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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.

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,

"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.

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.