Director – David Bickerstaff – 2017 – UK – Cert. U – 91m
*****
Sixteenth Century Renaissance sculptor Michelangelo remains one of the greatest artists of all time, yet his overreaching ambition frequently proved his undoing – back out in UK cinemas to tie in with the 550th anniversary of Michelangelo’s birth from Tuesday, May 20th
“From a fountain of mercy… my suffering is born.” These words (voiced by James Faulkner as Michelangelo) accompany images of a present day sculptor (Marco Ambrosini) working away at a piece of marble in his studio. The writings of Vasari (voice: Lawrence Kennedy) take up the story. A boy was born to a noble family in 1475. Art Critic and Author Jonathan Jones places Michelangelo among the greats, like Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Picasso. He deals with the strangest, darkest and most difficult stuff. He is the original famous artist. He had two biographies written about him in his lifetime, and took great interest in them, helping bring them to fruition. He painted, sculpted, built architecture, wrote poetry, even built military fortifications. This was the time when artists started being regarded as creative geniuses, according to Art Historian Jennifer Sliwka. Vasari referred to Michelangelo and his art in terms of Divinity and then the Divine.
For the latest Exhibition on Screen outing, producer Phil Grabsky and director Bickerstaff have assembled a particularly impressive group of art experts of one sort or another, some of whom speak in English and some (with subtitles) in Italian, the latter’s sounds and cadences adding a certain appropriate, and most welcome, local flavour to the soundtrack of a film about an Italian artist). The former group includes: Art Critic and Author Martin Gayford, Artist Tania Kovats, Holly Trusted, Senior Curator of Sculpture at London’s V&A, Arnold Nesselrath, Deputy Director Vatican Museums, Phillippa Abrahams, Artist and Conservator and Martin Clayton, Head of Prints and Drawings at the Royal Collection Trust. The latter group includes: Alessandro Cecchi, Curator of the Casa Buonarotti, Florence, and Francesca Nicoli of the Laboratoire Artistici Nicoli. Additional interview material, appropriate given Michelangelo’s interest in anatomy, features Peter Abrahams, a Professor of Clinical Anatomy from Warwick Medical School.
Gayford describes Michelangelo’s upbringing – the artist’s mother died when he was seven – in the male worlds of artists’ workshops and the papal court. The family had been on the up, much like that other family the Medicis, but now their fortune was on the wane. In Michelangelo’s teenage years, the head of the Medici clan, the most powerful man in Florence, was Lorenzo di Medici. The Medici family would become his main patrons, commissioning much of his work.
According to Cecchi, the teenager found himself recommended to the artist academy founded by Lorenzo under the direction of Bertoldo, a surviving acolyte of the artist Donatello. Early Michelangelo works included the relief Battle of the Centaurs (1492), which Jones reads as full of teenage angst and tormented gay sexuality. No sooner had he completed this piece, than Lorenzo the Magnificent passed. The young artist was struck with grief for many days. Jones’ reading of the work is by far the most impressive feature of the film, making one wish he had explored this theme further.
Abrahams talks about the crucifixion the artist sculpted for the Santo Spiritu Church, how the artist wanted to understand, through studying cadavers, how the human body worked. Over the course of Michelangelo’s career, the anatomy in his work gets more and more expressive. Both Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were fascinated by the human body and studied corpses intensively. Their drawings were ahead of the medical science of their day in the sense that it would be another 50 years before the scientists started seriously examining cadavers to advance our knowledge.
Arresting, establishing shots of Rome feature various ancient ruins including the Colosseum, trams going through narrow streets, and a man honing his football header skills in the street as, on the soundtrack, Vasari is wheeled back in for further quotes as we look at Michelangelo’s Bacchus, described as a strange fusion of male anatomy and female fleshiness, gifted mad eyes and a slanted head by the artist. There’s a frightening irrationality to this image, asserts Jones. What it would be like to lose yourself in the senses and in the irrational.
A French diplomat, leaving Rome, commissioned a Pietà, the only work Michelangelo signed, presumably touting for more work. Describing Mary as an immense mountain holding the lifeless, dead Christ, Kovats starts waving her arms expressively, which makes it a shame the shot is cut away from and back to the Pietà quite so quickly. Sliwka places the head of Christ resting in the Virgin Mary’s lap as within a German religious art tradition of expressing grief, a trope with which Italian audiences would not have been familiar. She notes that the Virgin is here portrayed as a very young woman with smooth skin, and suggests a tactile quality: just as she holds the limp Christ, so the viewer wants to reach out and touch Him.
Jones talks about the Neo-Platonist idea that by loving beauty, you could ascend to a higher spiritual realm, ultimately to Heaven. Or, the love of physical beauty could lead you to Christian redemption. Michelangelo was gay, but didn’t consummate relationships, being content to visually enjoy and feast upon the figures of particular men. This effectively allowed him to be openly gay in a time when sodomy was punishable by burning at the stake.
Florence Cathedral they thought he might make something out of a block of marble sitting in their Office of Works. The plan had been to have a figure of David carved out of the block from Carrara – famous for its marble quarries, as Nicoli stresses – placed atop the Duomo (an Italian term for a local church built as or at least built with the features of a cathedral).
Michelangelo was confronted with a lump of stone that had already been blocked out. He refused to use any assistants, closed off the area so that no one else could get access, and worked on the block night and day for months. His radical idea, says Gayford, was that he was going to take David’s clothes off. David (1501-4) is presented to us in situ with a near static camera – in various detail close ups – perhaps these were hand held and the movement comes from the effort of physically holding a camera steady rather than having it mounted on a locked-off rig. Nicoli enthuses abut the artistry of details (shown in separate shots) of the hands, the eyes.
Sculpture is about problem-solving, comments Kovats; the engineering of the imagination. The scale of the finished piece is overwhelming, designed to reduce you, David against Goliath, and yet, David IS the giant. Gaylord explains that it was decided too good to stick out of the way on the roof, and a committee of artists – probably the most star-studded committee of artists there has ever been which included Leonardo – was convened to try to work out where to put it. It ended up outside a main government building as a symbol of the Florentine state.
Pope Julius II summoned Michelangelo to Rome, commissioning a tomb, a wildly ambitious design by Michelangelo which was to prove a major headache in terms of the Carrara quarry costs and would ultimately take 40 years to complete, and even then in a trimmed down version which must have been a considerable disappointment to the artist. There were a number of reasons, says Gaylord: he was a control freak who couldn’t delegate and he kept getting diverted by other commissions.
For instance, next up for Julius II, a series of paintings on the Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508-1512). As Nesselrath explains, the artist was required to produce nine scenes from the book of Genesis on the chapel ceiling to complement scenes from the Old and New Testaments that were already there. As Jones recalls, one of Michelangelo’s poems records the physical agony of constantly stretching to the ceiling to complete the work
Julius, who visited the work often while it was in progress, eventually got fed up with the amount of time it was taking, causing Michelangelo to give up and present the work. Perhaps he would have preferred to have spent more time working on it, but needs must.
Kovats, arms and fingers gesticulating, enthuses about these paintings which are so sculptural that they are almost not paintings. This “teeming orgy of figures” is anchored by a moment of touch at its centre, in the Creation of Adam where God’s finger touches that of Adam to impart life. To understand Michelangelo, she says, you have to start with touch. Him touching the material, touching the paper, touching space, his manipulation of architectural space, a tactile reality.
Looking at a preparatory study of a male nude seen from behind for The Battle of Cascina, held at the Casa Buonorotti, Cecchi points out that you never see bodies at rest in Michelangelo – he is fascinated by movement, and the bodies are always in motion.
He also worked in architecture; Pope Leo X commissioned a facade to San Lorenzo in Florence, a church built by the great Cosimo de Medici and otherwise complete. Only a model of the design survives. Michelangelo went on to design and build a new sacristy and a library, which show off his artistic and self-taught architectural abilities at their height. These include two tombs showcasing his sculptures Night & Day and Dawn and Dusk.
This work was interrupted in 1530 when Florence came under attack from Pope Clement VII seeking to regain power, and the town put the artist in charge of building fortifications. In the aftermath of a peace deal, the artist went into hiding in San Lorenzo monastery for several months. Recognising the artist’s value as an asset, Clement put him back to work on the San Lorenzo tombs as soon as possible.
The staircase of the Laurentian library is another remarkable work, which seems to flow out of the library like lava from a volcano. Gaylord describes it as both menacing and original. In the library itself, Nesselrath explains how Michelangelo turns convention on its head by instead of having a building supported by columns has a building supported by walls where columns are added as purely decorative motifs, and extols the way the artist played with the very language of architecture to an extent rare in that discipline.
Pope Paul III got the artist back in to the Sistine Chapel to paint the altar wall, which he adorned with The Last Judgement. There’s no frame, “says Gaylord, “it’s all picture as if he had just punched a great hole. It’s as if the end of the building has been torn away and we see through to a vision of the end of the world with Christ in judgement, almost entirely in terms of the muscular nude body, a wall of flesh. The face in the fleshly skin hanging from the hand of one of the saints is likely to be that of the artist himself, the only known self-portrait in his painting. Self-portraits also occur in his sculptures such as The Deposition (1547-55).
In his seventies, he embarked on building the cupola of St. Peter’s, Rome, with a vision to surround it with some thirty sculptural figures, an ambition representative, says Nesselrath, of his sometimes overreaching mindset. His work is full of ambitious projects that never got completed as the artist’s attention was diverted by the next commission or several.
Michelangelo died at age 88, and was entombed in the church of Santa Croce, Florence.
The film also features the voices of David Rintoul as the voice of his ‘official’ biographer Condivi.
Exhibition on Screen: Michaelangelo – Love and Death is back out in cinemas in the UK to tie in with the 550th anniversary of Michelangelo’s birth from Tuesday, May 20th.
Trailer: