We switch from "buongiorno" to "buonasera"
so I'll say "buonasera." Welcome to Michaelangelo's Italy my name is Gene Openshaw. I'm
the coauthor of several of the Rick Steves guidebooks. I'd like to say a special welcome to our virtual audience, the people
that are watching this live-streaming on Facebook. So to you folks
out in cyberspace, thanks for joining us. Can I just start by asking, how many people have had the
opportunity to actually go to Italy and seen some of Michelangelo's works? Good, good. How many are currently
planning a trip? Good. How many are keeping one eye on the
Dow Jones? Let's leave those mundane
things behind us and enter Michelangelo's Italy. Michelangelo Buonarroti is
considered one of the greatest artists, if not the greatest, and with good reason. He was accomplished
in many fields, first and foremost as
a sculptor, creating some of our most
memorable images, statues that people will recognize even if they don't know anything about art.
But he's probably equally well-known as a painter working on a monumental
scale. As an architect, his work has
influenced countless generations. He was also a poet, fairly well-known. In short,
a Renaissance Man, so much so, so famous, such an icon that we sometimes forget that this great
artist was also an ordinary Italian who lived in very
much the same Italy that we go and experience today. He
would've traveled through the same diverse
landscape. There was a request,
does anyone in need the house lights down to
see a little bit better? Okay, thank you. Are you the sound technician? Good, thank you for the--
thank you, yeah. Michelangelo also would have walked through ruins of history that stretched
back thousands of years. He would have prayed
in the same churches that locals do today,
been a tourist and traveled to exotic destinations
in Italy, admiring the great work of his predecessors and enjoying
Italian food. In short, he was an everyday Italian, part the rhythm love everyday Italian
life and of ordinary Italians. Are these The
Sopranos? Well what I would like to do today
is to trace the arc, the long arc, ninety years almost, of
Michelangelo's life, taking you to some other
places where he created, where he lived, worked, created some the
masterpieces that we see today. I know that not--that not
everyone that goes to Italy is going to be quite
the museum wonk that I am, but even on a casual trip to Italy
you're gonna encounter Michelangelo's work. I want to
make sure that you all got a copy of this handout here.
No need to follow along during my show, but it lists on there some of the artwork that you're going to see, the
museum that you'll find it in, and a few sight-seeing tips to avoid
crowds. Well let's start Michelangelo's journey. Michelangelo was born in Florence,
the heart of Italy. He lived more than half his life there,
but he also spent significant time in Rome, as well as lesser stays in
Siena, Carrara, Bologna, Venice. To give you an idea of
scale, from Florence to Rome is 180 miles,
Seattle Portland. That's like two hours
on the train, three hours by car, or three to four days on horse as
Michelangelo would have traveled it. Well let's begin
in his hometown of Florence. The skyline of Florence looks very much
like it might have in Michelangelo's day. The main church, called the Duomo, with
its distinctive red and white dome. The medieval tower of the town hall,
and the Arno River. Michelangelo grew up right in the
thick of it, right about two blocks behind the Town Hall, and that's
where we begin his journey, right here at this rather
inauspicious place. Amid the graffiti, the plumbing, the
electrical cables, Luigi's undershorts, you see this plaque which
tells us that this is the "casa," the house where Michelangelo,
born in nearby Caprese, spent his childhood.
Back then it was a kind of working-class neighborhood,
and it still is today. A place where Florentines, the
university students park their "motorinos," just outside
the tourist zone. As a child, little Mikey was a dreamer. His dad wanted him to be a city bureaucrat but Michelangelo wanted to be an artist. One day, his father caught him sketching
when he should have been studying. His father literally tried to beat the
art out of him. When that didn't work, plan B. They
arranged a job for young Michelangelo working for an artist who is painting this chapel across town. It was menial, blue-collar work for
thirteen-year-old Michelangelo, but there were a few glimpses,
Ghirlandaio, the master, would occasionally job out little
details to his assistants. "Hey Marco, paint me some jewels
on this dress." "Hey Francesco, paint me a mountain." "Hey Michelangelo, you do
young men's butts." And it's said that thirteen-year-old
Michelangelo painted these three figures as realistic as anything in
Ghirlandaio's fresco cycle. Well in 1494, Michelangelo's life
took a Dickensian turn. He was plucked from obscurity by none other than the ruler of Florence,
Lorenzo the Magnificent, who recognized his talent and invited
him into the Medici household to study art and the classics. Suddenly, Michelangelo was living
in the best palace in town, the Medici Palace, living among future
popes, and princes, and dining with Europe's most distinguished guests. Florence in the 1400s
was the very center of the Renaissance, that
cultural phenomenon that was the rebirth
of the learning and arts of ancient
Greece and Rome. Florence, here's a map of Florence, the
Arno River runs roughly east-west through the city,
and it's on the north bank that most of the sites are,
clustered around the main church or Duomo.
Michelangelo lived with the Medici in what's now called the
Medici Riccardi Palace. Let's take a walk through
Michelangelo's Florence. From his palace, past the Duomo,
down the main street, to the Arno. If you ever get lost,
the dome is home. The main church, the Duomo, would have
been for Michelangelo practically a museum of great art that
he could admire. He would have stood in the front there
and looked at the work done by the three generations before him,
the people that had invented the Renaissance.
So first and foremost, the dome built by Filippo Brunelleschi, an engineering feat that even
surpassed that of the Ancients. On the facade, he would've
seen works by Donatello that recalled ancient
Greece and Rome, and works that inspired
Michelangelo's own style. Turning 180 degrees from the Duomo,
he'd see the Baptistry with its bronze doors, where
Lorenzo Ghiberti had made these three-dimensional
scenes on a virtual two-dimensional surface, inspiring the
painters of the Renaissance. As you head down Florence's main street,
you realize it's a very modern city today. About 400,000 people, and they kind of go
about their everyday business almost oblivious to these masterpieces
that stand around them. So Donatello's St. George
gazes proudly across at modern shop displays.
Florence today is actually a very trendy boutique shopping town, just as it would have been in
Michelangelo's day. Few steps farther along you
reach what was the Town Hall, the Palazzo Vecchio, where the Medici
family had their offices. And then just beyond that,
the Arno River. Florence sat at a crossroads of trade,
the east-west trade along the Arno, and the north-south trade along
the main highway from-- that connected Rome in Northern Europe.
It was always a cosmopolitan center, the perfect place to birth the
Renaissance. Think of the world that Michelangelo
grew up in. We think of the Renaissance as being
just great artists, but there are also people like Christopher Columbus
discovering new worlds. So think of it, Michelangelo knew
Leonardo da Vinci. They competed together in a
painting contest. Leonardo, in his youth,
had been a musician, playing lute at parties attended by
Lorenzo the Magnificent. Lorenzo's son grew up to be
Pope Leo X. Leo X had to contend with the radical politician, Niccolo Machiavelli
of Florence. Machiavelli's writings were
much admired by another cunning politician,
King Henry VIII of England. Henry VIII considered himself a
writer, and wrote a treatise condemning the
heresies of Martin Luther of Germany. Martin Luther befriended
the artist Albrecht Durer, whose works were admired by Pope Leo X, who excommunicated Martin Luther. The Renaissance was blossoming
all over Europe, but the very epicenter of that movement was
Florence and the Medici Palace. Teenage Michelangelo, age 16,
began to create his first works. This is one of his first ones,
done when he was 15, 16, 17. It's fully classical, looks like
ancient Greece or Rome, celebration of the naked human form, a mythological scene,
it's pagan, and earthy, and secular. Contrast that
with another work that he was working on at
the very same time. This madonna is Christian, and
understated, and humble. Those two philosophical poles,
the pagan, the earthy, the classical, and the Christian, the faith-centered, the understated, those two poles would
dominate Michelangelo's work, and his life, and personality
through all his years. In 1494, Michelangelo's life took another turn. Florence came under the
sway of a charismatic monk, this man here, Girolamo Savonarola, who preached fire and brimstone
sermons condemning the pagan Renaissance. His followers threw the Medici from power,
literally ransacked, vandalized the Medici Palace.
Michelangelo, still just a teenager, was guilty by association, and
suddenly found himself homeless. For the next few years, he would roam
Italy in search of his fortune. The works from this time
show the wide variety of his experimental and
emerging style. This decadent Bacchus that he did
for a nobleman in Rome. A dreamy Madonna, done for a
far away church in Belgium. A stately St. Paul for an
altar piece in Siena. A Holy Family for a rich merchant in Flor--in Tuscany. And this statue that first put
Michelangelo on the map, a pietà showing Mary, the Mother
of Christ, cradling her dead son in her lap, having been taken
down from the cross. Michelangelo was just in his early
twenties when he sculpted this, and it was displayed for Holy Year 1500
in old St. Peter's. Tens of thousands
of pilgrims filed by. They were amazed at how
this young sculptor could have such understated emotion and create a heavenly scene with such human realism. Eventually, Michelangelo was free
to return to Florence, and there he took on his next challenge. They asked him to sculpt a figure from a 17-foot high block of marble -- 17 feet, wow. Something like that, I'm thinking, 17 feet? Not only that, the block of
marble was flawed and was considered too
narrow to accommodate a realistic human figure. Michelangelo
took on the challenge. He put it behind screens for privacy
while he worked, picked up his hammer
and chisel, knocked a knot off what would become
the statue's heart, and started work. For the next two years, he carved out a story from the Bible, of the shepherd boy that
slew the giant. Story goes that David turned down the
armor of the day, instead he went to the river and
collected five smooth stones that he cups in his powerful right hand. He throws his sling over his left
shoulder and goes out onto the field of battle. And
Michelangelo captures him at the exact moment he's gazing
across the battlefield, sizing up the enemy and saying to himself, "I can take this guy." When the screens came down, the
Florentines were amazed. They claimed the statue as their own,
a symbol of the city. They tied ropes to it and dragged it
across wooden rollers down the streets. Imagine the
engineering challenge of this, you got a statue that's seventeen feet
tall, weighs 12,000 pounds, top-heavy, with virtually all the weight balanced on one fragile right ankle. Thousands of Michelangemaniacs
lined the streets as they brought it into the main square
in town, where they set it up right at the most prominent place, in
front of the entrance to the Town Hall, where the fake David
stands today. For the Florentines of the time, David
seemed to represent them. They were Renaissance men and women, enlightened people slaying the giant of medieval ignorance and superstition. And in some ways, David may be a metaphor
for Michelangelo himself at this point. Lean and muscular with the body of David, but not the face. Michelangelo was ugly. He had a nose--bent nose all his life
that had been broken in a fight. But it caught his spirit. At age thirty, Michelangelo was now at the top with his sculpting powers, confident, ready to take on the world. When he was at the top of his game
as a sculptor, he was suddenly forced to make
a career change, to pick up a painter's brush instead
of a sculptor's chisel. The call came from none other
than the pope in Rome. The Pope asked him to paint his chapel, the Sistine Chapel, the private
chapel of the popes at the Vatican. It was a huge undertaking, so Michelangelo
had a a suitably huge vision for it. He wanted to paint the entire
history of the world, from the first day of creation up to the
coming of Christ -- 300 figures. It's a lot to take in at once, so
let's kind of get oriented. Let me show you a diagram
of the ceiling. The ceiling looks something
kinda like this, it's composed of three elements: a central spine of scenes
from the Bible, flanking those are prophets on thrones, and in between those, these triangular
things, these lunettes that feature the ancestors of Christ. The story begins right here
in this panel with the first day of Creation. God separates the light from the
darkness, beginning Creation. As you go up the central spine there,
you see the other acts of Creation. You see God bringing forth dry land,
God creating man, God creating woman. Keep going up, Adam and Eve
in the Garden of Eden. You keep going up and you get to the
stories of Noah and the flood. Now flanking that central spine then
are prophets sitting on thrones -- both Old Testament prophets
and pagan prophetesses from Ancient Greece, the Delphic Oracle, who
Michelangelo and his people thought also prophesied the coming of Christ. And then inside those, the lunettes,
where the ancestors of Christ patiently
await his coming. There is a fourth element
that Michelangelo added. Amid all of this fake architecture
and fake statues that he did are these figures, these naked figures,
the so-called Ignudi, or nudes. These seem to have no
thematic purpose, simply a celebration of the
naked male body, exuding the pagan spirit of
the Renaissance here in Christendom's most
holy chapel. Picture Michelangelo preparing to
paint this thing, standing six stories up
on scaffolding looking at his big blank canvas. It was 12,000 square feet, both the
upper walls here and the ceiling. Michelangelo did the ceiling with his
own hand, about half of the job. Huge undertaking, and where
did it all start? Right here, in Michelangelo's
fertile brain. He would get an idea, maybe a face, pick up a piece a paper and a
stick of chalk and start sketching some lines
and some hatching, a nose, a mouth, a fleeting emotion,
some wind-blown hair. This face, where would it go?
And then he thinks, "well maybe I'll make that face
part of this figure here, the figure--the face of this figure
clinging to a tree." Great idea, but remember though that
Michelangelo's painting this in fresco, which is painting on
wet plaster. So first they'd have to haul all the
materials up the scaffolding, they'd have to sand and prepare the
ceiling, they'd have to mix the plaster, they'd have to trowel it on, and then
while it's still wet Michelangelo would have to work quickly
to get it finished before it dried and locked the colors in. If they got it wrong, they just have to scrape that section off
and start all over again. It was a big undertaking, and this face
would have been just one tiny element of what eventually became a larger scene -- Noah and the flood. Here's Noah's Ark in the background. Now, it's often thought that
Michelangelo painted lying down, but he painted standing up, reaching up,
bending backwards. If you've ever futzed with a light fixture
for even five minutes, you know how tiring that can be for your hands, for
your arms. And then all this--all of that work took him two months just to do this
scene here. He could probably do about this
much in a day. Maybe--it's about this big, something like that, piecing together
these little pieces. Two months it took him to do the flood, and yet the flood is only a drop
in the flood of the ceiling. Its way up here now, just
one scene among many. It took Michelangelo four long years to
do the Sistine ceiling. The physical effort, paint dripping
in his eyes, and most of all the mental stress of
dealing with a pushy pope. He claimed it nearly killed him. But when it was finally done and they took
the scaffolding down, and the Pope and his court came
in to look, it just blew 'em away. They'd never seen
anything like it before. It seemed like they could look up and see
into heaven itself, watching God at work in his Creation. And the central scene of
the whole thing was the central act of Creation. God swoops in with his entourage to create man. He reaches across to pass the divine spark of life to his Creation, and Adam receives it, looking back, making
meaningful eye contact with God, almost like they're on the same plane. Adam receives that spark of life, that creative force, and then he goes on to continue God's Creation on Earth. What a humanist statement. With the
Sistine ceiling, it was showing God almost
like a loving father, passing the baton to
the next generation. Michelangelo had summed up the
optimistic spirit of the times. He topped the work of all other painters, and when you go to Italy and you
stand under the Sistine Chapel and see that expansive ceiling, you can appreciate the agony of the process
and the ecstasy of the result. Now when I go to Italy and I see these
masterpieces done by these enlightened people
of yore, it always leaves me feeling
inspired and invigorated. But as many of you know who have
traveled, sightseeing is very hard work. So let's take a little break from our
art sightseeing and do a little different sightseeing --
Italian cuisine. If America's specialty is fast food,
Italy's is slow food. So you build a meal, you buy your
figs from Sophia Loren, you buy your meats from the butcher, you
buy your breads from the baker, you basically shop by walking
around the block, greeting shopkeepers that you may have
known all of your life. You buy foods in season. If you're making
a journey in the next month or two, you may find artichokes
on the menu. The food is prepared with love and
always eaten in social circumstances. For Italians, an evening's
entertainment is not necessarily dinner and a movie, it's just dinner. Leisurely meal, multi-course meal with
your friends. Italians do eat in courses, your first
course might be antipasto. then, that's just the start of a full
meal. Next comes your pasta course, then your main dish--your meat dish, then
your salad course, then your dessert, your coffee, your liqueur, the cigarette course. But of course food is only half of
the equation of Italian cuisine, the other half being wine. If you go to Italy I would say it's
compulsory that you try the wines. You got your chianti from the region of
Tuscany, you got your Bardolino from the north, Lacryma Christi from
the south, there's a wine for every wine
connoisseur. By the way, Michelangelo's favorite
wine was a white wine made from the Trebbiano grape. If you
want to try a little vino di Michelangelo, pick yourself
up a dry crisp white, like an Orvieto Classico, that would
have been one he would have enjoyed. Well our meal is almost done, time to do
a little more sightseeing, but first I like to end my meal with a little
dessert. Nothing better than gelato, Italian ice cream, the best
in the world. It's made from a little less milk fat so
the natural flavors can come through. Almost every place in italy has got at
least one gelateria. A little 31 flavors establishment
where you can buy homemade ice cream on the presence--on the
premises. So grab yourself a cup or a cone and
join the rest the rest of the Italians on the evening "passeggiata," as they walk
the streets, greet their neighbors, and enjoy a slice of edible art. When we finish here, I would be glad
to talk to you about your trip or answer questions but I I can't do it here, so
I will meet you in the Travel Center which is two blocks south of here. While
you're there, I hope that you'll kind of peruse some of our products and
services which can help your trip. A best one is arm
yourself with information. Now there are three main
Michelangelo sights, and all three of them come with
big crowds. You'll want to find ways to avoid waiting
in line to buy tickets for what can be an hour, two hours,
maybe more in the hot sun, and those lines
and crowds are pretty much all the time from
April through October, and even sometimes in the offseason. So you want to find ways to
avoid that. In Florence to see David, the Accademia
is the museum you go to. It has long lines but they can
be avoided by simply making a reservation, reserving
an entry time. That can be done very easily online,
on the phone with an English-speaking operator,
or even through your hotel. Another option that's been added
just recently is the Florence Card. This is a three-day
sightseeing pass that covers most of the museums of Florence and
allows you to go straight to the head of the line. It's a
great deal, ultra convenient, but it's also a little bit pricier,
so check, you know, get a guidebook and see how much
you're gonna use that pass, and whether that's the route to go. In Rome, to see the Sistine Chapel, that's
part of the Vatican Museum tour. So you wanna go online to the Vatican
Museum website and book yourself a reservation time.
You print off the confirmation, you go right there, you bypass all
those people waiting in a two-hour line and go,
"what a buncha losers," and you walk right up to the front
of the place with no line at all, hand them your voucher,
and they let you right in. And for St. Peter's, although there's
no fee to get into St. Peter's, there is usually a long line to get
through security. We found out a way to avoid that,
which is a special backdoor exit from the Sistine Chapel that
leads directly to St. Peter's. So if you've got this white sheet of mine,
I did leave--list these three options very briefly, as well as a few other
things on it, check that out, and you want to get a
little more detail from a guidebook. The point that I really wanna make about all this is, I really want you to spend a lot money here today at Europe Through the Back Door. Of course I don't, I don't wanna push a
buncha crap on you, but a little bit of--but the right things can really
help. Don't be what the British call "penny-wise but pound-foolish." We are pinching pennies here trying to
save money and missing the big picture. Look, you're spending literally thousands
of dollars for this trip. Be willing to spend a few dozen dollars up front for the kinds of things that
can save you money down the line, save you
time, enrich your experience, and make your trip, your very expensive trip, exactly what
you want it to be. The one thing that I will mention is this book here, "Europe 101." Rick Steves and I wrote this
book to try to bring Europe's history and art to life
for the traveler. It talks through Europe's history
and is illustrated with the very masterpieces that
you're going to Europe to see. This can be very helpful so
consider that, and if you are-- I'm actually doing a slideshow on
"Europe 101" two weeks from today here in Edmonds at the
Edmonds movie theater, so it's similar to my Michelangelo show,
if you like that, come where I treat Europe--European
history and art in very much the same way, with many of the very same jokes. If you're going to do any shopping,
the final word I'm going to say is, do it here today at the
Travel Center until 6:00. Why? Because everything
is 20% off. For those that are-- our friends in cyberspace that are
watching on the Facebook stream, that also applies to you,
you get 20% off the price when you're
shopping online until 6 p.m., 6 p.m. Pacific time. End of commercial, thank you. Let's go
back to Michelangelo's life. We left Michelangelo where? We left him at the peak up his career, the triumph of David, the triumph of
the Sistine Chapel, he was now famous. The
commissions poured in for other works, a Pope's tomb,
a church facade, he would need a mountain of marble to
sculpt all of those things. So where did he go? To the
"mother lode" of marble, and that's where we hit next, the
mountains of Carrara. Carrara quarries many different
kinds of marble, but its specialty is pure white,
that is without the purities--the impurities that make-- that give marble its color. In Carrara it's not just statues that
are white, heck, the streets are literally paved
with marble, and even the humblest establishments
might have a sign for--made out of Carrara marble. Michelangelo, in 1516, settled in this flat in the
town of Carrara, right next to where
today the locals come for their morning
cappuccino and newspaper. The plaque over the
door tells us, "many times, 'piu volte,' Michelangelo came here to bring his creations to life
from the marble of our living mountains." From the town of
Carrara you then look up into those mountains, and you see these
snow-capped peaks. Oh wait, sorry, these aren't
snow-capped peaks, you realize this is the white exposed
rock from the quarries. To get there you go up to steep
switchbacks hills to what are now still working quarries. And you can gaze across at the
sheer face that has been carved out with these big blocks of marble, looks kinda like you're looking at
a opera amphitheater with box seats, but big
enough that could seat literally thousands of Davids. You look down below at the bottom and you
see these tiny men and machines going along, and you
realize the enormity, the scale of quarrying marble. In Michelangelo's day it was much more
arduous work, workers had to dangle down on the sheer
rock face, kinda try to work a little crack
into the face, then they would pound in wooden wedges. They'd pour water on the wedges
causing them to expand, and it would calve off these
big chunks of marble. Then workers would saw through them
like lumberjacks laboriously, to cut them into more
manageable sizes. These blocks would then be stacked
on a sledge, a wooden sled that they could slide down
the hillsides. Men and oxen hung on almost for
dear life as they brought 'em down these steep hills. Michelangelo even lost
one of his men one time in an accident. They bring 'em down to the town of
Carrara where even today they stack them ready for transport. Well after four years, Michelangelo had amassed many, many tons
of marble. He put some on a barge and sailed it up the Arno River to
his hometown. And there he'd been asked to
do a marvelous new project. He was gonna create dozens of colossal
size statues, the size of David, and put them on the facade, a gleaming
marble facade of a church, and here it is. Unfinished. The Church of San Lorenzo in Florence remains bare brick
to this day. And in fact this was only the first of a
number of projects that Michelangelo worked on and
left unfinished. Couple of decades of
work where things kinda kept getting put
by the wayside. From the Church of San Lorenzo,
unfinished, you go just around the corner
where you could find the Laurentian library which he also began, designed, and left
unfinished. It was completed after
his death. The statues known as the Slaves, intended for a Pope's tomb,
left unfinished. These statues, the Slaves or Prisoners, you'll find when you visit David, they
line the hall leading up to David. They seem to be struggling to free
themselves from the marble. It's kinda good that these were left
unfinished because these statues give us an insight into Michelangelo's
sculpting process. You may have heard, and it is true, that
he would say he wasn't creating the figure, he was just discovering the figure that God had put into the marble. The form that God put in the marble. That's form with a capital F for all the Neo-Platonists in the audience. Just across town, another project,
the Medici tombs, unfinished, the Medici
chapels. These were tombs that Michelangelo
was making for the Medici family, people he'd grown up with and were now dying around him. It's a kind of grim place, and you look
at some of these statues and they twist and squirm restlessly, like they're pondering their mortality
but unable to come to terms with it. Now in his 50s, Michelangelo sank
into a deep mid-life crisis. Oh wait, that's me,
sorry. And I don't wanna, you know, over analyze Michelangelo or
psychoanalyze him, but if you read his writings from this time, it's very clear the many references he
makes to how time is passing him by, he feels
overworked, stressed, trapped, and most
of all, old. In the autumn of 1529 Michelangelo suddenly walked away
from it all, all these projects that were
in the works. Without telling anyone, he left Florence
and went on a little trip. He went someplace that many people go
when they need to heal wounds or recharge
their batteries, he went where there's warm sun and
sea breezes, and that's where we head next, to the
island city of Venice. Engineers love Venice. A completely
man-made environment that seems to rise from the sea with no
visible means of support. Venice is an island shaped like a fish that sits about two miles off the
Italian mainland. These days it's connected to the
mainland by a bridge the brings in car and train traffic.
But for us, let's enter the city the way Michelangelo
would have, on boat, down the Grand Canal to the historic center, St. Mark's
Square. These days, you ride on a kind of water bus
called a vaporetto. You immediately see that the city
looks like it did way back when. The Grand Canal is grand, two and a quarter miles long,
150 feet wide, about 10 feet deep
in most places, and lined with Palazzos and churches,
just as it would have been in Michelangelo's day. You go underneath Rialto Bridge, where
there was the marketplace. Venice in its heyday ruled the
global economy. It was the middleman in trade between
the raw materials of Western Europe and the luxury goods
of the Eastern lands. We arrive then at Piazza San Marco,
St. Mark's Square, dominated by the church with its
bell tower, its clock tower, and the Doge's Palace,
where the prince or Doge of Venice ruled this worldwide
economic Empire. St. Mark's Square is one of the
world's great gathering places. These things along the side here, these
chairs and tables, these are cafes. Each one has its own cafe orchestra,
it's wonderful. For the price of what, here in the
States you might pay for like a movie, and popcorn, and Diet Coke, you could have a seat at one of these
cafe tables, sip a glass of Valpolicella wine, admire the Byzantine architecture
of the church, and listen while the band plays
New York, New York. Hey, if all you did was plunk yourself down
in St. Mark's Square and watch the world go by,
to me that's a vacation. It's not hard in Venice to blink away elements of the modern world and find
yourself transported in time, back to, say, the centuries of not just Michelangelo, but of
Giacomo Casanova, real-life Venetian. Seeing people going
about their timeless activities, people who
are going to the marketplace just as generations have done at
that same place for millennia. In Michelangelo's day, Europe--Venice was
Europe's fun city. A place where nobles would come, dawn a
mask for anonymity, and do the kinds of things in Venice
that they were forbidden to do back home. I can't exactly tell you what
Michelangelo did during his time in Venice, not
everything at least, he probably did the same kinds of things
that people do today. There are two things in the
historical record: one, he spent a lot of money in a short
amount of time, and second, he wrote poetry. Love poetry, and his career as a poet
began. "Love has taken me captive," he wrote, "and beauty holds me bound. He sees his beloved everywhere, her
beautiful face in every statue. Love leaves him dangling in the middle between reality
and hope, robbed of peace, sighing and consumed with a burning fire." Michelangelo was a homosexual, but exactly who he had sex with, if anyone, is a mystery to historians. He seemed to be a man married
only to his art, who saw all love as a platonic
force for good. But around this time, historians seem
to think Michelangelo did fall in love with the young man
forty years his junior in Rome named Tommaso dei Cavalieri. They often point to this statue that
Michelangelo was working on and see Cavalieri's graceful,
handsome figure in the young man standing here. Michelangelo sent Cavalieri passionate
letters, erotic sketches, love poems, and they see in the statue is something of
a metaphor their relationship, a handsome young man standing triumphant over an older man, whose face clearly resembles
Michelangelo, on a man who is clearly the young man's
conquest. In 1534, Michelangelo reinvented himself once more. He decided to leave Florence, he packed
up his belongings and closed his studio, he left and told his friends,
"I shall not return," and he never did. Now sixty years old, he headed south where he would start the final chapter of his life
in the city of Rome. Rome is the Eternal City with history
everywhere. Layers old and new, side by side.
So you might see a line of these motorinos from the 21st century lined
up against a second century temple. In Rome you might see an
Egyptian obelisk atop a Baroque elephant in front of a
Gothic church. Where images of the Christian God are
patterned on those of a pagan priest. Rome is the world of the Baroque and the broken. With Mussolini's Balcony Il Duce, and an overpriced shoe store named
Gucci. Is it just me or are the jokes
getting worse? I think so. Well Michelangelo, amid all
this history, added his own layer, Renaissance Rome. First up, the Sistine Chapel. Remember 25 years before,
he painted the ceiling, now he was asked to come and
finish the job, painting the altar wall. He painted the history
of the world from the Creation to the
coming of Christ, and now he finished it by
painting the end of time, the Last Judgment. Da, da, da, da! The angels blow their
trumpets, waking the dead, the dead rise from their graves
to be judged. The good rise up to Christ in heaven, while the wicked are
dragged down into hell to be tormented by
demons for all eternity. It's really a grim scene. Look at this
guy here, obviously a sinner going, "oh, why did I
cheat on my wife with my housekeeper?" It's very grim -- even Christ is not a
"love thy neighbor" Jesus anymore, he's come for justice. Out of the 390 figures not one is smiling, not even the blessed in heaven. In fact
it matched Michelangelo's mood, and the mood of all of Europe.
The Renaissance was ending, they were embroiled in the
religious wars of the Counter Ref-- of the Reformation, and Michelangelo found himself a
Renaissance Man in Counter-Reformation times. Very
different sort of world as he's painting all these naked figures. Take a look
at this, this is actually a copy of his work, of the Last Judgment, done by an
artist of the time. It shows how Michelangelo originally painted these figures,
virtually all of them buck-naked in all their classical glory. A few decades later, prudish
church officials would hire another artist to come in and clothe these with little loin cloths, that's the version that we see today. Michelangelo himself was becoming more
pessimistic about mankind, more introspective. And you can see it in one final detail
he added. Right next to Christ is this saint here, and he's holding a flayed skin in his hand. You zero in and you see that
skin has a safe-- has a face in it, clearly a self-portrait of a troubled and self-doubting
Michelangelo. Before I finish with our very final
years of Michelangelo's life, let me just remind you,
when we finish here I'll meet you in the Travel Center. Go there, spend a lot of
money until 6:00. If you're interested in a
Rick Steves tour, Heidi is giving a talk at 5:00 today at the Edmonds theater on
Italy tours. I hope I see some of you two weeks
from today for a talk on "Europe 101," and again, just be on behalf of everybody
that's spoken today, thanks for coming to
our travel festival. Now let's hit the the final
years of Michelangelo's life. In his last year's, Michelangelo's
work turned religious and faith centered.
Scenes like this Conversion of St. Paul, or the
Crucifixion of St. Peter. Not happy scenes celebrating humankind and their
confidence, but concentrating more on the gr--
our grim mortality. This late pietà, Michelangelo whittled
it down, whittled Christ down to an
emaciated figure, ethereal, other-worldly presence. And this late pietà, that Michelangelo
intended for his own tomb. You look at the dead Christ, and
you look up at the figures of Nicodemus up here,
and it's clearly a self-portrait of an aging Michelangelo,
looking down on what he fears might be the final--his final sculptures. Michelangelo in his last years turned
more to architecture. And it is this that is one
of his greatest legacies. At age 70, he was asked by
the Pope to take over the ongoing construction of the new
St. Peter's Basilica. For the next two decades, Michelangelo
worked on this project, making many designs that were
incorporated in it, completing a lot of it, being one of
many architects over about 120 years to
work on this church. You go inside, it's overwhelming. First of all, just the sheer size of it,
but also the the decoration, bronze mosaic, gold leaf, statues, paintings, stained glass, all of it meant to create this sense of the heaven that
awaits us when we reach the end of our days.
This interior work was done by a later generation, done in the
Baroque style, but that was a style that Michelangelo
in his last year's had helped pioneer. When you walk around there, you get a
sense that this is part of the completion of Michelangelo's
lifelong vision, to merge the Christian faith with
the grandeur of the Ancient World. You see some works, highlights
like his pietà that he had sculpted for
old St. Peter's 60 years before. But perhaps his greatest legacy, and the
thing that people still marvel at today, is the dome that he placed over the tomb of St. Peter.
Michelangelo, in his lifetime, did the designs and completed up about
as much as we see here, about where the windows are. And his
designs then were completed by later architects two generations
later. From a distance, you get a real sense of
the sca-- the scale of this thing. The dome, 448 feet tall, that puts-- makes this the greatest church in
Christendom. One of the best ways to finish a walk through St. Peter's is to climb up 323
sweaty steps inside the dome, where you pop out on top with this marvelous view of Rome. And from this high perspective, looking
out over the Eternal City, it's probably a good place for us to look
back on what we have seen in our journey through
Michelangelo's life. It started in inauspicious beginnings, in his hometown in Florence. His education with the Medici, the pietà that put him on the map, the triumph of David, and the exuberant, over-the-top nature of
the Sistine Chapel. The lost years in the quarries
of Carrara, and all those unfinished projects. We saw Michelangelo as a tourist, as a lover, and the introspective religious
works of his late years. Finally, there's the church that
served as a model for so many, that put a cap on the Renaissance. When Michelangelo died in 1564 at the
age of 89, you can essentially say the Renaissance
died with him, He was called "il Divino," the divine one, by his contemporaries who thought that
he had received his artistic talent as a divine spark
from heaven. Michelangelo received that divine spark and passed it along to the next
generations, and in the process, creating some of the
most iconic images in the Western world. Well thank you, "grazie,"
I hope you have a real good trip.
