for?
Get subtitles in any language from opensubtitles.com, and translate them here.