Michelangelo & The Sistine Chapel: Interview with Andrew Graham-Dixon

you're listening to the book talk today podcast a podcast that inspires readers to obtain valuable insights to inform educate and improve lives my name is on abdi i'm an avid reader best known for the creation of the one minute book review community and i'm sitting down with authors to delve deeper into the books they have written to uncover the story behind the story hello booktalk today family and welcome back to another episode of the book talk today podcast today i'm really excited to announce back on the podcast andrew graham dixon to discuss michelangelo and the sistine chapel andrew came on the podcast at the latter part of last year to discuss caravaggio and the podcast went so well and was so well received by you i just couldn't wait to have him back on to discuss michelangelo and the sistine chapel in our podcast we discussed the divine nature of michelangelo's art also the creation of the sistine chapel and the process that michelangelo went through over the four year period to create it but also what it meant for art in general and the legacy that the sistine chapel has for what art could be and what michelangelo made art after its creation i was really excited to have andrew back on the podcast and it was such a fascinating conversation for art lovers or for anyone who's just interested in the creation of something new and ethereal and the divine nature of art i hope you enjoy it andrew it's a pleasure to have you back on hi there thank you for having me based on our previous podcast i know we were just briefly discussing it which was very well received on on caravaggio i was very excited to have you back on to discuss uh michelangelo and the sistine chapel i had the pleasure of visiting it in the mid-2000s i think and and when we visited rome and i was blown away by it so i was very interested to read read your book about it and and get your thoughts about michelangelo his life and and the sistine chapel itself so before we get into the sistine chapel specifically regarding michelangelo i think it would be good just to discuss him his origins and what made him such a leading figure sure i mean his his origins he was born um he was the son of a sort of minor florentine sort of fallen on a hard times merchant who then became a notary so his family was from reasonably high original origins but had fallen on hard times during you know during his generation um and his father was always asking him for money and and never properly realizing michelangelo's letters are full of sort of infuriated references to the pope his dad just doesn't realize in his constant quest for a bit of money for the family doesn't quite realize the heights to which michelangelo is climbing and in a sense um you'd have to say that he had he almost as if he had another father because he was taken under the wing of lorenzo de medici or the lorenzo the magnificent who was the leading member of the medici family in florence michelangelo was brought up in florence and he was taken into his household he was recognized for the prodigy that he was at a very early age um and lorenzo i believe did things like expose michelangelo 2 to botticelli's drawings which he owned in portfolio and there are there's evidence that some of michelangelo's later work is influenced by some of those drawings including michelangelo's david actually which is quite similar to one of the great drawings done by botticelli for dante's inferno which lorenzo owned and it's hard to see how else michelangelo could have seen such a thing and he also was exposed to this extraordinary sculpture collection which he made in the gardens that the medici family owned nearby the monastery of san marco where there was a curator of sculptors an elderly man called giovanni de bartoldo who had studied under donatello and is probably the person who who first interested michelangelo in sculpture uh as opposed to painting so so he he's an interesting background um never appreciated by his own family taken on by a very very noble family that did indeed greatly appreciate him and um but no one can explain uh really the nature of his prodigious gifts quite how he had them how he came by them you know some people are just extraordinary and he seems to have been one of those people well it's interesting because at the beginning of the book you talk about his desire to preserve the intact aura of his own sufficiency i think that's what you uh what you said in the book and you talk about vasari and kandivi the two uh biographies that were written about him and and how they were somewhat uh opposing to a degree and and how he actually had influence over them so how much was it based on what you just said about being in the medici family and having access to all those drawings and and people and opportunities and how much of it was that divinely gifted talent that he wanted people to think it was well i think there was there was certainly a degree of of teaching that he later in life um wanted to conceal because he he was quite keen on the idea that his gifts were purely god-given you know with vasari himself who idolized michelangelo called him the divine michelangelo in recognition of vasari's own belief that michelangelo's gifts came from god rather than for any tuition or education that he'd received however the fact is that despite the rather unconventional nature of michelangelo's youth um you know and this this uh exposure to the court and to the court possessions um and and and retainers like giovanni de bertolder of the medici family the fact still remains that that michelangelo did receive uh conventional apprenticeship painting tuition at the hands of domenico gilandayo who painted a great series of frescoes for santa maria novella it's the church right next to the modern train station in florence people can go and visit it and gillandayo for that chapel painted a wonderful series of scenes of the life of the virgin um all set in modern florentine dress so the virgin becomes a kind of well-to-do almost made it cheap style florentine noble woman bit you know giving birth to jesus in the house of a florentine you know which is really a florentine palazzo and so on michelangelo definitely um studied there you know otherwise how could this man who was supposedly only a sculptor of painting or have even agreed to take on a fresco cycle of the scale of the sistine chapel but vasari published the fact that he had been an apprentice with the girl and i family and um he then uh michelangelo then was so displeased by the revelation of this that he he authorized his own biography to be written by a man called ascanio condivi in in rivalry with visario to replace vasari's version in which this was roundly denied and vasari was so irritated by the fact that michelangelo had accused him of in his sense of being a liar that he he went round to the girl and i workshop and well he didn't get a photo copy because such things didn't exist but he got he he got a transcript of the original contract and then published some of the details in the second edition of the lives of the artists just to say well i'm not a liar and he really did receive some training even though he is divine he was taught michelangelo himself um did prefer the the more mystical types of explanation of his talents for sure um so while downplaying the practical side i.e gil and dio did actually teach him and they had a contract he he preferred the idea that he'd got his gifts for sculpture from the fact that he was uh breastfed by a wet nurse you know back in those days people didn't necessarily breastfeed their own children they sometimes hired other women to breastfeed their children and and he was breastfed by the daughter of a stonemason who lived up in the in the mountains of carrara above florence which is where they get all the marble from in that time to to make the great sculptures it's where the marble for the david came from and michelangelo liked to say that he was um [Music] he he said he actually said he he he drank in uh stone mason's chisels and um marble chips through her milk so it's as if he sort of painfully ingested the materials of his profession as a sculptor which is always what he he said he was first and foremost he didn't like painting he didn't he didn't value painting which seems like an odd thing for the creator of the world's most famous painting to say but he he regarded sculpture as really the the essential the most serious of the great art forms i always think that him downplaying it is almost to make it seem like everything that he created or the sistine chapel that he created was greater than if he was just a fresco painter because he was a sculptor for him to create the sistine chapel without it being his primary skill it makes it seem his grandeur to be even greater yes i suppose it's it's like the uh it's like the olympic 100 meter sprinter just sort of suddenly deciding oh i'll have a go at doing you know the long distance swimming or something and then he wins the gold medal i've never trained at it but anyway you know i'm just so good and god's on my side to such an extent that doesn't really matter what i do i'll win yeah it definitely did feel like that and in reference to his spirituality and religion i know in the book you referenced that he he felt as if his art was his um his way of of connecting to the divine because he was known as being celibate to a degree and he considered his work and his art to be all that he needed so what was the role that his somewhat asceticism played in his life in general well he never married um he was i mean he was very ascetic uh one thing he did get from his father which vasari tells us about which is sort of peculiar monastic slightly to some to some people distasteful was the fact that his his father told him a never to wear anything on his head so he never wore a hat unlike most people even though he lived his life in rome which is not a place not to wear a hat in my opinion and um b he never washed or he washed as seldom as he could because it was said to be bad for your health um it's a sort of hermit who never washes and vasari's describes once in a quite grisly fashion he describes watching michelangelo during one of the rare occasions when he used to take off his buskins which are these sort of knee-length tights or socks that they used to wear in those days and he said that the skin came off them so it was as if michelangelo was like a snake shedding his skin so he was he was sort of a very peculiar mixture of things you know very divine very inspiring but also at the level of personal hygiene it sounds to me like he was a nil out of town yeah perhaps needed to uh attend some more social gatherings perhaps socialize a bit more he certainly didn't do that he was very much non not the social which is why he didn't like raphael because raphael came in you know swung into town you know the new hit wonder from urbino and very young came came in won the approval of the pope was given these great frescoes to paint in in in the vatican library painted the school of athens parnassus painted all these classically inspired subjects really stealing the kind of thing that michelangelo was doing and not only stealing them metaphorically but actually because raphael is one of the few people the pope allowed into the sistine chapel halfway through because halfway through michelangelo directed a scaffold so when he got halfway through the scaffold only covered half the ceiling so when he got halfway through he had to come down take the scaffolding down and re-erect it so that he could then paint the second half at which point if you stood on the floor of the sistine chapel the first half which he had painted by then and which had been obscured by the scaffold you could now see it so raphael went in saw it and promptly borrowed a whole load of figures for his some of the figures of the prophets and the sybils in particular some of his paintings and not only that you know he was very very gifted with social graces and he was very entertaining the pope was um you know enchanted by his company whereas the pope admired michelangelo but they didn't really speak to each other that much because michelangelo was always too busy in his ascetic bubble um getting on with his work for god well one of the questions i wanted to ask you is how much influence the pope played in the creation of the sistine chapel how much influence he had over the the figures in there the story the triads how much influence did the pope actually have conventionally uh art historians always used to argue that um such an important commission because the sistine chapel is after all you know the chapel where the conclave to elect each new pope is held it's this it's the essential uh chapel in the vatican for the celebration of mass you know how how could a mere artist be allowed to you know invent all his subjects um and and invent his iconography um but the fact is you know we do know that originally um what the pope wanted was something you know very very mundane and straightforward um you know he wanted a a small group of allegorical figures and i think he just wanted a almost an abstract ceiling painted with with stars or something like that and and um michelangelo thought that was a poor thing in quotes and uh offered his own solution which was this great series from the genesis cycle which is partly to be explained by the fact that the lower registers of the chapel had already been painted um with scenes uh for example from the life of moses and and yeah i think i believe it's the life of moses and the life of christ um and and so the you know the upper register the the story of genesis it you know it hadn't been painted and in a sense in theological terms it was a opportunity to complete the kind of christian version of history as told in the bible by including the the very the very beginnings genesis and all that but in terms of how he painted it and the way in which he chose to depict the subjects a there aren't that many precedents for it because it's not that frequently depicted the main precedent is um to be found in in a work of art that you certainly knew which were the two great sets of the the two great baptistery doors painted on the theme of um uh genesis by not painted sorry i'll start again there was certainly a precedent for it um but but not very many precedents for it um the main one would have been the doors of paradise which is actually the name michelangelo gave to them which were created by the early florentine renaissance artist called gibberity spent 30 years of these amazing um uh gilded bronze doors which show all the scenes and most of the same scenes that michelangelo painted but michelangelo completely reinvented that iconography which gibberty took from other artists and had been more or less stable for a very long time but there was no precedent for example for having god as this astonishing caped winged figure um flying through space which would in fact have a huge influence on popular art in the 20th century because it was the inspiration for the marvel comics the caped superheroes they actually come from the figure of god in the sistine chapel it was michelangelo who invented that way of depicting someone with superhuman powers soaring through space um and and it's to such an extent was it original that you know what we do have an eyewitness account of the sistine chapel very early on by a man called paulo nocherra who was a bishop so he's an ecclesiastical he's a man of the cloth and a bishop and he look he he looks up at the ceiling and he looks up at the most famous image on the whole ceiling which is adam being created by god with their fingertips almost touching as god creates adam uh and and he remarked that he didn't have any idea who this old man was flying in the sky so so when it was first done you know the the iconography was so original and so different from anything anybody had ever seen that even a bishop didn't know what was going on which would argue to me that michelangelo surely surely surely invented this stuff and he invented this way of doing it he seems even to have invented the idea that this is what should be depicted sure he should have had approval i imagine he couldn't have done it without having to explain himself to some papal adviser or indeed the pope himself but you know the idea that such an advisor or the pope himself could have suggested these things to michelangelo is is beyond possibility in my mind did he did he sketch them before he sort of took them to the to the actual chapel itself did he how did he actually go about transferring it did he was any diaries of ideas that that had been left or is it just he just did it straight there are numerous drawings for different parts of the sistine chapel michelangelo is a great draftsman so there are many drawings some in the british museum for example and the standard procedure i mean for example in the case of raphael who was working at the same time in the vatican library we actually have uh in the breira in milan there is a huge semi-circular drawing for the school of athens amazing drawing one of the most amazing drawings in the world it's the same size as the fresco and if you go and look at it you'll see that all the figures the outlines of all the figures have been pricked with a sharp point and that's that's because the method was that you you would take your drawing and you would transfer it to the wall i believe i'm you know never painted a fresco myself but i believe you would do that in such a way that once the plaster had been laid you would prick the drawing through and then you had to paint while it was you know while the plaster was still wet so you might well use the same drawing two or three times or many times it because you can only paint eight hours when the fresco is still wet and then you have to stop and start again so they call each bit of laid on fresco a jordanata in italian which means a day's work so for example just as hypothesis you know raphael if if you take his big drawing say he was able to accomplish one-sixth of that or one-fifth of that or just one figure from it in a day that's how much of the drawing would be pounced through and then transferred and then he would paint using that drawing as his guide but he would have to paint directly into the into the fresco there's no you can't draw on fresco so that and that's how michelangelo worked but as he got towards the end and it's interesting and it's interesting that he's you know he started he started at the end further away from the altar so he started with the last he started at the end as it were if it was a film he's he started by as it were shooting the last sequence which was the life of moses and only at the end of his painting procedure did he paint for example god creating the earth god creating the oceans god separating light from darkness he did those right right at the end and if you look at the very very first image in the whole genesis cycle which is god at the very beginning having you know who is the god is the word and he will he will separate light and darkness that very very first image right over the altar michelangelo didn't use i mean he will have almost certainly made a drawing but he didn't use the traditional technique there's no outlining of the drawing he just did it free so he did it like free and and almost no one could do that i know you gave reference to it in the book and you said that his style changed during the period from when he started to when he finished because there was a four year period if i'm correct um yeah and you talk about in reference to the four spatules you say that he developed a style of mannerism and his actual style changed it as the work evolved was that the case really then when he transferred from for instance putting the drawings up on the fresco and doing the the eight-hour shift to then just doing it by freehand did his skills improve as the project went on immensely his skills improved immensely but he planned for that to happen and that's what's quite interesting because the way that he worked was he he could only paint half the ceiling at a time because it was too technologically challenging to fill the entire sistine chapel with a single scaffold so he couldn't fill the whole chapel with a single scaffold it also would have made the ceremonies that still took place in the chapel impossible to to to complete so he had to you know he had to only fill half of the chapel and he chose to fill the chapel that's nearest the way out and to start that and if you if you if you if you stand with your back to to where the original exit to the chapel was it's been moved because of tourism but the originally the chapel's exit was at the far end of the chapel um as it would be in any cathedral so you know when you enter you you're standing at the door and you the altar is as far away as it can get and you can only walk towards the altar so everything that he's painting at the beginning is furthest away from the altar and in his story in the way that he's designed the story the nature of the story is that in the beginning there was god and god made the word and god made the world so you go from that to god creating adam and you go from that to the fall of man and you go from that to what's going to happen to the children of adam who are they well then you go to the fact that they all betray god and get drunk and they fail and they fall and then noah builds the ark and then there's a deluge and humanity is consumed and no will be saved but then noah gets drunk and then it's the end that's the story so if you think of all of the the nature of the scenes after the fall of man basically this is a story of corrupt human decadence if you go all the stories before the fall of man it's all about heaven and god and perfection and the making of adam and the making of eve and the making of them perfect and they will screw it up now michelangelo starts his painting at the point where humanity comes into the scene so in other words for all of the human parts of the painting of his story he's the young michelangelo he's the first phase michelangelo for all of the later ones as he moves towards god and as he moves towards the altar he's moving towards the end of his painting process so he's engineered it so that the very last thing he paints will be god at his most perfect because then michelangelo will be at his best and the very first thing he paints will be all these scenes of human decadence when michelangelo is at his worst or at his most immature at his least resolved put it that way so i think he he was almost programmatically planning my question was is did he actually have anyone to help him like who helped him who who were the trained individuals that helped him or did he do everything himself he said he had no assistance i mean he certainly had some assistance and he sacked some assistance it's a bit of a murky area but if you look at the actual way in which he did the painting michelangelo was very much um the opposite of rubens or the opposite of vasari who himself who was a very successful artist as well as or not not a very good one but a very successful artist for the medici family and employed huge numbers of assistants michelangelo doesn't seem to have done that there are some parts of the sistine chapel like the lower register there are some depictions of the ancestors of christ which are really probably the most minor depictions of all in the whole sistine chapel and some of those do look a little bit as though perhaps they might have been uh you know done by a different hand but if you look at the figures of the sybils or if you look at any of the important figures you know the figure of adam uh in the center of the ceiling i mean there's almost he's got a very distinctive personal style michelangelo and there's nothing there to suggest you know it's it's it's not at all like other artists such as titian where you can you know you can perhaps see that the landscape was done by a studio assistant there's nothing like that in michelangelo i think he he saw it as his own work i think it was his own work it was a superhuman effort as his talents developed and and he planned it in such a way was that in uh parallel to his actual religion and asceticism because i think in in the book as well you talk about how his own journey and how he started the last thing that he painted was god itself so did he do that knowing that this process would see him become closer to god as well i think that idea is very much in his mind and i think it's i think it's in his mind at the beginning if you look at the scene of um noah building the ark noah you know building this kind of refuge from humanity where he's going to save everyone but he's not going to save humanity he's only going to save you know himself because he's been chosen by god and his wife because he's been chosen by god with her and they will be the you know man and woman and you know he's only going to save them when you look at that depiction of the ark it looks remarkably to me like almost a little mini architectural model of the sistine chapel and and and i i sort of think that michelangelo because he he's painting these pictures at a time you know which is the early 16th century when there's a lot of millenarianism about people believing that you know maybe the end of the world is nigh one of the reasons for commissioning the sistine chapel and a lot of the other commissions of this period uh one of the reasons is that the the papacy and those around the papers he genuinely think that perhaps the book of revelations is about to come true that this is the time after the half time that you know the the that's referred to in the in you know in the words of the book of revelations and the you know that the the antichrist is about to rise and you know luca signorelli whose uh depictions of the lives of the the life of the antichrist the coming of the antichrist they've just been done in all vietnam they're a big influence on michelangelo they were created about six years before the sistine chapel was begun there's a lot of this in the air savanna roller who was the sort of hellfire preacher who took over florence from the medici in the late 16th century in the late 15th century he had preached hellfire and damnation and you know these ideas were about and and i think that michelangelo perhaps saw himself as somebody you know in this end time rather as noah was in his own end time so noah's ark becomes the sistine chapel which is michelangelo's ark and there he is right at the top of the boat that is the chapel painting to god painting for god painting the message of god painting enlightenment so that you know when it comes to the final contest between good and evil people will come to the sistine chapel and they will see and they will believe and you know the new heaven and the new heaven on earth that's predicted in the book of revelations will come to pass and michelangelo is all part of that i don't think it's it's you know you have to understand that people have a very very different mindset to ours in that time and i and i think that that's that's part of it he feels very very close to god and he writes poems about he's one of as well as you know again we were talking earlier about how he could just sort of be something outside his speciality he's not even a he's not even a painter but he paints the sistine chapel he's not even a poet but his modern reputation in italian literary circles is as the greatest poet of the italian 16th century so you know but he writes these poems about his devotion to god sonnets a lot of them um and and uh so i think i think that's very much very much part of it and it's very important to him that he wants to depict god uh as the very last thing that he does and and the other thing about it all is of course that there are there are all kinds of details in the sistine chapel which we can now appreciate and and and admire because we have reproductive technology we've got great photographs but there's a lot of bits of it that you can't necessarily really see um unless or you couldn't see in his time unless you were actually up on the scaffolding so that in michelangelo's mind i believe that a lot of those small details and subtleties are actually just painted for the contemplation of god because god's the only well not person but god's the only being who will ever see these details and that's a that's a florentine tradition too donatello who michelangelo greatly admired made a series of amazing sculptures to be placed very very high up on on the cathedral spire at north spire the cathedral tower of florence cathedral and those sculptures have got astonishing details of realism and skin texture and all sorts of things that you simply would never know from the ground i mean they're not they're not on the ground anymore they're in museums so we can appreciate them but if you imagine them put up in the sky as they originally were they've got all levels of detail that were surely only made for god and this goes it's a medieval tradition medieval cathedral builders did the same thing and i think there's a lot of that in the sistine chapel it almost seems like it's more of a personal not sacrifice but a personal gift to the divine rather than for perhaps humans to appreciate especially in relation to the the details like you're talking about because people wouldn't be able to see those details so who is it actually for is it for the people or is it somewhat like a sacrifice in in a way an artistic sacrifice if you want to call it that i mean in my opinion it's quite a punishing object if you understand it correctly i mean in my view i mean i spent a long time thinking about how it's meant to be seen and about what it says and um i sometimes really think that the structure and the way in which because it's so often seen in reproduction we we don't necessarily think about how it was originally experienced when it was first made in the context of the building for which it was created and if we return to the to the eye to the original configuration of the of the chapel if you enter the chapel if you're a lay person you're only allowed halfway up anyway so you can only get halfway to the image of god beginning everything if you're the pope okay you can you you're on the other side but if you're just an ordinary person like you or me we never get further than halfway so we can see towards the altar we can see above the altar the perfection of god separating light and darkness but if we look up we then see god creating the moon and the sun god creating adam we then see the fall of man we look above ourselves we see the deluge we then see the scenes of drunkenness and that's the end and our destiny is to walk out of the chapel so we're at the human end and as we walk out of the chapel it strikes me that by implication whatever we do next is the latest thing that happened in the fresco cycle so you might go outside and buy an ice cream but you're still in the fresco cycle because you've left god and now you're just in your mundane life buying an ice cream i don't know doing something bad having to go to confession whatever you might do but he he's almost the the fresco cycle physically expels us but it doesn't let us go it expels us from the chapel but we're still in its grip and i think michelangelo's idea is that we will always want in our minds to return to the place we were halfway along which is as far as we ever got but we want to go further we want to get back we want to go to to god because it's it's a it's a cycle that condemns us to a kind of fallen existence whether we're crossing the street getting on a bus we're still in the painting because we're doing the latest thing in this great divine story however low that may be and we're being reminded of the immeasurable gulf that separates us from the cosmic majesty of god that we saw in the chapel which is the beginning of everything sometimes you know the other day i had a conversation with a physicist about who studies deep deep space and the origins of all things and they and they did say to me that it's you know it's peculiar to me to think after studying dark matter and the formation of our universe and the sheer scale of our universe which is you know our son is one of two billion billion billion sons in 20 billion universes in nine billion just all inconceivable size and then they have to go out and they have to get on a train and they have to ask for a ticket and you just it's very hard to put it together and i think the sistine chapel challenges us with some with a similar sort of sense of our own tininess in relation to the cosmic scale of god that's interestingly enough that's how i felt when i visited so i was in my early teens i must have been 13 14 when i visited it and that was distinctly what i remember feeling because i thought yourself wait one person painted this and it was a person and then once i started studying it more and reading about it and then it talks about the book of genesis and then its relationship to god and then the whole atom with god with the finger and is like is that the transference of consciousness in relation to to what humans are in human consciousness and then that got me thinking about how he created this is it to basically be a mirror to to to civilization into humans and be like this is your insufficiency and then i i was sort of thinking about that in my early in my early and mid teens and i thought to myself oh this is a bit deep well i think i think in a nutshell i think you've got it i mean i think that is that that's absolutely dead right yeah now that's it and that finger that's creating consciousness in adam that's another of his inventions because in um in most well in all previous depictions of the creation of adam that i know god doesn't he doesn't do this and right raise adam you know in that way he simply does makes an uplifting gesture and adam raises himself up from the earth and adam in in in jewish scripture um adam is a jewish word that means earth so that's why adam rises from the earth because he's made from the earth he's made from the clay um but michelangelo doesn't do that it's a much more conceptual platonic idea and i think michelangelo this finger that god is pointing at adam the finger has a precedent the idea of the finger of god creating something or writing something is present in in old jewish and christian ideas about the the creation of the tables of the law when he writes the ten commandments in some accounts it's as if god has got a laser and it's it so that the finger is almost like a pen or a laser i think the lasers may be a better analogy and and in modern terms what i would say god is doing is he's not just creating adam he's not raising from the earth and he's not just creating it he's actually programming him in other words he's writing a much more complicated program into him than the complex uh in instructions that are enshrined in the ten commandments it's far more complicated he's creating consciousness creating human being because it seems i was reading milton's paradise lost when i was writing my book and i was thinking that the one bit that because milton goes on about it a lot in he's writing the same story and milton talks a lot about how the archangel gabriel in his poem teaches adam and eve the rules but it's very important that they know the rules because if they don't know the rules how can you say they've sinned by taking the apple and all that so it's very important and michelangelo nowhere has adam and eve being told the rules but he's got this finger which is so different from the gestures of the past and i think the finger is literally and he's looking really intently god not at adam he's looking at his own finger so it's as if god his thought is going into the finger and then the thought god's consciousness becomes his finger and his finger magically animates adam with consciousness but it's a kind of programming as well as creating act so he's forming his mind and forming him with rules that he will then break which makes our fall all the more disgraceful and terrible because we have been programmed not to do that but we've still done it the interesting thing as well is that the finger never touches so what i took from that and perhaps you have a different point on this is the fact that all that information isn't transferred so it's not like as if all the knowledge of the divine is given to to us it's only like such a small subset so we're never touching we're just we're so close but we're never we're never on the same level that's an interesting way of seeing it i mean i i my feeling was but it again it's it's also in the same in the in the old uh older representations god never touches adam i believe there may be one there may be one image that i know where he he's almost pulling him out of the ground um so he is holding his hand but i think that michelangelo definitely doesn't want any physical contact between god and adam because there can be no contact between the divine and the human no physical contact it's a spiritual connection um and and it exists at the level of of the soul or the consciousness it's not physical um so and it's also intellectual um which is which is in line with michelangelo was exposed to quite a lot of he read quite a lot of plato or at least neoplatonism in in his florentine years and he's he's clearly very much thinking throughout his life about about how the body relates to the soul and in a lot of his art it's almost as if he wants to create sculpted or drawn or painted bodies that are so spiritualized they have almost shed their material nature and have become idealized to the point where they represent the form of an idea in reference to the actual individuals that are that are painted one question i did have was obviously we've talked about michelangelo in his relationship with with religion and his spirituality and his asceticism and specifically in relation to the deluge there's a lot of expressive nude figures and what i would have thought is someone who has such a ascetic nature or someone who's so religious would be somewhat apprehensive to draw nude figures in such a way uh perhaps that's just um a more contemporary view of of religion perhaps they had a different view of it what do you think about that drawing of of individuals in a nude way in in such a religious and sanctimonious place well it's not only it's not only um in the deluge but it's um there's a whole register of figures called the inudi the nudes which are these nude figures who serve no purpose in the story they're placed in in these decorative um areas of the chapel throughout on both sides they decorate around they're almost like part of a painted frame to to the main stories from genesis along with the prophets and the sybils who do have a biblical function but these and nudie don't and they caused a great deal of controversy because they are naked very beautiful and when a later pope padrian vi came to the papacy not that much later he looked up at the chapel and he just referred to it as a bathroom full of nudes um and a later initiative had daniele de volterra painting fig leaves onto all the genitalia of these figures which have now many many many many many years later been taken off so the ceiling is unfig leafed but so the nudity was controversial in michelangelo's own time but i i i think the context to understand it is in michelangelo's mind the idea that he could be immoral or lubricious or you know erotically suggestive was so crazy that who on earth could possibly suspect michelangelo the ascetic of that and and as far as he was concerned you know i would come back to the to the origins of the sistine chapel which is that he has given the sistine chapel to paint as a consolation prize because he is a sculptor he's been called to rome because he's created the david the world's most astonishing sculpture of a male nude by the way but there's nothing sexy about it um not in my view he wants to create this great tomb for julius ii the pope who will commission the sistine chapel from him and he spends a year and a half or something of that nature up in carrara with two men and a horse you know i mean ridiculous situation quarrying his own marble to create the largest ensemble of marble sculpture in the history of humankind he brings these vast blocks of marble that he has personally quarried with these men and these are huge things he brings them all to rome they're lying in a piazza the rain is on them but they you know they they occupy several football pitches these blocks of marble and the tomb itself is going to be larger than a than quite a large church and it's going to be placed in old saint peter's and he's going to create this astonishing tomb to julius ii with all this marble and suddenly julius thinks oh maybe i shouldn't do this because this is a bit hubristic i mean after all a tomb to a boat that's the size of a football fish he may also have actually doubted michelangelo's ability to do it because on the basis of the surviving figures that he did carve that were put up in a much smaller final version of that tomb which is in a church called san pietro in vincoli if you look at the original design that michelangelo made and think well how long would it have taken some people reckon it would have taken him a hundred years carving with the energy of a 20 year old to finish this tomb so the pope may have thought he couldn't do it but all that by the by when michelangelo discovers that the tomb has been cancelled and that those marbles all going to be used actually for a new church a new cathedral and peters to be built by bromanti he's so furious he runs off um he runs off to a place called um [Music] what's it called poggi bonsi which is now um one of the main centers for acquiring flat pack furniture in tuscany he runs off there and the pope's agents finally catch up with him he's in a sock and they say well what the pope has said um you can paint a chapel you can paint the sistine chapel instead of the tomb you know you can't do the tomb he doesn't want to do that but you can do this chapel and he remains in really annoyed and eventually after a few years he comes around to it and does agree to do the sistine chapel but for him it's a consolation prize as a commission and and if you look at the sistine chapel as a thing if you if you imagine it as a three-dimensional thing what is it it's a painted version the stories are all different the iconography is all different but it's a painted version of that huge sculpture that he'd originally wanted to make so it's a painting that says i want to be a sculpture and i think that's what all these nudes are you know they turn the a lot of the deluge that you refer to at the beginning of your question it looks like a sarcophagus freeze it's very classical you know it's it its references are to sculpture not to other paintings and and that's and i think that's what's going on those in new dear really um there is one little they are actually the closest bit to the tomb um because they are all of them surrounded and wreathed and garlanded with oak leaves and julius ii's family name was de la rovery where robert is oak tree so i think the nudi are are really just michelangelo's say way of saying this whole thing was commissioned by giulio de la rovere these are the boys who symbolize him as well as being a kind of ideal classical sculpture gallery and so they're sort of julius wasn't clever enough to get me to do a sculpture for him and i wanted to do a sculpture but he did commission it so that's where i put these boys here that's what all the things that they're saying it's like a consolation prize it's like i was meant to do this i couldn't do it so here they are yeah and also id iding julia and saying you know julius it was his idea i wanted to do a sculpture so i've done a painting that looks like a sculpture so this this is what happens when he and me met i actually did want to talk uh briefly about his his approach to fresco painting um because as we've discussed and before he painted the sistine chapel he was a sculptor by profession sculpting david and his approach to painting frescoes was very much from in the book he referenced like 3d so he liked to see a 2d he saw two dude everyone else saw 2d but he sort of saw 3d and he painted in such a way so how did his approach to fresco painting inspired by his sculpting how how did that separate him from his peers and and those that came after him well i think he sculpted he's he sculpted very much he painted he did paint very much um like a sculptor um i mean the crossover between painting and sculpture was much closer in those days than it is now and and indeed between architecture you know there were great architects who also painted and made sculptures um and donatello for example is credited with creating a sculptural freeze that is in a sense the very first painting in perspective to be made in florence it's a painting but it's actually in the form of a sculpture so there was a tradition within florentine art um and the thing that runs through it all the thing that's most significant uh and and that the sari goes on about a lot is the idea of lime which is the thing that unites architecture sculpture and fresco in michelangelo's mind it's what separates him from an artist like the greatest artist from the opposite spectrum which is venice where there's much less drawing there's much less line there's no fresco in venice um because of the weather and the dampness so they have on oil painting tradition there which doesn't require drawing in the same way whereas michelangelo for michelangelo i think the thing that unites everything is the idea so in all of in all that he makes what central is the line what central is the form and in his mind the form can be three-dimensional it can be two-dimensional it can be whatever he wants it to be because he does have an extraordinary ability to um think spatially but also in a linear way so he can he's hugely adaptable in that sense so he can use line almost in an abstract way but he always knows how to make a form into a sculpture so he's got a great advantage and he and he knows how to model a form instinctively so by the end of the sistine chapel when he paints the very last you know it's an amazing fact that when he painted the deluge at the beginning of the four years of working okay the deluge is a large painting and the creation the separation of lights and darkness is not so large a painting but the deluge nonetheless and we know this from technical analysis the the deluge took 32 days and don't quote me exactly i think it's 32 days whereas the separation of light and darkness above the altar the very last image probably that michelangelo painted of the sistine chapel there are no pounce marks there's no drawing that we can see if you x-ray it there's no drawing underneath it's painted free hand in fresco from his idea and he does it in one day that's it i mean it's a huge thing it's it's like you know nine feet high sick but he does it in one day and i remember years ago i met um hugo chapman who's the director of the prince and drawings department of the british museum and he put on a very fascinating exhibition of drawings by michelangelo but and i remember him taking me around and showing me some things but he was one in particular which was a drawing it was an architectural drawing and it was a drawing for um a piece of in tablature or um the the top of a column which was um quite a complicated form with leaves but it went all the way around the column and the drawing had three versions it had front on view it had section and it had cross-section and he said hugo said you know this is impossible to do you know you can do it now with a computer there are computer programs that can get you can do a form and then you can do it in cross-section don't you know the computer program will work it out but to do it freehand perfectly with without you know just it's as if he's turning the form in his mind and as he turns it in his mind he can see exactly how it looks he's got something in his brain that enables him completely to translate um you know this into that it's as if he could you know i mean it's ridiculous it's ridiculous that he could do that and and and this a similar but different story is as if he asked him how do you create a figure like the david you know because not only did he have to carve the david free hand i mean but but he also had to work around existing faults in this large block of marble that meant that the leg had to go there and so he really complicated just as the level of problem solving and he said how did you manage to create this figure that just is it's he said well it's for me michelangelo's answers of asari was for me the figure is always already there and for me carving a figure is like pulling a man out of a pool of water so it just slips out and he comes out and that's it he's pulling him out of water it's no more complicated than that when you think of the tactics of later generations of sculptors like canova with all their pointing devices and ways of translating small models into large sculptures michelangelo didn't use any of that i think ultimately if you if you pushed him on it he'd say he might take you back to that finger of god and say well it's actually it's that finger of god you know i'm just a bit closer to that finger than any of you lot so the information is a high quality level so that's why i can do these things is that the humility is that the humility of michelangelo coming through it does translate into a kind of humility in the end because because even if you're very very close to god you still only if you're michelangelo you still only realize how far away from god you are and as he goes on in his life later on in his life he deliberately forsakes the astonishing grace and beauty of his earlier style and creates much more difficult troubled less perfect if you like forms which perhaps do represent a kind of turning away from his own younger hubris and perhaps an acknowledgement that perhaps as he gets older he doesn't necessarily feel that he says so much closer to that finger of god than the rest of us as he does when he's painting the sistine chapel as a relatively young man and there's a very moving series of drawings in the british museum which again were actually shown to me once by hugo in which he draws um he draws christ on the cross and they're weird drawings you can look them up online if you if you look up the crucifixion drawings of the british museum own and i think the royal collection ends a very beautiful one as well and he goes over the form again and again and again and again so that it becomes a kind of weird almost like cezanne might have drawn it it's got many many different outlines so it's becomes almost blurred um and and hugo had a very interesting theory about that that he he says that the drawings are actually prayers and that whereas um an ordinary person might take a different bead of the rosary and move it round the bracelet of the rosary with each prayer so they pray they say a hail mary and then they move a bead they say another prayer mary and they maybe say 20 for the 20 beads on the rosary michelangelo says a hail mary and draws right the way around his crucifixion then he says another one and draws right all the way around the crucifixion and so you end up with this drawing that is a kind of materialized gesture of the act of praying that's a very interesting theory i love that it sounds it sounds great i love that you started off the book with this um with this quote you said michelangelo didn't just event invent a new kind of art but a new idea of what art could be so i think it'd be great just to finish andrew to talk about what the legacy of uh michelangelo was and the sistine chapel in general and and what impact he had on on art or what art could be well i think one of the things that was interesting about the restoration of the sistine chapel when it happened in the 1980s and and the centuries of candle smoke were removed from the surface of the frescoes was the sheer vibrancy of the colors particularly of the later parts of the chapel and that and that vibrancy of color suddenly made apparent to everyone um who's interested in renaissance and high renaissance and later on just how much as a colorist which is not his reputation in art history it's not his reputation he's he's known as the man of line not the man of color but how revolutionary his use of color was these sort of clashing astonishing yellows and reds and scarlets and lime greens and suddenly one could see how deeply influenced the troubled generation troubled by the reformation and and the upheavals in the church that occurred not long after the creation of the sistine chapel the extent to which that sense of clashing color and form and straining action and and unease that that's there in the sistine chapel how much that will be taken forward by the great artists of the mannerist period as it's known um for example pontomo who for me is one of the greatest artists who ever lived and whose work survives only in a few examples because his main work san lorenzo and florence was destroyed by fire but he's if you go for example to santa felichita one of the most amazing enuncia depositions in the history of art it's it's as if the spirit of the sistine chapel permeates that work and you think of rosso fiorentino working for louis the um francis the first in fontainebleau who's deeply under the sway of michelangelo and just a generation of generation of artists but i think his his greatest influences is through [Music] just the sheer magnitude of the achievement of the sistine chapel the sheer uh scale and ambition of it and some say somebody like vasari is emboldened to write the lives of the artists which is a book in many ways ahead of its time because throughout large swedes of europe artists are still regarded in the courts and the royal households where they paint mostly and indeed by the churches for whom they they paint they're regarded as craftsmen they're not regarded as the equals of you know painting is still not one of the seven liberal arts as leonardo da vinci in outrage comments again and again in his notebooks painting is seen as a low form of expression and so likewise sculpture maybe sculpture even lower because it's more handicraft it's more like a builder doing his thing and um i think michelangelo is the artist above all other artists who changes that vasari's book is the is the book that begins the change whereby people begin to see artists as among the most important expresses of human truth um along with philosophers and poets um and indeed great scientists and vasari's book sets this the seal on that and and from vasari's book stems that great tradition of starting academies of of artists so artists suddenly have academies like musicians who who had long been regarded as part of the liberal arts because music was connected with mathematics and mathematics had a high intellectual reputation so musicians were higher than artists but not anymore not after michelangelo and i think michelangelo was the one who affected that sea change and made the writing of asari's book possible made the foundation of european academies possible basically i mean without him i don't think that change would have happened when it happened and and he made it impossible not to think of an artist like that i mean you cannot go into the sistine chapel and think oh you've had the decorators in you know i mean this is this is this is more this is more than the builders coming in although there was there was a minimalist artist there was a minimalist artist um called i can't remember his name but one of the great american minimalists it may have been solarwind um went in and looked up at the sistine chapel you know the minimal artists they only made like base bear forms so they would be like donald judd's cubes of pure steel or a painting that's just pure white and then this american minimalist went in and he looked up at the sistine chapel and he said oh wow if it had been me i would have used a roller and done it in a week but other than that the artistic response to the christine chapel the artistic response to the sistine chapel other than that has been nothing short of you know ore and bewilderment and amazement and if you're think thinking about you know the tradition of art in britain you know who founds the royal academy joshua reynolds so without him there would be no academy in britain what was joshua reynolds what which work of art in the whole world did he hold in high regard more than any other the sistine chapel in the you know he even said in in one of his discourses i think at the end of his very last discourse he says because i would only wish as an artist if i could have my time again to step in his trail to follow in his footsteps i wish that the very last word i say in these discourses that he's been giving for 16 years at the royal academy the very last word i say shall be his name and that name is michelangelo so you know he what he did to the perception of what artists could do and in the 18th century it was such such was his reputation that in the 18th century you know when they weren't electing a pope or holding a mass they actually allowed the leading artists of europe who were mostly studying in rome when they were young that's where they would all study all of the artists at least 50 or 60 they each had their own bed in the sistine chapel and they were allowed every day to go in and they would lie on their bed and they would look up at the sistine chapel and absorb it and breathe it in all the artists of germany all the artists of france all the artists of england all the artists of scandinavia they were they would sort of sunbathe underneath sistine chapel in the hope that somehow you know that the finger that that had given michelangelo the inspiration that had created adam that the finger would somehow infuse them with the ability to be great artists so no wonder you look at the pre-raphaelites you look at the nazarenes you look at the german you look at somebody like jericho who painted the raft of the medusa which is among other things a great homage to michelangelo and the sistine chapel in the last judgment you know the influence is just enormous and then it goes forward into the into the comic books of of of the pro of the of the 1950s and the 1960s the invention of creatures like like batman believe it or not you know the artists who created batman were profoundly influenced by by the sistine chapel and those flying figures and that idea of energy you know batman and spider-man they're highly mannerist creations so you know it's it you can't really end where his influence ends because it's still i think for me when i when i read it back and i read this book specifically it felt like a watershed moment in history for art because art the art world or artists weren't seen in the same way after the sistine chapel was created it's a new realm or a new podium for artists or what artists could be and and their place in society so yeah that those those sentiments is you put it so wonderfully so we've come to our the end of our time andrew i once again i really appreciate you coming back on and and discussing uh michelangelo and the sistine chapel from from your book um where's the best place to everyone to to find you and get and and find out more about you and and your work oh well um if anyone's interested come to my website andrewgramdickson.com join the website i give a wednesday uh evening talk most wednesdays um and there's about 100 100 and more maybe 150 films that you can have access to on there and about 2 000 written articles about all aspects of art i do q and a's um we have all sorts of events and we do make little films about exhibitions that are happening so it's kind of like it began as a website and it's become a kind of tv channel um and and archival resource so um yeah please come along and um you know it's it i i believe it's not too expensive to to to join um you get most benefit if you are a member i think it's 15 or 20 pounds a year i can't remember exactly but um and there are concessions as well so yeah be lovely to see you the more you come the more we can do definitely i definitely recommend your documentaries as well because i know the one on caravaggio is one that inspired me to find out more about you that i found out on on bbc i think it was um so definitely recommend the documentaries i'm actually currently listening uh watching the one that you're doing on the medici the midichi family because it seems to be a threat throughout renaissance art in italy and i want to find out more about the medici i think he did a series on the medici family so i'm currently watching that one so um yeah now a lot of the documentaries i've made so many documentaries that i actually i made the website partly well originally mostly so that i could actually have access to my own material through one website so i was the main user so it meant i could watch any of the 100 or 120 docs you know at the click of a button um so so that was one of the reasons to do the website funnily enough was just to get them together because they're so dispersed and you can find them sometimes on youtube but then the next time you go you can't find them so at least if i put them in one place so that's um that's part of it but we sort of grown in a slightly different direction now so it's more interactive and we you know we do talks on things that people want to do and you know want to hear about and so on but um can't really describe it and you know you have to come along and sort of join in yeah yeah definitely definitely recommend checking out the websites i know you do trips as well sometimes obviously we you haven't probably done any trips in the past year or two but um i know if anyone's interested they can they can sign up to that as well so anyway andrew it's been a pleasure again thank you so much for taking the time thank you for having me and thank you for asking such interesting questions

Channel: Book Talk Today with Aun Abdi

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Keywords: book talk today, podcast, author interview, aun abdi, author podcast, what books to read, michelangelo and the sistine chapel, how was the sistine chapel made, how long did it take to create the sistine chapel, what is the sistine chapel, where is the sistine chapel, who was michelangelo, the vatican and the sistine chapel, the vatican, how many paintings are in the sistine chapel, where can i see the sistine chapel

Id: gA9NOuDDiTk

Length: 67min 20sec (4040 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 11 2021