Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling
By Ross King
Walker, 373 pages, $28
In October 1512, as he was putting the final touches on what would become one of the most famous works of art in the world, Michelangelo wrote to his father in anything other than a triumphant or even satisfied mood.
” ‘I live wearied by stupendous labours and beset by a thousand anxieties,’ ” he wrote. ” ‘And thus have I lived for some fifteen years now and never an hour’s happiness have I had.’ “
Even for Michelangelo, a chronic moaner, this was a remarkable look backward at life, especially at the four years that had gone into his painting of the Sistine Chapel ceiling for Pope Julius II. He had every reason to be self-congratulatory in the extreme, but his father might have been forgiven if he thought his grouch of a son had produced a failure.
As everyone knows from popular fiction and a Hollywood film, Michelangelo grumbled incessantly, and he grumbled particularly about almost everything connected with this project. He complained about not being paid enough or on time, about being forced to work in a medium with which he was not familiar, about not being allowed to get on with the sculpting of a papal tomb, about having to put up with the antics of a troublesome father and brothers. He was simply a misanthropic, self-pitying, evidently neurotic, slovenly man with an appalling disregard for personal hygiene, but, of course, a man of genius.
Canadian-born, British-based author Ross King is amply qualified to infuse the familiar story of Michelangelo, Pope Julius and that ceiling with new life and fresh insights. His previous work was the much-acclaimed “Brunelleschi’s Dome,” the ground-breaking dome that crowned the Florence cathedral.
In his new book, “Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling,” King places the various facets of the artist’s complex character, and those of the pope, in the context of a Renaissance Italy that seethed with artistic talent, political conflict, violence, corruption and popular superstition. It was an Italy in which the pope could lavish a fortune on the glorification of his reign and on ruinous wars while the city around him was a picture of urban neglect and decline.
It is an enthralling book, meticulously researched and well illustrated, that is peopled not just by these two Renaissance giants but by such diverse characters as Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Savonarola, Donato Bramante, military genius Alfonso d’Este, Lodovico Ariosto, Erasmus, Martin Luther and the Medicis. King deftly weaves a tapestry broad enough to encompass all these figures while focusing on the central theme of Michelangelo’s wondrous creation and the painful labor that brought it into being.
One of the extraordinary aspects of Michelangelo’s work is how poorly prepared he was to undertake it. He had little experience as a painter, almost none in the difficult techniques of fresco painting. He was also ill-equipped to create illusionistic effects on high, curved surfaces through foreshortening. Fully aware of his shortcomings, he was reluctant to undertake the assignment but unable to resist the demands of a pope who perhaps instinctively grasped Michelangelo’s ability to master an unfamiliar medium better than Michelangelo did himself.
The pope, who hugely admired the frescoes when they were completed but thought they needed a few finishing touches, lived to enjoy them just 31/2 months after Michelangelo applied the last brush strokes. Michelangelo, who had been commissioned to create the pope’s tomb and was then diverted to paint the ceiling, hankered always to get back to the tomb. He was finally allowed to complete it after Pope Julius died, but on a much smaller scale than originally planned, and even so the pope’s body was never placed in it.
King provides detailed and engrossing technical descriptions of the intricate art of fresco painting and of the sources and preparation of pigments that Renaissance artists used to produce their dazzling colors.
Novelist Irving Stone and Hollywood notwithstanding, Michelangelo did not paint the ceiling lying on his back. That myth was the result of a misinterpretation of an old text. He painted the ceiling while standing, but bent backward so that his beard jutted straight up and paint sometimes dripped into it and onto his face. It was arduous, almost literally back-breaking labor.
It proceeded slowly at first, and the initial work was marked by errors that meant starting again. But as Michelangelo became increasingly sure of the techniques he was mastering as he went along, he worked with sometimes astonishing speed, his work delayed at one point only by Pope Julius’ penchant for going off to fight battles and forgetting to pay him.
While Michelangelo and his assistants devoted themselves to the ceiling, the pope put his great rival Raphael to work on frescoing the walls of the papal apartments. When Michelangelo’s half-completed ceiling was unveiled in 1510, Raphael was so impressed that, according to a contemporary biographer of Michelangelo’s, he tried to secure the commission to complete it. In his comparison of these two artists’ work, King judges that “Raphael was beautiful but Michelangelo sublime.”
Michelangelo’s own view of his uncompleted work, which he was able to see at floor level for the first time, was that he had made many of his figures too small. Thus the later figures, starting with the “Creation of Adam” were, on average, about 4 feet taller, making them more recognizable from below.
King expounds on each of the principal panels, especially the “Creation of Adam,” the most famous one, and with the exactitude of an accountant he records how many days Michelangelo took to paint each one. He points out that because of the familiarity of people today with Michelangelo’s work, many may lose sight of the fact his ceiling marked a new direction in painting at the time. “Michelangelo had brought the power, vitality, and sheer magnitude of works of sculpture . . . into the realm of painting,” he writes. “The art of fresco would never be the same again.”
Michelangelo’s ceiling displays his predilection for male nudes, and that leads King into a discussion of his perceived homosexuality, a subject of speculation for many years. He concludes that there is no firm evidence either way and that Michelangelo most likely practiced lifelong abstinence. He once advised a friend that the best way to prolong his life would be to avoid sex or indulge in it ” ‘the least that you can.’ ” He himself died at 89.
Raphael’s later work in the papal apartments was influenced by Michelangelo, just as Michelangelo was influenced by other artists, such as the classical sculptors who created the “Laocoon,” and Jacopo della Quercia, who rendered the “Creation of Adam” in Bologna in a fashion somewhat similar to Michelangelo’s. And Auguste Rodin’s famous sculpture “The Thinker” may owe its inspiration to Michelangelo’s Jeremiah.
No one can come away from this book without wanting to rush to Rome to look at the Sistine Chapel ceiling in light of King’s historical data and his acute observations about the merits of individual panels.
The book concludes with a generally favorable, if cautious, estimation of the restoration of the frescoes that was carried out in the 1980s and that has been a subject of controversy ever since. King suggests the restoration brought to light Michelangelo’s brilliant colors and an extraordinary amount of new information about his technique, influences and collaborations.
