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By Ross King (Walker & Co., 304 pages, $28) Despite the carping of a few nitpickers who preferred seeing it through centuries of accumulated grime and varnish, the brilliant restoration of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes, depicting the biblical creation story, has proved to be one of the past century's greatest gifts to art lovers. Now the artist's inspired commingling of the divine and the erotic, the pagan and the Judeo-Christian, returned to its radiant original beauty, can challenge its viewers as never before.With the restoration of this profound work now complete, Ross King, in a new biographical study, Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling, gives general readers a fresh look at the story of its installation. King has his own cleaning work to do. Just as the Sistine ceiling had accumulated layers of obscuring materials, so have Michelangelo's personality and reputation accumulated layers of mythology over the centuries since the work was completed in 1512.
One of the most persistent myths portrays the great artist working entirely alone, lying on his back on the scaffolding, occasionally climbing down to engage in violent arguments with his patron, Pope Julius III. This image of Michelangelo, confirmed in popularity by Charlton Heston's role in the 1965 film The Agony and the Ecstasy, draws its appeal from the romantic modern notion of the artist as an autonomous creator. King, using the best of recent scholarship, shows that while Michelangelo may have been irascible, he took a collaborative, pragmatic approach to the problems posed by the Sistine Chapel project. King reveals that Michelangelo designed and constructed an arched scaffolding that allowed him and his numerous assistants to work on the ceiling standing up. He did have to bend backward a good deal, which caused discomfort, but he never worked lying down. He also needed a team of assistants to tear off the original plaster, build scaffolding, mix pigments, and even to apply colors under his direction, once the outline of Michelangelo's design was transferred to the wet plaster.
Pope Julius was indeed an ambitious egotist, but even though Michelangelo ignored the Pope's hackneyed ideas for the ceiling's design, Julius turned his attention mostly to his military campaigns. Any arguments Michelangelo had over the project were with lower-ranking Vatican bureaucrats. The Pope also took quite a chance in giving the commission to an artist known primarily as a sculptor and having only limited experience in fresco painting. King uses the restoration research to demonstrate how much Michelangelo struggled with his initial work on Noah and the Deluge, gradually gaining technical and artistic confidence as he moved toward the creation scenes.
King also gives fairly short shrift to the problematic issue of Michelangelo's homosexuality. While granting that the bachelor artist had no known sexual relationships with women and always used male figure models, even for female subjects, he points out that Michelangelo was a man of stern, apocalyptic faith, much influenced by the fire and brimstone sermons of the Florentine monk, Savanorola. His statue of David and the great decorative male nudes that flank the creation scenes on the Sistine ceiling are charged with erotic potential as expressions of divine life force, but they're never sexually voluptuous like the nudes of Raphael or Titian. King surmises that Michelangelo probably subsumed his sexual urges into his art and remained basically celibate.
In addition to offering a refreshing, realistic account of the actual work of creating the Sistine Chapel frescoes, King places the work in the context of the times: the decadence of the papacy under the Borgias, Julius's punitive military measures against the city-states, the French invasion of Italy, and visits to Rome by the Renaissance humanist Erasmus and the future leader of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther. King also gives a compelling portrait of Raphael, Michelangelo's younger contemporary and competitor, as he was simultaneously working in the papal apartments on his own set of frescoes.
The book includes a color reproduction of the entire restored ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the illustrations, but enthusiastic readers should have a larger, coffee-table edition of the restored frescoes handy. One of the best is The Sistine Chapel: A Glorious Restoration, edited by Pierluigi de Vecchi and Diana Murphy, which provides excellent, enlarged color reproductions of the entire ceiling.
Although he shows how the Michelangelo most educated people think they know has little basis in fact, King's demythologizing portrait of a simpler, more team-oriented man of his time does nothing to diminish Michelangelo's stature or accomplishment. He did, after all, imagine the Creation and paint the face of God.
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Calendar
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ANNIE LEIBOVITZ / WORK @ Mint Museum Uptown at Levine Center for the Arts
- Tuesdays-Sundays, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Continues through Aug. 31
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Summer arts camps @ McDowell Arts Center
- Mondays-Fridays, 12:30-4 p.m. Continues through Aug. 23
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NoDa Bizarre @ Johnston YMCA
- Sat., Aug. 2, 12-8 p.m.
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Color Riot Exhibition Opening - Artists Exploring Boundaries @ Clearwater Artist Studios
- Sat., Aug. 2, 6-9 p.m.
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The Dinner Detective True Crime Murder Mystery Dinner Show - Charlotte, NC @ DoubleTree by Hilton South Charlotte Tyvola.
- Sat., Aug. 2, 6-8:30 p.m. and Sat., Aug. 23, 6-8:30 p.m.
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More Spring Events
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Monster Mash in the Q.C.
Wolfman gets kicked off the kick line
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A Midsummer's Wet Dream
But The Farm shouts down Genet
