Speranza
Almost 500 years after Michelangelo Buonarroti frescoed the ceiling of the
Sistine Chapel in Rome, the site still attracts throngs of visitors and is
considered one of the artistic masterpieces of the world. Michelangelo and the
Pope’s Ceiling unveils the story behind the art's making, a story rife with all
the drama of a modern-day soap opera.
The temperament of the day was dictated
by the politics of the papal court, a corrupt and powerful office steeped in
controversy; Pope Julius II even had a nickname, "Il Papa Terrible," to prove
it. Along with his violent outbursts and warmongering, Pope Julius II took upon
himself to restore the Sistine Chapel and pretty much intimidated Michelangelo
into painting the ceiling even though the artist considered himself primarily a
sculptor and was particularly unfamiliar with the temperamental art of fresco.
Along with technical difficulties, personality conflicts, and money troubles,
Michelangelo was plagued by health problems and competition in the form of the
dashing and talented young painter Raphael.
Author Ross King offers an
in-depth analysis of the complex historical background that led to the
magnificence that is the Sistine Chapel ceiling along with detailed discussion
of some of the ceiling’s panels. King provides fabulous tidbits of information
and weaves together a fascinating historical tale. --J.P. Cohen --This text
refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From
Publishers Weekly
King's historical account of the four years Michelangelo
Buonarroti spent frescoing the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome is
splendid, thorough and detailed. But its larger appeal lies in the way King
(Brunelleschi's Dome) brings out the story's human elements. Listeners learn of
Michelangelo's bitter disappointment when a project he was eagerly looking
forward to (the construction of the Pope's tomb) was cancelled and that he had
little experience with the art of fresco and was reluctant to take on the
Sistine Chapel. King explains the craft of frescoing with involving details: for
example, fresco dries quickly, so the artist could work only in small sections,
and if a mistake was found after the paint dried, the whole day's work had to be
chipped away and redone. Listeners also learn of Michelangelo's financial woes
and family problems and the political upheavals of the time. Sklar's narration
is perfect for the project. His lively and expressive reading add a realistic
edge to a centuries-old tale. He speaks passionately and his accent on the
Italian names and phrases is flawless.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business
Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition
of this title.
From Booklist
A celebrated novelist as well as a lively
nonfiction writer, King casts fiction's spell as he tells the creation stories
of crowning artistic achievements, first in the widely acclaimed Brunelleschi's
Dome (2000), and now in this exciting account of the making of Michelangelo's
magnificent Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes. Not only is King fluent in the
complicated art of frescoing, a chancy technique sculptor Michelangelo
(1475-1564) was loathe to undertake, he also relishes the tumultuous politics of
early-sixteenth-century Rome, particularly the escapades of the irascible,
syphilitic, gourmand Pope Julius II, Michelangelo's demanding patron. Everyone
in Rome was terrified of this stick-wielding, bearded, warrior pope except for
moody, homely, antisocial Michelangelo, and King recounts their skirmishes with
as much verve as he chronicles the arduous efforts involved in creating the most
famous ceiling in the world. Brilliant and tireless, Michelangelo designed an
ingenious form of scaffolding and quickly mastered fresco's secrets so that he
could paint his powerful, anatomically exact Old Testament figures freehand in
an inspired frenzy. King chronicles Michelangelo's aesthetic decisions and
clarion triumphs over myriad forms of adversity with expertise and contagious
enthusiasm. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights
reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this
title.
Review
"Ross King expertly wipes away the smudges from the story of
this great painting, only to uncover a truth even more exciting and impossible."
(San Francisco Chronicle)
From the Inside Flap
?There is no other work to
compare with this for excellence, nor could there be,? wrote Vasari in his Lives
of Artists.
The extraordinary story behind Michelangelo?s masterpiece in
the Sistine Chapel - from the author of the acclaimed Brunelleschi?s
Dome.
In 1508 Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to paint the
ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Though he considered himself primarily a sculptor
not a painter, he laboured over it for the next four years and the result was
one of the greatest masterpieces of all time.
Ross King?s fascinating new
book tells the story of those four extraordinary years. Battling against ill
health, financial difficulties, domestic problems and inadequate knowledge of
the art of fresco, Michelangelo created figures so beautiful that, when they
were unveiled in 1512, they stunned the onlookers. From Michelangelo?s
experiments with the composition of pigment and plaster to his bitter rivalry
with Raphael, who was working on the neighbouring Papal Apartments, Ross King
paints a magnificent picture of day-to-day life on the Sistine scaffolding and
outside in the upheaval of early sixteenth-century Rome.
From the
Hardcover edition. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback
edition.
About the Author
Ross King was born in Canada in 1962 and
completed a PhD in English Literature at York University in Toronto. He is the
author of two novels and Brunelleschi’s Dome, (voted Non-Fiction Book of the
Year by American Independent Booksellers in 2001). He lives in
Oxford.
From the Hardcover edition. --This text refers to an
alternate Paperback edition.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights
reserved.
CHAPTER ONE
The Summons
The Piazza Rusticucci was not one of
Rome’s most prestigious addresses. Though only a short walk from the Vatican,
the square was humble and nondescript, part of a maze of narrow streets and
densely packed shops and houses that ran west from where the Ponte Sant’Angelo
crossed the Tiber River. A trough for livestock stood at its center, next to a
fountain, and on its east side was a modest church with a tiny belfry. Santa
Caterina delle Cavallerotte was too new to be famous. It housed none of the
sorts of relics—bones of saints, fragments from the True Cross—that each year
brought thousands of pilgrims to Rome from all over Christendom. However, behind
this church, in a small street overshadowed by the city wall, there could be
found the workshop of the most sought-after artist in Italy: a squat,
flat-nosed, shabbily dressed, ill-tempered sculptor from
Florence.
Michelangelo Buonarroti was summoned back to this workshop behind
Santa Caterina in April 1508. He obeyed the call with great reluctance, having
vowed he would never return to Rome. Fleeing the city two years earlier, he had
ordered his assistants to clear the workshop and sell its contents, his tools
included, to the Jews. He returned that spring to find the premises bare and,
nearby in the Piazza San Pietro, exposed to the elements, one hundred tons of
marble still piled where he had abandoned it. These lunar-white blocks had been
quarried in preparation for what was intended to be one of the largest
assemblages of sculpture the world had ever seen: the tomb of the reigning pope,
Julius II. Yet Michelangelo had not been brought back to Rome to resume work on
this colossus.
Michelangelo was thirty-three years old. He had been born on
the sixth of March 1475, at an hour, he informed one of his assistants, when
Mercury and Venus were in the house of Jupiter. Such a fortunate arrangement of
the planets had foretold “success in the arts which delight the senses, such as
painting, sculpture and architecture.” This success was not long in coming. By
the age of fifteen the precociously gifted Michelangelo was studying the art of
sculpture in the Garden of San Marco, a school for artists fostered by Lorenzo
de’ Medici, the ruler of Florence. At nineteen he was carving statues in
Bologna, and two years later, in 1496, he made his first trip to Rome, where he
soon received a commission to sculpt the Pietà. His contract for this statue
boldly claimed it would be "the most beautiful work in marble that Rome has ever
seen”—a condition he was said to have fulfilled when the work was unveiled to an
astonished public a few years later. Carved to adorn the tomb of a French
cardinal, the Pietà won praise for surpassing not only the sculptures of all of
Michelangelo’s contemporaries but even those of the ancient Greeks and Romans
themselves—the standards by which all art was judged. The Piazza Rusticucci,
with the Castel Sant Angelo in the background.
Michelangelo’s next triumph
was another marble statue, the David, which was installed in front of the
Palazzo della Signoria in Florence in September 1504, following three years of
work. If the Pietà showed delicate grace and feminine beauty, the David revealed
Michelangelo’s talent for expressing monumental power through the male nude.
Almost seventeen feet in height, the work came to be known by the awestruck
citizens of Florence as Il Gigante, or "The Giant." It took four days and
considerable ingenuity on the part of Michelangelo’s friend, the architect
Giuliano da Sangallo, to transport the mighty statue the quarter mile from his
workshop behind the cathedral to its pedestal in the Piazza della Signoria.
A
few months after the David was finished, early in 1505, Michelangelo received
from Pope Julius II an abrupt that interrupted his work in Florence. So
impressed was the pope with the Pietà, which he had seen in a chapel of St.
Peter’s, that he wanted the young sculptor to carve his tomb as well. At the end
of February the papal treasurer, Cardinal Francesco Alidosi, paid Michelangelo
an advance of one hundred gold florins, the equivalent of a full year’s salary
for a craftsman. The sculptor then returned to Rome and entered the service of
the pope. So began what he would later call "the tragedy of the tomb."
Papal
tombs were usually grand affairs. That of Sixtus IV, who died in 1484, was a
beautiful bronze sarcophagus that had been nine years in the making. But Julius,
a stranger to all modesty, had envisioned for himself something on an entirely
new scale. He had begun making plans for his sepulchre soon after his election
to the papacy in 1503, ultimately conceiving of a memorial that was to be the
largest since the mausoleums built for Roman emperors such as Hadrian and
Augustus.
Michelangelo’s design was in keeping with these tremendous
ambitions, calling for a freestanding structure some thirty-four feet wide and
fifty feet high. There were to be over forty life-size marble statues, all set
in a massive and highly detailed architectural setting of pillars, arches, and
niches. On the bottom tier a series of nude statues would represent the liberal
arts, while the top would be crowned by a ten-foot-high statue of Julius wearing
the papal tiara. Besides an annual salary of 1,200 ducats—roughly ten times what
the average sculptor or goldsmith could expect to earn in a single
year—Michelangelo was to receive a final payment of 10,000 more.
Michelangelo
began this daunting project with energy and enthusiasm, spending eight months in
Carrara, sixty-five miles northwest of Florence, supervising the quarrying and
transport of the white marble for which the town was famous, not least because
both the Pietà and the David had been carved from it. In spite of several
Michelangelo mishaps in transit—one of his cargo boats ran aground in the Tiber,
and several others were swamped when the river flooded—by the start of 1506 he
had transported more than ninety wagonloads of marble to the square before St.
Peter’s and moved into the workshop behind Santa Caterina. The people of Rome
rejoiced at the sight of this mountain of white stone rising in front of the old
basilica. No one was more excited than the pope, who had a special walkway built
to connect Michelangelo’s workshop with the Vatican and thereby facilitate his
visits to the Piazza Rusticucci, where he would discuss his magnificent project
with the artist.
1) The ducat, a 24-karat gold coin, was the standard
currency throughout most of Italy. To give a sense of its value: The average
annual salary of a craftsman or a tradesman amounted to roughly 100 to 120
ducats per year, while a year’s rent on a good-size painter’s workshop in Rome
or Florence would have cost ten to twelve ducats. The ducat was of the same
value as the florin, the standard currency in Florence, which it replaced later
in the sixteenth century.
Even before the marble had arrived in Rome,
however, the pope’s attentions were being distracted by a much larger
enterprise. Originally he had planned for his sepulchre to stand in a church
near the Colosseum, San Pietro in Vincoli, only to change his mind and decide it
should be installed instead in the grander setting of St. Peter’s. But soon he
realized that the old basilica was in no fit state to accommodate such an
impressive monument. Two and a half centuries after his death in 67 c.e., the
bones of St. Peter A copy of one of Michelangelo’s sketches for Pope Julius’s
tomb had been brought from the catacombs to this location beside the Tiber—the
spot where he was believed to have been crucified— and the basilica that bears
his name constructed over them. By a sad irony, this great edifice housing the
tomb of St. Peter, the rock on which the Christian Church was founded, therefore
came to occupy a low-lying patch of marshy ground in which, it was said, there
lived snakes large enough to eat babies whole.
These undesirable foundations
meant that, by 1505, the walls of the basilica were leaning six feet out of
true. While various piecemeal efforts had been made to rectify the perilous
situation, Julius, typically, decided to take the most drastic measures: He
planned to have St. Peter’s demolished and a new basilica built in its place.
The destruction of the oldest and holiest church in Christendom had therefore
started by the time Michelangelo returned from Carrara. Dozens of ancient tombs
of saints and previous popes— the inspiration for visions, healings, and other
miracles—were smashed to rubble and enormous pits twenty-five feet deep
excavated for the foundations. Tons of building materials cluttered the
surrounding streets and piazzas as an army of 2,000 carpenters and stonemasons
prepared themselves for the largest construction project seen anywhere in Italy
since the days of ancient Rome.
A design for this grand new basilica had been
put forward by the pope’s official architect, Giuliano da Sangallo,
Michelangelo’s friend and mentor. The sixty-three-year-old Sangallo, a
Florentine, boasted an impressive list of commissions, having designed churches
and palaces across much of Italy, among them the Palazzo Rovere, a splendid
residence built in Savona, near Genoa, for Julius II. Sangallo also had been the
favorite architect of Lorenzo de’ Medici, for whom he had designed a villa near
Florence at Poggio a Caiano. In Rome he had been responsible for making repairs
to the Castel Sant’Angelo, the city’s fortress. He had also repaired Santa Maria
Maggiore, one of Rome’s most ancient churches, and gilded its ceiling with what
was said to be the first gold ever brought back from the New World.
So
confident was Sangallo of gaining the commission to rebuild St. Peter’s that he
uprooted his family from Florence and moved it to Rome. He faced competition for
the design, however. Donato d’Angelo Lazzari, better known as Bramante, had a
collection of equally prestigious works to his credit. Hailed by his admirers as
the greatest architect since Filippo Brunelleschi, he had built churches and
domes in Milan and, after moving to Rome in 1500, various convents, cloisters,
and palaces. To date, his most celebrated building was the Tempietto of San
Pietro in Montorio, a small classicalstyle temple on the Janiculum, a hill south
of the Vatican. The word bramante means "ravenous," making it an apt nickname
for someone with the sixty-two-year-old architect’s overweening aspirations and
vast sensual appetites. And the voracious Bramante saw, in St. Peter’s, the
chance to exercise his considerable abilities on a larger scale than ever
before.
The competition between Sangallo and Bramante had repercussions for
virtually every painter and sculptor in Rome. A Florentine who had lived and
worked for many years in Rome, Sangallo was the leader of a group of
artists—among them his brother and nephews— who had migrated south from Florence
to vie for commissions from the pope and his wealthy cardinals. Bramante, a
native of Urbino, had Donato Bramante come to Rome more recently, though since
his arrival he had been cultivating friendships with artists who hailed from
various other Italian towns and cities, promoting them as a counterpoise to the
Florentines whose careers Sangallo was attempting to advance.4 Much was at stake
in the competition to design St. Peter’s,since to the victor would accrue
wide-ranging powers of patronage as well as an enviable influence at the papal
court. Late in 1505, Bramante’s faction dramatically seized the upper hand when
the pope accepted his design for a huge, domed structure in the shape of a Greek
cross, rather than the one submitted by Sangallo.
If Michelangelo was
disappointed by his friend’s failure to secure the commission, the rebuilding of
St. Peter’s had an almost immediate effect on his own work. The tremendous
expense involved meant that the pope abruptly put the tomb project on hold—a
change of heart that Michelangelo learned about the hard way. After shipping his
one hundred tons of marble to Rome, he was left with freight charges of 140
ducats, a substantial sum which he needed a bank loan to pay. Having received no
money since the one hundred florins more than a year earlier, he decided to seek
reimbursement from the pope, with whom he happened to dine in the Vatican one
week before Easter. To his alarm, during this meal he overheard the pope
informing two of his other guests that he had no intention of spending another
ducat on marble for the tomb—a shocking turnabout given his earlier zeal for the
project. Still, before taking his leave of the table Michelangelo was bold
enough to broach the subject of the 140 ducats, only to be fobbed off by Julius,
who instructed him to return to the Vatican on Monday. Then, however, he was
spurned a second time when the pope declined to grant him an audience.
"I
returned on Monday," Michelangelo later recalled in a letter to a friend, "and
on Tuesday and on Wednesday and on Thursday.... Finally, on Friday morning I was
turned out, in other words, I was sent packing." A bishop, witnessing these
proceedings with some surprise, asked the groom who repulsed Michelangelo if he
realized to whom he was speaking. "I do know him," answered the groom, "but I am
obliged to follow the orders of my superiors, without inquiring
further."
Such treatment was too much for a man unaccustomed to the sight of
doors closing in his face. Almost as renowned for his moody temper and aloof,
suspicious nature as he was for his amazing skill with the hammer and chisel,
Michelangelo could be arrogant, insolent, and impulsive. "You may tell the
pope," he haughtily informed the groom, "that from now on, if he wants me, he
can look for me elsewhere." He then returned to his workshop—"overwhelmed with
despair," he later claimed—and instructed his servants to sell all of its
contents to the Jews. Later that day, the seventeenth of April 1506—the eve of
the laying of the foundation stone of the new basilica—he fled from Rome, vowing
never to return.
Pope Julius II was not a man one wished to offend. No pope
before or since has enjoyed such a fearsome reputation. A sturdily built
sixty-three-year-old with snow-white hair and a ruddy face, he was known as il
papa terribile, the "dreadful" or "terrifying" pope. People had good reason to
dread Julius. His violent rages, in which he punched underlings or thrashed them
with his stick, were legendary. To stunned onlookers he possessed an almost
superhuman power to bend the world to his purpose. "It is virtually impossible,"
wrote an awestruck Venetian ambassador, "to describe how strong and violent and
difficult to manage he is. In body and soul he has the nature of a giant.
Everything about him is on a magnified scale, both his undertakings and
passions." On his deathbed, the beleaguered ambassador claimed the prospect of
extinction was sweet because it meant he would no longer have to cope with
Julius. A Spanish ambassador was even less charitable. "In the hospital in
Valencia," he claimed, "there are a hundred people chained up who are less mad
than His Holiness."
The pope would have learned of Michelangelo’s flight
almost immediately, since he had spies not only at the city’s gates but in the
countryside as well. Thus, barely had Michelangelo bolted from his workshop on a
hired horse than five horsemen set off in pursuit of him. They tracked the
runaway sculptor as his horse took him north along the Via Cassia, past tiny
villages with posting inns where, every few hours, he changed his mount. After a
long ride through the darkness, he finally crossed into Florentine territory,
where the pope had no jurisdiction, at two o’clock in the morning. Tired, but
believing himself beyond the pope’s reach, he alighted at a hostel in
Poggibonsi, a fortified town still twenty miles from the gates of Florence. No
sooner had he arrived at the hostel, however, than the horsemen appeared.
Michelangelo stoutly refused to return with them, pointing out that he was now
in Florentine territory and threatening to have the five of them murdered—a
daring bluff— should they attempt to seize him by force.
But the couriers
were insistent, showing him a letter, bearing the papal seal, that ordered him
to return immediately to Rome "under pain of disfavour." Michelangelo still
refused to obey, but at their request he wrote a response to the pope, a defiant
letter informing Julius that he did not intend ever to return to Rome; that in
exchange for his faithful service he had not deserved such maltreatment; and
that since the pope did not wish to proceed with the tomb, he considered his
obligations to His Holiness at an end. The letter was signed, dated, and passed
to the couriers, who found themselves with little choice but to turn their
horses around and ride back to face the wrath of their master.
The pope would
have received this letter as he prepared to lay the basilica’s foundation stone,
which was made, ironically, from Carrara marble. Among those assembled for the
ceremony on the edge of the vast crater was the man whom Michelangelo believed
had been responsible for bringing about his sudden fall from grace: Donato
Bramante. Michelangelo did not think that financial considerations alone
explained why the pope had lost interest in having his tomb carved; he was
convinced that a dark plot was afoot, a conspiracy in which Bramante was seeking
to thwart his ambitions and destroy his reputation. In Michelangelo’s eyes,
Bramante had persuaded the pope to abandon the project by warning him that it
was bad luck to have one’s tomb carved during one’s lifetime, and had then
proposed an altogether different commission for the sculptor, a task at which he
knew Michelangelo could not possibly succeed: frescoing the vault of the Sistine
Chapel.
From AudioFile
Ross King offers a fascinating look at the
Italian Renaissance through the saga of the painting of the Vatican's Sistine
Chapel. King's use of detail and description enriches the journey through the
art, politics, and personal rivalries that encompass both painters and popes.
Reader Alan Sklar is an engaging guide as he immerses listeners in the world of
the brilliant, yet difficult Michelangelo. Sklar's clear Italian brings a fluid
handling of the many names. His accent is so precise and careful that it's a
language lesson. Using a respectful pace, Sklar allows listeners time to absorb
the many details--the complexity of fresco painting, or the byzantine
negotiations over papal commissions. Intriguing armchair travel, or a fine
companion to a visit to Italy. R.F.W. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine--
Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
Friday, January 22, 2016
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment