Original subtitles

Welcome to Great Art.

For the past few years, we've been filming the biggest exhibitions

in the world, about the greatest artists in art and history.

Often we record these landmark shows

while securing privileged access behind the scenes

of the galleries and museums concerned.

But sometimes, it just feels the right time to take another look

at one of the giants of artistic history.

To look afresh, not based on any current exhibition,

of their life and work.

And in 2017, that was how we felt

about Michelangelo, painter, poet,

sculptor and architect.

Poles have consistently put him,

or one of his works, notably, the Sistine Chapel walls and ceiling,

at the top, above all others.

We wanted to explore why.

From the many centuries of artistic output,

why is this man chosen more than Leonardo, more than Rembrandt,

more than Van Gogh, to hold the title of the greatest artist of all time?

Perhaps it's an impossible question to answer.

Maybe we should explore and celebrate the greats

without trying to rank them.

But certainly, it makes sense to take a closer look

at the life and work of Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti.

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 Ludovico 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, Ludovico, judicial officer of the township

of Chiusi and Caprese,

in the diocese of Arezzo,

a son was born, on the 6th of March,

a Sunday.

I think there were a handful of artists

who are the greatest.

There's Leonardo da Vinci,

Rembrandt, Picasso.

But I think Michelangelo's the artist

that once you start looking and thinking about his work,

your sense of awe increases more and more.

And really, whether he's doing something, a small drawing,

or a poem, or a massive sculpture,

he's always dealing with the strangest and darkest

and most difficult thoughts. He's always dealing with

what it is to be alive 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.

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,

a few rents, and his mother died when he was seven.

He had five brothers,

and was brought up by his father and his uncle.

Subsequently lived in a pretty male world

of artist workshops, the papal court.

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 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 the 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, a poet of enormous cultivation.

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,

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've originally been on there.

We can imagine that the wounds of Christ would've had blood,

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

That not withstanding 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.

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 most 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 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, kind of,

deeply, deeply personal image

of what it would be like to lose yourself totally

in the senses, and in the irrational.

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 Lagraulas

wanted to leave a fitting memorial of himself in Rome,

he was eager to employ such a rare artist.

And he commissioned a marble Pieta in the round,

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

The Pieta 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 adversement for himself.

It's the only work which he signs.

You know, Mary is a mountain in that work.

The kind of 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.

You know, everything that's become embodied in that stone

has kind of, sort of,

failed, and is laid across her.

And she supports his weight,

so, kind of, easily, effortlessly.

Her kind of strength at the moment of his weakness

is so emotionally powerful.

And there she is, this kind of

mother church, supporting this figure

that has died in such anguish.

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 it transported to Rome.

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

Actually, fantastically smooth, almost glassy.

Would've reflected light in a beautiful way.

I belong to a family tradition

that last since the beginning of the 18th Century,

and the reason why it is a marble workshop,

we're 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're one aside 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.

To face 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 gonna 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 the clay modelling.

Whereas in the marble carving,

it's only to remove material.

You cannot add what's been removed before.

After that, you reach the finishing phase and the polishing.

So the sense of taking away and taking away,

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

and then that kind of,

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.

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 difficult probably,

by sea, 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 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'd already been worked.

He does not call anyone to help,

any assistant. Nobody. It had to be on his own.

Then he closes all the area with the tents

so that nobody could see

what was going on within that place,

and he starts working night and day.

With the passion that he got, and all of his ideas.

Inside it 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, and so, he kept working.

And all the bars in Florence, nobody could stop talking

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

and days and nights, and days.

He couldn't care less there is a defect.

He was 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.

Only the hand is an incredible piece of art,

with all the concentration and the stress,

and the reflection, and all the thinking of David,

is concentrated on this gesture and the strength.

All the blood coming through the veins, you know,

and the eyes.

So in those details, you can tell

he's probably the highest achievement

in marble sculpture.

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

to waste by putting it out of the way on a roof of the cathedral.

It needed to be seen from closer up.

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.

Pope Julius II called Michelangelo to Rome,

and Michelangelo came.

But many months past 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.

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 them scarcely emerging from the marble block.

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've felt it was botched and unsatisfactory.

He certainly indicated as much,

and 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 to 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.

And Michelangelo now 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.

And there's a poem where he actually caricatures himself standing.

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

and the other, his paintbrush, reaching up to the roof, his face,

and he talks in the poem about his face covered in paint.

He says he's spattered in colours.

I've already grown a goitre at this tragedy,

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 ass into a cropper 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 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,

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

and with, of course, the fall of men,

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 1508-1512.

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 a bay.

And he also painted 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.

It's sort of deranged,

a composition lay,

and 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 kind of point of contact

between the two chief protagonists in the narrative,

between God and Adam.

I mean, it is an artistic cliche as well,

but it does generate everything,

and to understand Michelangelo,

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

you have to start with touch.

You have to start with him touching the material,

touching the paper.

You know, touching space.

How he kind of manipulated architectural space as well.

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

The materials that Michelangelo used

were very varied.

This was not completely unusual for the time.

An artist would've been trained to work in many different media,

and... I mean, he's incredibly famous

for his sculptures, the stone carving.

Really, incredibly tough guy stuff.

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've used

was 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...

Here it is.

..with iron sulphate.

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...

there's black, and there's that one.

Buonarotto, 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 meld 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 the gesture 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 100 or so years,

people have been trying to work out, really, are they by Michelangelo,

or are they by somebody else?

He's just finished carving the colossal David,

he's just finished making a three-times-over-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.

And 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 know 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.

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

that this is the work of Michelangelo.

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

who had succeeded Julius II,

to ornament the facade of San Lorenzo, in Florence,

with sculpture and marblework.

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

and, except for the facade 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 completely and installed,

and one of the things which happened to him was that he became,

willy-nilly, a great architect.

Trained himself in the elements of architecture.

He designed, first of all, the facade of San Lorenzo,

which was a grand composition we don't have,

except for a wooden model, so that would've 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, architectural art at its height.

One of the most extraordinary parts of the Lorenzo 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, because 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.

Inside the sacristy, adorning the walls,

Michelangelo built four tombs

to hold the bodies of the elder Lorenzo and his brother, Juliano.

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.

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.

Michelangelo has often produced beautiful drawings.

Like those he sent in the past with friend, Gherardo Perini.

Although sent more recently to master Tommaso dei Cavalieri,

a Roman gentleman who has some stupendous examples.

Michelangelo's sketched throughout his life

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 paintings and sculpture, for example.

And I think it's the underlying powerful human themes

that you find throughout Greek and Roman mythology.

That must've appealed to Michelangelo,

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

but nonetheless, some message in the presentation drawings.

You see Jupiter astride the eagle,

Phaethon 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 Phaethon fell,

and you can see the water flowing out of his urn there

to make the river. And his cousin Cygnus has been transformed

into a swan.

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 recipients 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. 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.

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, from 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 absolute definite self portrait

we have, at least in painting.

And 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've been on his mind,

certainly death would've been on his mind at that point.

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 to think.

He would never stop to challenge himself.

Towards the end of his life he destroyed a lot of work as well

that he wasn't happy with. Yet 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 cause and offensive times

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.

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