All language subtitles for Exhibition On Screen Michelangelo Love And Death 2017 1080p WEBRip-English

From a thing of graceful and exotic beauty,

from a fountain of mercy,

my suffering is born.

I thank God to have been born
in the time Michelangelo was alive

and for him to have been on
such friendly terms with me.

I have been able to write
many details about his life,

all of which are true.

In the year 1475,

there was born a son, from
an excellent and noble mother,

to Lodovico di Leonardo Buonarroti Simoni,

a descendant, so it is said,

of the most noble and most ancient
family of the Counts of Canossa.

To that Lodovico, judicial officer of
the township of Chiusi and Caprese,

in the diocese of Arezzo,

a son was born on 6 March, a Sunday.

I think there are a handful of
artists who are the greatest.

There's Leonardo da
Vinci, Rembrandt, Picasso.

But I think Michelangelo
is the artist that,

once you start looking at his work
and start thinking about his work,

your sense of awe increases more and more.

And really, whether he's doing a small
drawing, a poem or a massive sculpture,

he's always dealing with the strangest,
darkest and most difficult thoughts.

He's always dealing with what
it is to be alive and with mortality

and with the fragility of existence
and with the deep, serious stuff.

The thing about Michelangelo
is he's the original famous artist.

He's extremely famous today.

He was extremely
famous in his own lifetime.

He was the first celebrity artist.

He had two biographies of
himself published in his own lifetime

and took a big interest in their
publication and helped with them both.

And he was regarded as a godlike figure.

Michelangelo did everything. He painted.

He sculpted.

He built architecture. He wrote poetry.

He designed military
fortifications rather brilliantly,

which is his least-known skill.

Previously, let's say in the late
medieval, early Renaissance period,

artists were still very much
conceived as craftsmen,

albeit very skilled craftsmen.

It's really in the period of
Leonardo and Michelangelo

that artists start being
understood as creative geniuses,

and of course this comes up again and again

in The Lives of the Artists
written by Giorgio Vasari,

who describes Michelangelo
repeatedly as divino.

He is divine, and he both
paints and draws divinely.

The Buonarroti family had been
upwardly mobile in the 14th century

and at the start of the 15th
century doing quite well,

possibly even as well as another
up-and-coming family called Medici.

And by the time he was born

they actually didn't have very
much left except a bit of status.

They had a farm in Settignano
outside Florence with a few rents.

His mother died when he
was seven. He had five brothers

and was brought up by
his father and his uncle.

Subsequently he lived
in a pretty male world

of artists' workshops, the papal court.

Michelangelo was sent to be
nursed by the wife of a stonecutter.

Wherefore the same Michelangelo,

talking with me once, said in good humour,

"Giorgio, if I have
anything good in my brain,"

it has come from my being born in
the pure air of your country of Arezzo,

even as I also sucked
in with my nurse's milk

"the chisels and hammer with
which I now make my figures."

15th-century Florence was
a major commercial centre

and for 15th-century
Europe quite a big town.

Population, we're not quite sure,
somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000,

fluctuating depending on plague
and various other disasters.

It was a workaday place.

The Florentines were hard-nosed merchants

and that comes out very strongly
in Michelangelo's own character

because whatever else he was,
great genius, poet and so forth,

he was tremendously interested in money

and he ended up with a great deal of
money and a huge amount of property,

mainly in the Florence area.

The Medici were a family
of bankers and merchants,

who had prospered

by using a considerable amount
of political skill and corruption

to become, by the end of the 15th century,

de facto the rulers of Florence.

They'd fixed the Florentine constitution

so that they could pull the
levers of power behind the scenes,

except everyone knew that the
boss was the head of Medici clan,

and the head of the Medici clan
when Michelangelo was a teenager

was Lorenzo.

A very complicated man, a bit of a mafioso,

but also a great intellectual and a poet

and a man of enormous cultivation.

Michelangelo's complex, intimate and,
in some ways, antagonistic relationship

with the Medici family
lasts for most of his life

and explains a lot of his work.

Indeed a great deal of his
work was commissioned by them.

It's clear from Condivi's
Life of Michelangelo,

which is not exactly an
autobiography but getting a bit close,

Michelangelo really wanted
to emphasise this relationship,

that Lorenzo was...

If anyone was going to be his teacher,

it was not some painter in Florence,
it was Lorenzo the Magnificent.

Lodovico, being a friend
of the painter Ghirlandaio,

went to his workshop and spoke to
him about his student Michelangelo.

At that time Lorenzo the
Magnificent had a garden

where he kept many fine antiques
that he had collected at great expense.

It was his great wish

to create a school of excellence
for painters and sculptors.

So, along with his best pupils,
Ghirlandaio sent Michelangelo.

In his garden close to San Marco,

Lorenzo the Magnificent had a
school, an academy for young artists,

under the supervision of Bertoldo,
the last sculptor-disciple of Donatello.

The reference points for these young men

were, on the one hand, antiquity
and, on the other, Donatello.

Among them there was a really
young Michelangelo, 15 to 17 years old.

He made the two reliefs we can see here:

The Madonna of the Stairs
and The Battle of the Centaurs.

They show what a prodigious gift he had.

We can already see his young genius.

These are the first items
in Michelangelo's oeuvre.

They are some of his earliest works,
even if they were never completed.

Especially this relief which was
commissioned by Lorenzo the Magnificent,

who had taken him under his wing.

Michelangelo was one of those
who lived in Lorenzo's own home.

This is one of
Michelangelo's juvenile pieces

and we can really see how he was
mastering the technique of sculpting.

We can see how the material
is chiselled with different tools.

There are big tools to rough-hew the marble

and then the shapes are
gradually smoothed-out.

The heads in the background
are reminiscent of Donatello,

because they barely
emerge from the background.

He managed to create gradually-layered
planes in this marble slab

which was left like that,
incomplete, roughly-hewn.

He used several tools showing
incredible technical mastery.

There is such dexterity in the
way he chiselled the marble.

It was immediately clear that he
had discovered his true vocation.

His Battle of the Centaurs,

it's like a young man's work
of art, a teenager's work of art.

It's got a kind of adolescent
brooding intensity to it

and nobody before that had
put adolescence into a work of art.

It's full of sexual turbulence.

Michelangelo is dealing with his sexuality.

He preferred men to
women, that's very clear.

He had barely finished
the "Battle of the Centaurs"

when Lorenzo the
Magnificent passed from this life

and Michelangelo returned
to his father's house.

So much grief did he
feel for his patron's death

that it was many days
before he returned to work.

Michelangelo carved a very beautiful
wooden sculpture, a crucifixion,

for the church of Santo Spirito in Florence

and that sculpture today
appears very simple and plain

and that's in part because we're
missing a lot of the polychromy

that would have been on there.

So we can imagine that actually the
wounds of Christ would have had blood

and there would have been far more
detail than what we can see today.

That notwithstanding, the
smooth, very serene face of Christ

is something that we see elsewhere
in Michelangelo's later work.

And his attention to the anatomy
of the body is very particular

and we actually know that he was
at Santo Spirito studying dead bodies.

He was particularly
interested in their anatomy.

And he actually carved
that sculpture for the church

in thanks for them granting
him access to these dead bodies.

I think initially Michelangelo wanted to
understand how the human body works

and in doing that he had to
find out what was underneath.

He wanted to understand how the
expressive bulges and movements

were actually created.

So I think it was to have a deeper
understanding of expression,

because he is a very expressive artist.

If you look at it over his lifetime,

the format of his anatomy
gets more and more expressive.

There's more than aesthetics

in the case of both Leonardo
da Vinci and Michelangelo.

These were two people who
did dissect the human body,

who were fascinated by the human body

and, I must add, were ahead of
the medical scientists of their time.

In other words, artists were dissecting
and looking at the human body

50 years before any of
the scientists did it seriously.

Jacopo Galli, a Roman gentleman,

recognised Michelangelo's talent
and had him carve a Bacchus in marble,

holding a cup in his right hand

and in the left a tiger's skin,
along with a cluster of grapes,

which a little satyr is trying to eat.

In this figure it is clear that
Michelangelo wanted to attain

a marvellous combination
of various parts of the body

and, particularly, to give it both the
slenderness of the young male figure

and the fleshiness and
roundness of the female.

It was such an astounding work that it
showed Michelangelo to be more skilled

than any other modern sculptor
who had ever worked up to that time.

Bacchus is the god of
ecstasy, the god of unreason,

but in Michelangelo's statue he
gives the god these mad eyes.

He's got these weird, mad eyes,

his head is tilting in a
slightly odd, bizarre way.

There's really a sense of
madness and actually it's frightening.

There's a frightening irrationality
to Michelangelo's image of Bacchus.

Whereas other artists take
this myth of the god of wine

and might make it quite funny or jolly,

Michelangelo makes it a
deeply, deeply personal image

of what it would be like
to lose yourself totally

in the senses and in the irrational.

He is demonstrating his ability
to rival the art of the ancients

or perhaps even surpass
the art of the ancients,

and similarly that seems to be a comment

on a kind of domination
over the pagan past.

Part of Michelangelo's
preoccupation with the ideal male nude

comes from his access
to the antiquities in Rome.

These are objects that are being dug up

in this period of the early
years of the 16th century.

Things like the Laocoön, for example.

And he has access to the finest
works of ancient Greece and Rome.

During his stay in Rome, he made
such progress in the study of his art

that it was incredible to see.

As a result, when the
French Cardinal of Rouen

wanted to leave a fitting
memorial of himself in Rome,

he was eager to employ such a rare artist.

And he commissioned a
marble pietà in the round,

which, when finished,
was placed in St Peter's.

The Pietà is an astonishing feat of
skill and design and emotional empathy

and it is also, we can be quite certain,

intended by the 25-year-old
or so Michelangelo

as an advertisement for himself.

It's the only work which he signs.

Mary is a mountain in that work.

The incredible folds of her fabric
have a whole kind of topography,

they are a landscape,

and she forms this immense sort of pyramid

that gathers up this completely
limp and languishing dead Christ.

Everything that's become
embodied in that stone has failed

and is laid across her

and she supports his weight
so kind of easily, effortlessly.

You know, her kind of strength
at the moment of his weakness

is so emotionally powerful.

And there she is as kind of "Mother Church"

supporting this figure that
has died in such anguish.

It's a German tradition to
represent the body of Christ

in the lap of the Virgin.

This was not something that the
Romans would have seen very often

and in that German tradition it's
often a very grief-stricken Virgin

who's tearing out her hair, and
this emaciated body of Christ.

What Michelangelo does
is absolutely transformative.

The face of the Virgin which
has been often commented on

is extremely young and
beautiful, smooth in fact,

and she looks very serene.

And there's something very
touching, literally and figuratively,

about the way that she sort
of touches Christ's wound.

It makes you want to reach out
and touch that sculpture as well.

I think there's something also

about the very finely
polished finish of that sculpture

that also renders it extremely
tactile and appealing.

It's carved from one block of
marble which in itself is quite a feat,

producing a work that size from
one block which he quarried himself,

or had quarried under
his personal supervision,

in the mountains at Carrara
and had transported to Rome.

It's finished and polished in
the most extraordinary way,

actually fantastically
smooth, almost glassy.

It would have reflected
light in a beautiful way.

I belong to a family tradition

that lasts since the
beginning of the 18th century

and the reason why these marble
workshops were built in Carrara

is because we have such
an important marble tradition

connected, of course, with the
exploitation of the marble quarries.

In Carrara we've got a very fine
chemical composition of the particles.

They are, one side to the other,
very close and very, very fine.

But it's micro-crystals in composition

and this makes the white marble of
Carrara more suitable for sculpture

because it resists very fine profiles,
very fine, tiny, very tiny details.

You don't have that big
grain, like a grain of salt.

With Carrara marble it's particularly
suitable for the marble carving.

Faced with a large marble block,

you need to have a very clear idea in mind

and this is exactly what Michelangelo had.

He was not improvising,
he was not an expressionist,

he knew exactly what he was going to do

because he was idealistic, pure Platonic.

The first stage is the
roughing-out of the block.

So imagine a very regular square
block, you remove the angles.

Then the most crucial
phase is called modelling.

Modelling is the most important thing.
It's what we do also in clay modelling,

whereas marble carving
is only to remove material.

You cannot add what's been removed before.

After that you reach the
finishing phase and the polishing.

So this sense of taking
away and taking away

until he got to the point where
he found the skin of his subject.

And then that boundary of the body

actually becoming the
form of the sculpture,

and the idea that that's buried inside
this inert lump of marble is magical.

When I am driven away
from and deprived of fire,

I'm compelled to die,

where others survive and live.

For my only food is
what flares up and burns,

and that which others
die from, I need to live.

The poetry was the element of his
work which he was most worried about

and most pleased by praise of,

which suggests that he
was rather uncertain about it

because he wasn't a
professional literary man.

His poetry has had quite an
erratic reception over the centuries.

Michelangelo saw
himself as an intellectual.

He knew some of the leading Neoplatonists

and philosophers and poets as a teenager,

so it's part of his essential education.

The other great value of
Neoplatonism for Michelangelo

and for other people in the Renaissance

was that it gave a way of
talking about love that was sincere

and yet also rather useful if
you lived in a Christian society.

The Neoplatonists said
that by loving beauty

you could ascend to a higher
spiritual realm, ultimately to heaven.

In other words, the love of physical beauty

could lead you to an equivalent
of Christian redemption.

Now, Michelangelo loved men, he adored men.

He was gay. In our terms, he was gay.

He wrote love poems to men.

But he insisted it was platonic.

He was celibate, he claimed
to be completely celibate,

so that he could go around
idolising the male body

and idolising particular men,

but he could say, "It's a
Neoplatonic love of spiritual beauty."

So this was crucial to Michelangelo.

This allowed him to
be, in effect, openly gay

at a time when you
could be burnt at the stake

as what they called a sodomite.

How, then, could I ever dare

Without you, my beloved,
to keep hold on life

If, at our parting, I cannot
find help within myself?

Those sobs, those cries, those sighs

That accompanied my miserable heart to you

My lady, harshly confirmed

My approaching death and my torments

But if it is true that once I am gone

My faithful servitude may be forgotten

My heart Anticipating my afflictions

To fulfil your empty wish

Prepares the funerary rituals for my grave

We're here in the church of Sant'Agostino,

for which Michelangelo did one of
his first paintings, The Entombment,

which was an altarpiece for
one of the chapels in this church.

Of course, the work was never finished

and it is no longer in the chapel.

But in the context of the
National Gallery in London

where the picture is today,
with The Manchester Madonna,

it already shows an artist who
does not go with the normal concepts,

so it's a very unusual iconography.

Even though the altarpiece
of The Entombment

ostensibly represents a very familiar
subject to visitors to that church...

This is the moment after Christ's
body has been lowered from the cross

and it's about to be carried
to the tomb in the far distance.

Traditionally that scene of the burial,
the entombment of the body of Christ,

the body of Christ is
represented horizontally,

being carried off centre
stage to left or right.

In this case Michelangelo
does an extraordinary thing.

He actually pivots the body of Christ

so that it's being held
up to the viewer, frontally,

and the viewer is confronted
with this nude body of Christ.

I think part of the
genius of this altarpiece

is that Michelangelo takes
a very traditional subject

and literally turns it on its head.

He pivots the entire composition
and transforms its meaning.

It's not a literal reading.

It's now an allegorical,
a spiritual meaning.

That body of Christ is being raised
up in front of us, for us, the beholder,

and it's been removed away from us.

Those figures are stepping back into space.

Some friends wrote from
Florence urging him to come back

because there was a good chance
that he might be able to make a statue

out of a block of marble
that was standing spoiled

in the Office of Works.

Michelangelo would probably have
known about the block of marble,

out of which David was
carved, from childhood.

The block had been quarried in
Carrara in the mid-15th century

and transported with
great difficulty probably

by sea and along the river Arno to Florence

with the idea of carving
precisely a figure of David

to be put right up on the
skyline of the Duomo in Florence.

That was why it was so big.

But that project had come to nothing.

The sculpture had been blocked out

by a 15th-century
sculptor, Agostino di Duccio,

and then left mouldering

in the yard of the Office of
Works of Florence cathedral

for 40 years and more.

Suddenly the project had been revived.

So Michelangelo effectively
dropped everything,

apparently stopped work on a painting
he was doing in Rome of The Entombment,

dashed up to Florence to make
sure that he would get the commission.

The problem that
Michelangelo was faced with

was that this block didn't
really have very much scope

to put a newly-designed figure in
because it had already been worked.

He does not call anyone to
help, any assistant. Nobody.

He had to be on his own.

Then he closes all the area with tents

so that nobody, nobody, could see
what was going on within that place

and he starts working night and day.

With the passion that he
had and all his ideas inside,

he had to be connected forever.

His name, Michelangelo, had to be
connected forever with the colossus

and the colossus would make his name,

the greatest sculptor forever, of all time.

Everybody wanted to have access
to the place and nobody could.

So he kept working

and in all the bars in Florence
nobody could stop talking

about Michelangelo working
like mad, night and day for months,

and days and nights and nights and days.

He couldn't care less
that there is a defect.

He was mad.

He was made mad by
creation. He couldn't care less.

Michelangelo's brilliant insight

and the way he was able
to convince the patrons

that he could get a sculpture
out of this already-worked stone

was that he was going
to take David's clothes off.

He was going to present him as naked,

which was a sensational idea really
for a public sculpture at that date

and also gave him more space.

The hand.

This is an incredible piece of art.

The hand alone is an
incredible piece of art,

with all the concentration
and the stress and the reflection

and all the thinking of David,
his concentration on this gesture,

and the strength and all the
blood coming through the veins.

And the eyes.

So in those details you can tell

it's probably the highest
achievement in marble sculpture.

Sculpture is about problem-solving.

It's about process and managing
a material, testing it to its limits.

It's also the engineering
of the imagination,

so trying to match the intention
with all the problems of making.

And the other thing you throw in

as soon as you start putting
real stuff in real places is scale,

and the scale of Michelangelo's
work is overwhelming.

It's designed to overwhelm
you, it's designed to reduce you.

David against Goliath, the giant,

and yet David is the giant.

He's a monumental,
magnificent, human figure,

even though he's meant
to portray or symbolise

the smaller one in the battle,
the weaker one in the battle.

There's nothing weak or
humble about that as a sculpture.

It became apparent that this was
just far too good a work to waste

by putting it out of the way
on the roof of the cathedral.

It needed to be seen from closer up.

What happened here is they had a
great work and didn't know where to put it.

So, at the end of 1504,
January, in the bitter cold,

when the work was almost completed,

a committee was assembled

which might be by a mile or so
the most star-studded art committee

ever put together, anywhere, ever,

containing among other people
Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli

and most of the great artists in Florence,

who sat to deliberate on the
question: "Where do we put David?"

One of the strange things
about that committee meeting

with Leonardo and so forth,

which actually a lot of
the participants mention,

is that, for some reason
unknown to posterity

and in fact to them, apparently,
Michelangelo wasn't there.

The whole question was debated,

and probably it wasn't
decided until even after that

that finally in May 1504

it would be put right outside
the palace of government

as an emblem of the Florentine state.

In Florence in the 1850s there
was a great, skilled plaster caster

whose name was Clemente Papi.

He was asked to make a copy of
Michelangelo's David for Florence

because they were worried
about the original marble

being exposed to the weather.

So they wanted a copy which is
indeed in the main square of Florence,

the Piazza della Signoria, even today.

When Clemente Papi made this marble copy,

he made a mould which could be
used to reproduce plaster copies as well

and it was literally thousands of pieces

that were put together and then sealed.

And if you look closely at
the cast that we have here

there are faint lines, casting lines,

where you can see how all
these pieces were fitted together.

In fact, the particular copy we have here

was presented by the Florentine
government to Queen Victoria as a gift.

I think the other thing that
people love about Michelangelo,

especially today,

is what is known as non finito,

this sense that some of his sculptures
seem, or indeed are, unfinished,

so you've not only got this
wonderful smooth, polished marble

with this illusionistic sense
of drapery or hair or skin,

but you've got very
rough, half-worked stone.

The sense of the artist at
work, the sense of process.

I think that's one of the things
you can also see very well

in these plaster casts because
you can get up close to them,

you can look at the surface

and the surface reflects very
accurately the original marble.

Pope Julius II called Michelangelo to Rome

and Michelangelo came.

But many months passed before Julius
II resolved in what way to employ him.

Ultimately it came into his head
to ask him to make his monument.

When he saw Michelangelo's
design it pleased him so much

that he at once sent him to Carrara
to quarry the necessary marbles.

Michelangelo stayed in those
mountains for more than eight months

with just two workmen and a horse,

and without any salary except his food.

I have placed orders for much of the marble

and have paid out money, setting
the men to work in various places.

Some of the places on
which I have spent money

have failed to yield suitable marble.

One block which I had already
begun to excavate proved to be faulty.

And those barges I
chartered at Pisa never arrived.

The central disaster
of Michelangelo's life,

certainly as he saw it

and as it's presented in the
authorised biography by Condivi,

was what he called, what Condivi
calls, the tragedy of the tomb.

It took just on 40 years to complete.

What was completed was
a very, very reduced version

of Michelangelo's original conception.

A lot of the sculptures

which we now value most by
Michelangelo and know best,

such as the Slaves, the
two Slaves in the Louvre,

the four in the Accademia
in Florence, are unfinished.

The ones in the Accademia
are very unfinished,

some of then scarcely
emerging from the marble block.

The reason why they're unfinished

is because Michelangelo
was constantly diverted

from projects which he couldn't complete.

The reason why he didn't complete them

was a combination of the
over-ambition of the projects,

his own disinclination to delegate
tasks, so he was a control freak.

And very soon Pope Julius wanted
to divert him onto the Sistine Chapel.

Secondarily, he started complaining

about the sheer cost of just
quarrying the stone for this thing.

He had other expenses.

Constant warfare, running the Church,

rebuilding St Peter's which was
the largest building in Christendom.

The whole thing is still
perhaps the best papal tomb

or even the best Italian Renaissance
tomb of the 16th century altogether,

but Michelangelo must have felt
it was botched and unsatisfactory.

He certainly indicated as much.

It filled him, I'm sure, when he looked
at it, with a sense of dissatisfaction.

The pope ordered that the
ceiling of the Sistine Chapel

should now be painted.

It seems that Bramante, the architect,
as a friend and relative of Raphael,

had tried to prevent the project
being assigned to Michelangelo.

But by the pope's commission,
Michelangelo was summoned.

The Sistine Chapel was organised,
was rebuilt, as it stands today,

by Sixtus IV

and it was also decorated
completely at the time of Sixtus IV.

Michelangelo is told which iconography
he should put onto that ceiling

and it's an iconography that has to fit

into the iconography that
already is in the chapel,

i.e. the Old and the New Testament,
and what is lacking is Genesis.

So he's asked to tell the
story of Genesis in the ceiling

and he's asked to do this in nine scenes.

The thing about the Sistine
ceiling is that you cannot look at it

without thinking about Michelangelo's
pain and danger when he made it.

Looking at it is a physical experience.

There was a poem where he
actually caricatures himself standing...

He's sort of standing
with one arm on his hip

and the other with his
paintbrush reaching up to the roof.

And he talks in the poem
about his face covered in paint,

he says he's spattered in colours.

I have already grown a
goitre at this drudgery,

as the water gives the cats in Lombardy,

or else it may be in some other country,

which sticks my stomach
by force beneath my chin.

With my beard toward heaven, I
feel my memory-box atop my hump.

I'm getting a harpy's breast.

And the brush that is always above my face,

by dribbling down, makes
it an ornate pavement.

My loins have entered my belly,

and I make my arse into a
crupper as a counterweight.

Without my eyes, my feet move aimlessly.

In front of me my hide is stretching out

and, to wrinkle up behind, it forms a knot,

and I am bent like a Syrian bow.

Therefore the reasoning
that my mind produces

comes out unsound and strange,

for one shoots badly
through a crooked barrel.

Giovanni, from now on defend
my dead painting and my honour

since I'm not in a good
position, nor a painter.

The ceiling basically is
divided in three sections

and they are subdivided into three scenes.

So the first part is the
creation of the world,

the second part is the creation of man

and the third part is the covenant,
the alliance between God and man.

So it's not the seven days of creation.

They're condensed into the three scenes

with the division of light and darkness,

the creation of sun and moon,

and then he goes on to the
creation of man with Adam and Eve

and with, of course, the fall of
man, which you have to have.

And then you have three scenes for Noah

and of course it's much more difficult
to subdivide Noah into three scenes,

so he ends up with the drunkenness of Noah

and he has the deluge in the centre

and that's probably the first fresco

with which he started
painting on the ceiling.

He worked in the chapel from 1508 to 1512,

so there is a kind of natural
evolution of what he's doing.

He also painted the ceiling in two halves.

So he started off over the entrance door

and he probably started
off with the deluge.

And then, as you do in
fresco, you work down,

so the lunettes with
the ancestors of Christ

he did when he finished the bay.

He also painted them,
these ancestors, fairly quickly.

There is no cartoon.

These huge lunettes
were painted in three days,

so it's quite a dynamic process also,

despite the fact that he prepares
the central scenes very carefully.

While he was painting, Pope Julius
went to see the work many times,

ascending the scaffolding by a ladder,

Michelangelo giving him his hand to
assist him onto the highest platform.

It is true that I have heard
Michelangelo complain

that the work was not finished
as he would have wished,

as the pope was in such a hurry.

One day he demanded when
he would finish the chapel.

Michelangelo replied, "When I can."

The pope, angered, added,

"Do you want me to have you
thrown down off this scaffolding?"

Michelangelo, hearing this, said to
himself, "No, that will not happen."

And as soon as the pope had left
he had the scaffolding taken down

and presented his work on All Saints Day.

He uses all his understanding

of three-dimensional experience and reality

to paint these figures in
such a kind of sculptural way,

they're almost not paintings.

There's just so much happening.

It's sort of deranged compositionally.

There's obviously a narrative

and different stories being
told around the ceiling,

but the thing that anchors

the whole crazy, teeming
orgy of figures and action

is that moment of touch at the centre

and I find that just so compelling.

And it does make you go
back to the Sistine Chapel

just again to see that point of contact

between the two chief protagonists in
the narrative, between God and Adam.

It is an artistic cliché as well

but it does generate everything.

And to understand Michelangelo,

to kind of penetrate his kind
of way of looking at the world,

you have to start with touch,

you have to start with
him touching the material,

touching the paper, touching space,

how he manipulated
architectural space as well,

but I think it all comes
back to that tactile reality.

This drawing is a study of a
male nude seen from behind.

It is one of the most important
of the Casa Buonarroti collection.

It is a preparatory study
for The Battle of Cascina,

intended for The Palazzo Vecchio.

We can gain a perfect understanding of
how Michelangelo drew the human body,

how he paid particular attention to
the anatomy of muscles, of tendons

because you can see a
real mastery of the subject.

He had obviously studied human
bodies, and perhaps also corpses

because you can so clearly
identify all the muscles.

Michelangelo was fascinated by movement,

with muscles tensed.

He never depicted a
nude in a resting position

but always in action,

sometimes in quite brutal movement.

There is a formalism,

which inspired and laid the
foundations for mannerism.

His deep interest founds
a study of anatomy,

a quest to understand
perfectly the human body.

At this time, Michelangelo drew
using a pen and the hatching technique.

Later, he changed to using a
pen for making quick sketches.

The materials that Michelangelo
used were very varied.

This was not completely
unusual for the time.

An artist would have been trained
to work in many different media.

He's incredibly famous for his
sculptures, the stone carving,

really incredibly tough-guy stuff,

but he also worked in
much quieter materials.

He used different kinds of paint.

He worked in egg
tempera early in his career,

later on he worked in fresco,

so he's working very
famously on the Sistine Chapel,

and different drawing materials.

When he's planning his
sculptures, he's planning by drawing

and he's making little maquettes,

little versions of the bigger
things using clay, using wax.

Some of these things still survive.

The ink that Michelangelo would have used

is made from these oak galls

and they're very rich in tannic acid

and you soak them in
rainwater for a couple of weeks.

There they are. They look
like gallstones or something.

And you combine the juice...

There it is.

With iron sulphate.

If it's going to be ink you
also add in some gum arabic.

You put the lid on and you shake it

and the mixture of the
two produces black ink.

And then it should go as black as that one.

Buonarroto, we have cast my statue
and I was not over-fortunate with it,

the reason being that Maestro Bernardino,

either through ignorance or misfortune,
failed to melt the metal sufficiently.

It would take too long to
explain how it happened.

Enough that my figure has
come out up to the waist,

the remainder of the metal,
half the bronze, that is to say,

having caked in the
furnace, as it had not melted.

I was ready to believe
that Maestro Bernardino

could melt his metal without fire,
so great was my confidence in him.

His failure has been costly
to him as well as to me,

for he has disgraced
himself to such an extent

that he dare not raise his eyes in Bologna.

There's lots of documented evidence
of Michelangelo as a bronze maker

but, sadly for us, they've all been lost.

So we've got here two
really enigmatic bronzes,

two sexy, nude guys sitting on the
back of these ferocious, growling panthers.

There's a pair.

Why are they sitting on
the back of these panthers?

Why have they got their mouths
open in gestures of defiance?

Why have they got their
arms raised in victory?

Really wonderful, but what do they mean?

Who made them? Where were they
made for? What was their purpose?

The first notice we have of them

is that they were purchased in
Venice in 1878 by Madame Rothschild

for a great deal of money with
an attribution to Michelangelo.

And for the last hundred or so years,

people have been trying to work out,

are they by Michelangelo or
are they by somebody else?

He has just finished
carving the colossal David.

He has just finished making

a three-times life-size bronze
portrait of Pope Julius II in bronze.

He's about to embark on
the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

He's full of fire, he's full of energy.

We feel that these bronzes can be
positioned at that point in his career.

So we did the visual
analysis with art historians.

We got the Rijksmuseum
conservation scientists in

to do a lot of technical analysis.

They showed many things: that
they were very thick-walled casts,

that the alloy is absolutely consistent
with early Renaissance bronzes.

The thick wall is also typical
of the technology of the period.

Basically, everything they discovered

is consistent with bronzes made
in the late 1400s and early 1500s.

The thing that gobsmacked me
was the perfection of the anatomy.

Every little detail, every little
bump was in the right place.

It was almost as if someone
had moulded a human in 3D

and "shrinky-dinked" it.

Now, we can do that nowadays

but that couldn't be done
in the beginning of the 1500s

and that's what surprised me.

It was before any textbook had been written

about the anatomy of the human body.

I think the truth is that
the person who did this

actually had dissected the human body.

There are two or three areas

where anyone who had not
dissected the human body

could not have made such beautiful statues.

So here from this anatomy textbook

we can see this beautiful triangle

that is bounded by trapezius,
latissimus dorsi and the scapula

and you can see there are
no muscles whatsoever in it.

In other words, it is a
complete bare triangle

known as the triangle of auscultation.

If we now look at the bronze,

we can see the same
triangle, in the same area.

There is the scapula with the raised arm.

And it shows that whoever did this bronze

had been into the human body

and realised that there
was no muscle in that area.

There were very few people in the
art world who had done dissection

and the only two that
had got detailed dissection

were Leonardo and Michelangelo.

I am almost certain from other
drawings I've seen of Michelangelo's

that this is the work of Michelangelo.

People have often said that
Michelangelo idealises the human body.

However, what he does is he
hyper-anatomises the human body.

And although all of the body
looked as if it was a bodybuilder,

which in fact it probably was,

it was probably a stonemason
that he used as his model,

in fact the accuracy is perfect.

I really do believe that at this date

there is nobody else with
the love of the male nude,

that skill, the understanding of anatomy

and the obsession with beauty,
with these binary oppositions,

who could have made them.

In 1520 it came into
the head of Pope Leo X,

who had succeeded Julius II,

to ornament the façade of
San Lorenzo, in Florence,

with sculpture and marble work.

This was the church built by
the great Cosimo de' Medici

and, except for the façade mentioned
above, was all completely finished.

Pope Leo sent for Michelangelo,
made him prepare a design

and then go to Florence
to oversee the work.

A lot of things happened to
him. He was working flat out,

although very little was
actually completed and installed.

And one of the things which happened to him

was that he became,
willy-nilly, a great architect.

He trained himself in the
elements of architecture.

He designed first of all
the façade of San Lorenzo,

which was a grand
composition we don't have,

except for a wooden model,

so that would have been a great
monument of his architecture.

Then he moved on to the
projects in the early 1520s.

He moved on to the projects at San Lorenzo,

the New Sacristy and the library

in which he developed an entirely
personal take on architecture.

Altogether it's an
extraordinary virtuoso display

of his sculptural and
architectural art at its height.

Inside the sacristy, adorning the walls,

Michelangelo built four tombs

to hold the bodies of the elder
Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano.

To one tomb he gave "Night" and "Day"

and to the other "Dawn" and "Dusk".

But what shall I say of the "Dawn",

a nude female figure

that seems designed to
arouse melancholy in the soul

and confound all styles of sculpture?

And what shall I say of the "Night",

a statue not so much rare as unique?

Who at any time, ancient or modern,
has ever seen a statue made like this?

For in her may be seen not only
the stillness of one who sleeps,

but the sorrow and melancholy

of one who has lost
something great and worthy.

While Michelangelo was giving all
his love and care to these great works,

he was suddenly in the year 1530
interrupted by the siege of Florence

by the Medici Pope Clement
VII seeking to regain power.

Michelangelo had to put
the statues to one side

for he was now given the
task of fortifying the territory.

The citizens of Florence had
entrusted to Michelangelo's care

the fortifications of the city,

but a surrender agreement was signed

and the pope's commissioners
had orders to arrest and imprison

citizens most involved in the opposing
factions, including Michelangelo.

But Michelangelo had secretly fled to
the home of one of his closest friends

where he remained hidden
until the uproar had blown over

and Pope Clement had
remembered Michelangelo's talents

and had ordered that he be left alone.

Michelangelo was hunted for having
been an active defender of Florence.

He hid somewhere in the cellars of
San Lorenzo monastery for several months

and he had time on his hands.

While in hiding,

he could well have found a piece of marble,

not of particularly high
quality and not the best shape,

but enough to carry out a
design he had in mind for years.

And it's worth noting that
he left the statue unfinished

because things changed once again.

He was released and
continued living his normal life.

Michelangelo remains a key
artist of the Renaissance period.

In the centre of his works is man,

his emotional experiences,
his sufferings and his joy.

And this statue is a perfect example.

Here we see a man who is in
some sort of difficult position.

He is being suppressed and yet,
he preserves an inner force to resist.

He was an armed rebel who
might well have been executed.

In fact Clement took the view

that Michelangelo was simply too
much of an asset to the house of Medici.

He left strict instructions
that Michelangelo

should be treated with care and solicitude

and he was put back to work on
the Medici tombs in the New Sacristy

as soon as possible.

He was consistent as an architect,
as a sculptor and as a painter.

He possessed a unique and personal view,

which attracted the
admiration of other artists.

Vasari used to talk about his terribilità,

in other words, the terrific
magnificence of his compositions

which annihilated his contemporaries.

Other artists admired his works,
but they immediately understood

the huge gap between them and
the divine Michelangelo Buonarroti.

You can see that also on these studies

for the stairs of the
Laurentian Library entrance.

This was completed some years later,

when Michelangelo was away from Florence.

The Duke consulted him

to come up with new ideas,
new prototypes, new projects,

such as this one,

the study for the stairs of the
vestibule in the Laurentian Library.

This study displays various stages
in the planning of this structure

which was finally completed and
nowadays forms part of San Lorenzo.

One of the most extraordinary parts of
the Laurentian Library is the staircase

which flows out into the
vestibule like lava from a volcano.

It's not like any staircase that
anyone had conceived before.

It's like a living, moving,
slightly alarming thing.

It so fills the space that there's
not much room for anything else.

There's a slightly menacing quality to it

but there's also a quality of enormous
imaginative originality and grandeur.

The column, of course, is
the element in the architecture

that's holding the building.

Now, in the Laurentian Library,

he is doing precisely the opposite.

He's doing what the engineer is doing.

He shows you that the
wall is holding the building

and that the column is
just a decorative element

so he puts that into a little niche.

He can play with the
language of architecture

to an extent which very few architects

in the history of architecture have done.

And he takes this to the
extreme in the Porta Pia

at the same time when he is
still vaulting the cupola of St Peter,

and that shows you the
enormous range that he has

and the intellectual investment that
he puts into all three genres of art,

painting, sculpture and drawing.

We mustn't forget his
enormous creativity in drawings.

Michelangelo has often
produced beautiful drawings,

like those he sent in the past
to his friend, Gherardo Perini,

or those sent more recently to
Master Tommaso dei Cavalieri,

a Roman gentleman, who has
some stupendous examples.

Michelangelo sketched throughout
his life as studies for his works of art,

for his sculptures and
paintings and architecture,

but the presentation drawings
don't have any further purpose.

They are finished works
of art in their own right.

He tends not to work very much
in mythology in his other works.

It's much more common
in the presentation drawings

than in his painting and
sculpture, for example.

And I think it's the underlying
powerful human themes

that you find throughout
Greek and Roman mythology

that must have appealed to Michelangelo

in trying to put across some
message, maybe an elusive message,

but nonetheless some message
in the presentation drawings.

Phaeton was the son of Apollo, the sun god,

and he begged his father for permission
to drive the sun chariot for one day

but he drove it too
high and the earth froze,

he drove it too low and the earth boiled,

and the people of the earth begged
Jupiter to do something about this

and Jupiter struck
Phaeton with a thunderbolt,

knocked the chariot down to earth,

and that's what Michelangelo
has depicted in this drawing here.

You see Jupiter astride the eagle,

Phaeton falling with the chariot
and four horses towards the earth,

his sisters being transformed
into trees in the next episode below,

the god of the river
Eridanus in which Phaeton fell

and you can see the water flowing
out of his urn there to make the river,

and his cousin Cycnus who's
been transformed into a swan.

And this conjures up themes of hubris,
of taking on more than one should,

of maybe too much
self-regard, too much grandiosity,

and, in that context, it should
be seen as a moral warning

to the recipient of the drawing.

Michelangelo, who was then in his late 50s,

gave the drawing to the young Roman
nobleman, Tommaso dei Cavalieri.

Michelangelo had been writing
to Tommaso from Florence

over a period of about two months
while he was working on this drawing

and so Tommaso and other people in Rome

who knew that Michelangelo
was doing this sort of drawing

were expecting it

and clearly when they set eyes on it

there was no disappointment
in the splendour of the drawing,

quite unlike anything
Michelangelo had done before.

Just as within pen and ink

there exist the lofty and the
low and the middling style,

and within marbles are
images rich or worthless,

depending on what our
talents can draw out of them,

thus, my dear lord,

there may be in your breast as
much pride as acts of humility.

But I only draw out of it what's
suitable and similar to me,

as my face shows.

As earthly rain from
heaven, single and pure,

is turned into various
forms by various seeds,

one who sows sighs and tears and pains

harvests and reaps from
them sorrow and weeping,

and one who looks on high
beauty from great sadness

is sure to draw from it
harsh pain and suffering.

The drawing depicts
the Punishment of Tityus,

one of the giants of Roman mythology

who was condemned to be chained
to a rock in Hades for all eternity

and have his liver ripped
out by a vulture each day.

Every night the liver would grow back

and the punishment would
continue day after day.

And Michelangelo has shown him on his rock

with a vulture that looks
very much like an eagle.

The rock is sort of isolated.

The idea is that this
punishment is continuing

without any possibility of succour.

No one can relieve
Tityus from this torment.

The only other figure that we see

is this screaming,
mask-like face in a tree.

It's clearly a soul that's
been trapped in a tree,

again suffering some eternal torment.

And by working the
drawing in a range of finish,

starting with it quite
sketchy around the outside

and bringing it into focus

on this extraordinarily
richly-modelled torso and leg of Tityus,

Michelangelo focuses attention
on the suffering of Tityus

at the centre of this composition.

It's an absolute tour
de force in modelling.

The torso is done not
by blending the strokes

but by stippling of a finely-pointed chalk

and Michelangelo has built the torso
up almost as if he's carving into marble.

Pope Paul III took
Michelangelo into his service

and desired him to continue what he
had begun in the time of Pope Clement,

namely, to paint the end
wall of the Sistine Chapel,

which had already been roughly covered

and screened off with
boards from floor to ceiling.

There are infinite details
which I pass over in silence.

It is enough that, besides
the divine composition,

all that the human figure is
capable of in the art of painting

is here to be seen.

With The Last Judgement he's
punched a great hole effectively

in the altar wall. There's no frame.

It's just all picture as if the end
of the chapel had been torn away

and we see this vision of the end
of the world with Christ in judgement

and we see it, characteristically
for Michelangelo,

almost entirely in terms
of the muscular nude body.

So what you see there is a
wall of flesh, intertwined nudes,

expressing his conceptions and
perhaps anxieties about salvation.

Painted on the flayed
skin of St Bartholomew,

which is sort of wiggling
there like a wetsuit,

held by the saint as his attribute,

Michelangelo has almost
put a caricature of himself.

It's his face.

It's the only absolutely
definite self-portrait we have,

at least in painting.

He was a man in his mid-to late-60s

when he was painting this huge painting,

almost single-handedly, with one assistant,

and salvation must have been on his mind,

or certainly death would have
been on his mind at that point.

The Pietà is a composition

that is in between a
deposition and a lamentation

over the body of the dead Christ.

And Michelangelo carved
it, or started to carve it,

for a very personal purpose.

This group was supposed to
be installed on his own tomb

in one of the Roman churches.

In the composition we see four figures.

One is the dead body of Christ,
the other one is Mary the Virgin,

and the other is Mary Magdalene,

and on the top of the composition

there is a hooded man who
is assumed to be Nicodemus.

It was started by Michelangelo when
he was already 72 years old, in 1547.

He was furious about this piece of marble.

It was full of flaws.

He couldn't obtain exactly what
he was supposed to get from it

so he started to destroy
it with hammer strokes.

His servants, his assistants,
stopped him just in time,

but it was already broken.

Then Tiberio Calcagni, who was a
young Florentine assistant of Michelangelo,

and Francesco Bandini,
another Florentine, a banker...

Those two put together again the pieces,

and Francesco Bandini
installed the group in his garden.

The hooded figure that
we think is Nicodemus

is almost certainly a
self-portrait of Michelangelo

and this has, of course, a
profound and touching meaning,

because Nicodemus in
the gospel is a wise man

who has doubts about Christ's words
that we are supposed to be born again.

The Pietà deeply reflects
Michelangelo's attitude

towards his own life and
towards his own death.

When he built the cupola of St Peter's,

he was over 70 years old

and he still thought he could produce

24 pieces of sculpture bigger than Moses

to put around the dome of the cupola.

So what do you make of a man like this?

He knew he was mortal but
he would never stop thinking,

he would never stop challenging himself.

And I think this gives you an idea
of the tension that was in this person.

And, you know, he never resolved the Pietà

but he still had this vision
for the cupola of St Peter's.

Towards the end of his life
he destroyed quite a lot of work

that he wasn't happy with.

He wouldn't let something go

if he didn't feel it truly
represented his genius.

Genius is a very problematic
word for me to apply to an artist

but it's hard to avoid it when
it comes to Michelangelo.

Those whose taste is whole and sound

draw much delight
from works of the first art,

which reproduces for us the faces
and gestures of the human body

in wax, clay, or stone,

with limbs even more alive.

If harsh, coarse and offensive time

should then disfigure, or break,
or dismember it completely,

the beauty that once existed is remembered

and preserves our vain
pleasure for a better place.