High Renaissance: Florence and Rome
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Toward The High Renaissance
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Michelangelo, Pietà
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Michelangelo, David
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Representations of David in the Florentine Renaissance
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Michelangelo, Moses
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Michelangelo, Slaves
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Michelangelo, Last Judgment
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Michelangelo, Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel
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Michelangelo, Laurentian Library
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Leonardo da Vinci, Letter to the Duke of Milan
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Leonardo, Adoration of the Magi
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Leonardo, Virgin of the Rocks
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Leonardo, Last Supper
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Leonardo, Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist (Burlington House Cartoon)
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Leonardo, Mona Lisa
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Raphael, Marriage of the Virgin, 1504
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Raphael, Madonna of the Goldfinch
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Raphael, La belle jardinière
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Raphael, School of Athens
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Raphael, Alba Madonna
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Raphael, Portrait of Pope Julius II
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Raphael, Galatea
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Bramante, Tempietto
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Bramante, et.al., Saint Peter's Basilica
Michelangelo, Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel Michelangelo, Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, 1508-12 (Vatican, Rome) Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris, Dr. Steven Zucker For more: http://www.smarthistory.org/sistine-chapel-ceiling.html
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- This is Sez Zabelin,
- - and this is Max Newbold.
- We are Second Life correspondents for smARThistory.
- Here we are on the Vassar College campus in Second Life,
- looking at the Sistine Chapel recreation
- by Stan Frangible.
- It's a fabulous recreation.
- We owe enormous debt to Vassar for doing this for everybody.
- One of the things we're so excited about Second Life is its ability
- to really show paintings in context, in architectural context.
- Instead of looking at isolated photographs of a painting by Michelangelo,
- you can really see how they function in space and time.
- So let's go in.
- Terrific!
- Here we are inside the Chapel.
- I thought actually maybe we should start by talking about where the chapel is.
- I mean, right here in Second Life we're in the middle of the Vassar Campus, but -
- -Which is not really where . . .
- -It's not really where the chapel is.
- So the actual Sistine Chapel of course, is in the city of Rome,
- but in the nation-state of Vatican City.
- -The Vatican. Right.
- Right. And it's actually just to the right of St. Peter's Basilica.
- If you were looking at St. Peter's,
- it would be a small building,
- really kind of hidden, just to the right.
- It's used - its primary purpose is as the site where all the cardinals gather, the cardinal conclave -
- -to choose the next pope.
- Right. So for a while, when that happens, all the cardinals gather there,
- and the room is closed down, the space is closed down, and the cardinals select the next pope.
- So it's a very important space.
- It's a pretty wonderful, really ancient ceremony.
- The cardinals come, they vote, they argue with each other;
- and if they're successful, they send up literally a smoke signal.
- [chuckling] Isn't that amazing?
- It's great. It's really great.
- Okay, so let's talk about how the Sistine Chapel came to be.
- We know that - well, the chapel was built. It had a -
- -by Sixtus -
- - by Pope Sixtus, but it had a very plain, sort of typically adorned ceiling;
- and Pope Julius II [the Second] commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
- But there is a story behind that.
- Because before this moment in Michelangelo's career,
- he was primarily, almost exclusively, a sculptor.
- He really didn't paint. And in fact,
- we even get the sense from the biographies of Michelangelo that he disdained painting.
- Yes, we think he might have learned painting in the studio of Ghirlandaio, as an apprentice.
- And there are some oil paintings from earlier in his career.
- But he was clearly a sculptor, right? He had already sculpted David . . .
- This was his genius!
- He had already sculpted the Pietà . . . right.
- and he was extraordinary.
- He worked in stone . . . he was a massive figure.
- Michelangelo himself was just an aggressive guy . . . he was tall,
- he was big, and he threw his arms, his hammers, his chisels, at stone all day!
- And so, the idea of the more delicate sort of process of painting -
- -not very Michelangelo-ish, was it?
- No, not at all. So there's this great story about how he got the commission.
- We don't know how true it is, of course.
- No. It could entirely be legend.
- There was a man who was much younger than Michelangelo,
- but who knew Michelangelo at the end of his life, Giorgio Vasari,
- who wrote The Lives of the Painters, The Lives of the Artists,
- sort of a first compendium of the great Italian painters.
- And he speaks at length about how Michelangelo got the commission.
- The problem with Vasari is that he loves Michelangelo,
- so you have to take everything with a bit of a grain of salt.
- But, the story is worth it nevertheless.
- The short version is that Michelangelo had been such a success at sculpture
- that the other sculptors, and even painters, were fed up with him;
- and they wanted to make him less in the eyes of the Pope.
- Right, and the Pope, Pope Julius II, had already called Michelangelo to Rome to work for him
- and assigned him the task of sculpting the Pope's tomb.
- Oh, that's right!
- So, Michelangelo was at work on the tomb of Pope Julius II, and Michelangelo's -
- -He's desperate to finish it!
- Right, and he wants to finish it-
- - but Bramante and Raphael, who both want to lessen Michelangelo's stature in the eyes of the pope,
- suggest to the pope that Michelangelo should get the commission to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel -
- - Right, because really what they want to do is take him away from sculpture, because he's so great.
- In addition, Vasari says that since he didn't really paint,
- that if he was given this grand commission,
- not only would it literally get him out of the way for years, but it would -
- probably the final product would be nothing special, and he would be lessened.
- Right, and other artists, like Raphael, who was also painting in the Vatican at the same time,
- painting the Stanze, would look like the greatest painter.
- But it didn't work out that way.
- [chuckling] No, it didn't work out that way. So, Michelangelo got the commission . . .
- Although he didn't want it!
- No. In fact, he refused it in the beginning.
- Over and over again. But the Pope had a way of getting his way.
- Yes, he did. They were both strong-minded, but the Pope won out;
- and Michelangelo did paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
- So, actually, this is a good moment to thank Pope Julius II,
- and to remember the importance of the patron here.
- That's true. We might even thank Michelangelo's enemies, Raphael and Bramante.
- Maybe, maybe! Okay, so, Michelangelo painted the ceiling, and it's a very -
- in fresco! Traditional buon fresco: that is to take wet plaster, put it up,
- and put a kind of watercolor-like pigment on it which then literally soaks up into the wall,
- and it doesn't sit on the surface of the wall -
- It becomes the wall, the plaster.
- The wall itself is stained with the color.
- Right. And Michelangelo had a team of assistants that were assigned to him in the very beginning,
- to work with him, as many artists did back then.
- They had workshops, and assistants, who would have mixed the paint,
- and helped him on the subsidiary parts of the paintings-
- - But Michelangelo, we're told, again from Vasari, had such high expectations -
- not only for himself, but for art as a whole -
- when he looked at the work of these assistants, he was completely dissatisfied.
- Right. And he fired them. So -
- He kicked them out and wouldn't actually let them in anymore.
- That's right. He wouldn't let anyone in.
- He wouldn't let anybody see him -
- - according to Vasari -
- - not even the Pope.
- Right. So really, when we talk about the ceiling, we're talking about the work of a single man, right?
- Who produces this entire painting within four years. It's extraordinary.
- Right. Hard to talk about it has a painting . . .
- And he also designed the scaffolding that he stood on.
- Right, because he was dissatisfied with Bramante's design for the scaffolding,
- which would have left holes in the ceiling when it was dismantled.
- Right. And so, a lot of people have this false idea that Michelangelo painted on his back,
- because of the movie of The Agony and the Ecstasy.
- But we know in fact that Michelangelo painted standing up -
- -With a crooked neck.
- With a crooked - Well, standing up, and you know, painting a ceiling!
- And painting a ceiling is a really hard thing to do!
- He actually wrote a poem about how his neck hurt, how his back hurt,
- how paint was falling on his face, and it was just a horrible job!
- It's a lot of work. And the ceiling is huge!
- And it hurt like hell!
- It's just a really big space to paint.
- It really is. And it's curved, right, the vault is slightly curved, as we can see.
- So maybe we should talk just a little bit about the structure?
- Sure.
- Because it's a pretty complicated space.
- It is.
- He doesn't paint one scene; it's actually many, many scenes.
- It is many, many scenes; down the center of the ceiling are the most obvious scenes -
- - and the most famous.
- Right, those large rectangular scenes -
- We'll get to those later.
- Okay. Maybe first we should talk about the seated figures in between those triangular spaces.
- Okay, and maybe we actually even want to spend a moment talking about the triangular spaces,
- and sort of the architecture.
- All of the architectural detail that we're seeing separating these scenes?
- Yes.
- Much of it . . . some of it is true.
- Some of it is real, some of it is architectural.
- But a lot of it is painted.
- Right, okay. So let's talk about that first.
- The only part of it that's real is the molding framing those triangular scenes.
- All of the other stonework - all of the other plasterwork - is painted.
- It's complete illusion.
- It's not real stonework. I know.
- It's complete illusion!
- I know. I have to tell you that when I was a kid and I looked at Michelangelo books,
- I could not believe that that was paint.
- I thought for sure that that was, you know, molding and architec-
- And what's fabulous is the light is coming in the windows on one side of the chapel,
- and he's actually responding to where that natural light is coming in from,
- so there's this kind of consistency, and it's just . . .
- it just looks right.
- Yes, it looks like architecture.
- It's fabulous. Okay. So then, the triangles.
- Okay, so inside the triangles, and in the lunettes above the windows,
- are figures who are the ancestors of Christ.
- According to the traditions of Catholicism.
- Right. According to the New Testament and the traditions of the Church,
- Christ could trace his lineage back to the House of King David.
- Okay. And so, this is - that's actually a really important point.
- Yes, it is important.
- Because what that's doing is,
- it's embedding the New Testament in the Old Testament, in the great Judaic tradition.
- Right. It sort of says, you know, Christ is the Messiah.
- The prophets predicted that the Messiah would come from the House of David,
- and indeed, Christ's ancestry - so the Church said -
- went back to the House of King David.
- And what's really interesting is, Michelangelo's being -
- is looking back, of course, to the prophets, the Judaic prophets,
- but he's also looking outside of the Judaic tradition,
- to the Sibyls and to the other foretellers of the future.
- And one example of that is the Libyan Sibyl, who is one of my favorite figures.
- Yes. So, the Sibyls are figures from classical antiquity,
- who, like the prophets, had foretold the coming of a savior.
- And in this case of course, that's understood as Christ.
- Right. And so, we have the Libyan Sibyl, who's one of the most fabulous figures -
- Ahh, she's gorgeous!
- I know.
- But you know what's so interesting, look at the power of that body.
- She's massive.
- You know, it's impossible to look at Michelangelo's painting and forget that
- he's a sculptor first and foremost. These are sculptural figures.
- They are. And what amazes me about her is how enormous her body is,
- how monumental and at the same time, this amazingly graceful twist to her body,
- Oh, that torsion is incredible!
- so we see her back as she twists, she tilts her neck back,
- and then we see her legs from profile view and then she rests on these very graceful toes.
- I know! It's fabulous.
- It's just a very, very elegant figure.
- He, Michelangelo - what this really expresses is his understanding of the anatomy of the body;
- but then also, how its force can function symbolically as an expression of the Divinity.
- Yes! That's very important here.
- Because of course the Prophet and the Sibyls were in touch with the Divine,
- and that's how they were able to prophesy the coming of Christ.
- So it's interesting. Instead of using the medieval or Early Renaissance traditions of the halo,
- of the wings, the sort of props of divinity,
- That's right.
- Michelangelo's really using the power and majesty of the body to express that beauty.
- Yes. And that's something that Michelangelo did throughout his career, right?
- To express very spiritual ideas through the body.
- It's absolutely true.
- And so, all of those seated figures are prophets and Sibyls in between the triangular spaces.
- And then, should we go on to the rectangular scenes down the center?
- Absolutely.
- All right so, all of the scenes down the center are scenes from the -
- -Old Testament -
- -from the book of Genesis.
- That's the first book of the Bible.
- Right. So we begin the ceiling with the Creation, and the separation of light and darkness.
- The creation of the planets.
- Right. And then we have -
- There's the separation of land and sea.
- . . . land and sea. Then we have the creation of Adam,
- the creation of Eve, right -
- -which is by the way, a smaller scene than the creation of Adam -
- Yes, it is. Then we have the temptation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden
- combined with the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.
- So it's really two scenes in one frame.
- Then we have the sacrifice of Noah -
- - the Flood -
- the Flood, and then the drunkenness of Noah ends.
- It's interesting that there's this real interest in Noah in those last three scenes.
- It is interesting. And so, really, what's interesting to me is that
- this is really, you know, this is the Old Testament on the ceiling.
- You know, Christ never appears expressly anywhere on the ceiling!
- But, he is implied everywhere. Everywhere.
- He is implied everywhere, and that's the really beautiful part about it;
- because everywhere one looks, one is reminded of God's plan:
- from the very moment of the Creation, God's plan for mankind,
- to save mankind, through the sacrifice of Christ.
- And as if that's not enough,
- I'm just shocked and awed by the plan of Michelangelo to carry this out.
- [laughs] Yes! It is amazing, isn't it?
- Why don't we look at the rectangular scene of the Creation?
- Okay. Fantastic. That's probably the single most famous painting in here.
- It's a very famous image, isn't it?
- It's hard to be a part of our culture and not know this image -
- specifically the fingers, the hands coming together.
- Almost coming together, almost touching.
- Almost touching! And of course, this is not a scene that's in the Bible anywhere,
- you know, in the Creation, God and Adam never touch.
- In fact, I think God breathes life into Adam.
- He doesn't actually touch him to bring life into him.
- What Michelangelo's able to do in his sculptures
- and then here in his painting is to anticipate a moment.
- This is when Adam is being created, is being in a sense given life,
- but this is the moment immediately before, sometimes referred to as the pregnant moment,
- this moment that anticipates this sort of awakening,
- and it's fabulous because really what it does is, it builds a kind of drama.
- It does.
- And God is . . . God and Adam almost mirror each other in a kind of . . .
- come together in a convex, concave kind of shapes and Adam looks so . . .
- there's something so - first of all, so graceful and beautiful about his body -
- - languid, as well -
- and very passive.
- Yes. Whereas God is completely active. Absolutely.
- Active, and forceful, and powerful.
- In a sense, in a sense, the masculine and feminine sort of aspects of this painting.
- And God is surrounded by angels.
- This is so interesting. Because you know, the painting had been cleaned recently.
- Yes.
- And a very sort of careful cleaning.
- And it really revealed those figures for the first time, and also the luminous color.
- Amazing color.
- You know, it's interesting.
- Historically, art historians had always thought Michelangelo was brilliant at his drawing,
- but his color had never been looked at seriously until this cleaning.
- And we had to reassess. It's glorious!
- Oh, God! Oranges, and pinks, and greens!
- But also to me, this moment that all human beings want, in some way.
- This direct audience, this direct attention.
- This direct - yes, with our Creator.
- That's right. And of course, Adam here, before the Fall, is ideal.
- He is represented as sort of perfection.
- He is.
- And he is perfection because he is a reflection of God's divinity.
- Exactly - created in God's image.
- Now Michelangelo, interestingly, to create this divine image in the form of a man,
- was drawing on ancient Greek sculpture, like the Belvedere Torso -
- Absolutely.
- which, all these ancient Greek sculptures which were being unearthed in Rome right at this time.
- In fact, because his patron was really interested in classical origin.
- Right, right.
- So, it is a fascinating kind of tie-in.
- And then, of course, there's all sorts of interesting commentary among art historians
- about who those figures are that surround God.
- Yes. And so, there does seem to be a figure who looks female -
- Yes, with breasts exposed -
- - with kind of breasts, and -
- - female breasts exposed -
- - yeah, and also a figure next to her who doesn't appear to be an angel, but seems to be a child.
- Yes, but more . . . larger, more powerful, and singled . . .
- both of those figures are singled out by God.
- You know, think about what it means to have God's arm wrapped around you -
- Oh my goodness!
- - as he does around that female figure,
- or God's hand on the shoulder of -
- - of that child.
- And look at that hand, look at that finger! It's just fabulous.
- Well, and so there's speculation that that is Mary and Christ.
- In the wings in a sense, waiting.
- But that raises really interesting philosophical questions,
- because if you let the story unfold for a moment,
- Chri - excuse me, Adam - hasn't even been created yet, fully -
- No.
- and already we have Christ in the wings?
- If Christ is meant to save Man from Adam's fall, then Adam has no chance!
- Where is free will?
- God knows. God knows - God has a plan and God knows. It's all there.
- It's a fascinating sort of conundrum.
- Yeah, yeah. And you know, there's that interpretation that that is in fact Mary and Christ,
- and not just Eve sort of waiting in the wings to be created -
- - which had long been thought. That's right.
- But the idea that God seems to be touching the child figure with just his forefinger and thumb,
- which in the Church, are the two fingers that the priest is allowed to touch the bread,
- the wafer with during Communion, which is the Body of Christ.
- So this young child becomes a kind of Communion, in a sense, a kind of communion wafer.
- The Body of Christ.
- Yes, absolutely. Quite literally.
- So, maybe Christ is there, maybe he's not, but he's certainly implied;
- his saving power for mankind is implied throughout the ceiling.
- Now, you may have noticed those nude figures on the four corners of the central scenes.
- Yes. There's a lot of nudity in this painting.
- [chuckling] There is, for the ceiling of a church in the Vatican, or a chapel in the Vatican.
- Now, those nude figures that are seated -
- they function again on the illusionistic architecture that's been rendered.
- Right.
- And they're sort of framing figures.
- They don't actually . . .
- they're not part of the rectangles or the pictorial images within them.
- Right. Theý're a little bit separate.
- Yeah, they're not part of these narratives.
- And we call them ignudi, right?
- The nudes!
- The Italian word for nudes.
- The nudes. We don't know what to do with them.
- And we really don't know what they mean!
- They're gorgeous.
- They are gorgeous. They're clearly very sculptural,
- and they look like to me always like Michelangelo was working out his ideas
- for the sculptures of the tomb that he got pulled off of . . .
- of the slaves, and other figures. Yeah.
- But they're incredibly beautiful male figures.
- Some people have interpreted them as angels; some as sort of -
- - guardians.
- representatives of classical antiquity, or the pagan pre-Christian era.
- But there is tremendous ambiguity.
- There is.
- It can - we can see them in different ways.
- We're not really sure what they are.
- And lastly, we have,
- - a couple of scenes later,
- a couple of scenes later, the expulsion . . .
- the temptation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and the expulsion of Adam and Eve.
- And this is a complicated image, because we're really . . .
- it's a kind of . . . it's not unprecedented,
- but it's an example of two scenes within one continuous space;
- and in fact, we've seen this particular sort of rendering in art history before.
- You mean Masaccio's? In the Brancacci Chapel.
- That's right, in the Brancacci Chapel.
- It's very clearly Michelangelo looking at Masaccio.
- You bet. Up in Florence of course, the Florentine.
- And we're speaking, of course, on the right side, the expulsion itself.
- Right. And so, you know, we have this image of Eve, who is so -
- I mean first of all, Michelangelo made his female figures very masculine.
- But she's so beautiful and grand and monumental and powerful -
- and - but still graceful.
- This is the woman who represents the Fall of all of -
- who causes the Fall of all Mankind into sin and death!
- In this action.
- In this action. And yet she is just so beautiful here.
- She is. She is. Beautiful, full of potential and power,
- and in a sense makes it all the more tragic.
- Yes. While we're speaking of female figures of course,
- it's probably worth noting that in the medieval tradition,
- the serpent, the representation of Evil itself,
- -was the woman.
- - is represented as a female.
- Let's move to the right side now, past the tree, to the Expulsion.
- The one that looks so much like Masaccio's version of the Expulsion?
- Yeah. It really - it has the three characters;
- it's very spare, just like Masaccio.
- And it's got the avenging angel,
- who's really doing the expelling under threat of that sword.
- Yeah. That foreshortened angel, who's just coming at them
- and chasing them out of Paradise.
- Yeah. They don't leave easily.
- No. They're going into a barren space, out of the Garden into this . . .
- Yes, out of this lush garden.
- That's right - and look what's happened to them.
- I mean, there's so much psychology and so much intensity here.
- First of all, physically,
- if you compare the earlier Eve with the Eve that's been thrown out, she's corrupted.
- Her body is corrupted.
- Gone is that power, that possibility, that beauty.
- Gone is the ideal beauty.
- And her head is sunken down below the horizon of her shoulders,
- she seems as if she's conniving a way to get back in.
- It's true! I hadn't thought of that.
- And it's so interesting because she seems to know her guilt.
- Adam seems to, in a sense almost be even rejecting it.
- I mean, there's really a kind of, I think,
- a really interesting kind of investigation of how we deal with our own guilt.
- I always saw that as an "Okay, we're going!" [laughing]
- "We're leaving! We got it! We can't stay!"
- [laughing] "Don't slap me on the back of the head with that sword!" Right.
- But in a way it also could be a kind of denial of the guilt of what they've done.
- I think in some ways, yeah.
- You know, it's interesting that all of the attention now is then on the upper bodies,
- you know, and their nakedness is clear.
- And then of course they're moving;
- there's this real sense of movement from left to right as we read,
- and it really sets up then those three final scenes.
- You know, Michelangelo will finish the ceiling, of course,
- and then a good deal of time will pass
- before he's invited back to paint in this room again.
- Yes. By another pope, several popes later.
- About 25 years later.
- And in a really different historical period.
- Very different moment.
- And of course, that's reflected in the painting: The Last Judgment.
- Which will be the subject of our next podcast.
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At 5:31, how is the moon large enough to block the sun? Isn't the sun way larger?
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