Michelangelo: The Sistine Chapel Ceiling (Part 3)

The Sistine Chapel ceiling is arguably the most famous work of art in the world, but why was Michelangelo so reluctant to take on the commission? And just what is it about his art that has led so many regard him as a genius? Join Alastair and James in the third of four episodes charting the remarkable life and work of Michelangelo. Artworks in this episode include: Attributed to Daniele da Volterra, Portrait of Michelangelo, c.1545, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Raphael, Portrait of Julius II, 1511, The National Gallery, London Michelangelo, The Sistine Chapel Ceiling, 1508-1512, Vatican CIty Michelangelo, Moses, 1513-15, Basilica of San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome Michelangelo, The Awakening Slave, 1530, Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence Michelangelo, The Bearded Slave, 1530, Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence Michelangelo, Atlas, 1530, Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence Michelangelo, The Rebellious Slave, 1513-15, Musée du Louvre, Paris For more great art content visit www.heni.com or visit the Heni Talks YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@HENITalks Hosts: Alastair Sooke and Dr James Fox Additional Research: Catherine Ingram Producer and Editor: Ben Harding Executive Producer: Emma Cahusac Chapters 00:00:00 Introduction: The Commission 00:03:56 The Sistine Chapel Building 00:07:58 Michelangelo's Reluctance 00:18:14 Early Struggles 00:30:14 The Creation of Adam 00:44:16 Moses 00:58:42 The Unfinished Sculptures

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01James Fox?

  Welcome to Stories of Art. I'm James Fox.

• 0:04Alastair Sooke?

  And I'm Alastair Sook.

• 0:09James Fox?

  "I intend to continue being generous," cried the Pope heartily. "I am going to favour you above all the painting masters of Italy." "Painting masters?" "Yes, I have decided that you are the best artist to complete the work begun by your countrymen. I am commissioning you to complete my Uncle Sixtus's chapel by painting the ceiling." There was a light patter of applause. Michelangelo was stunned. Nausea gripped him. He cried passionately. "I'm a sculptor, not a painter." Julius shook his head in despair. "I had less trouble conquering Perugia and Bologna than I have in subduing you." Now that, Alastair...

• 0:55Alastair Sooke?

  It's not a Versari, is it?

• 0:56James Fox?

  No, that is an excerpt from Irving Stone's 1961 novel The Agony and the Ecstasy, which told the story of Michelangelo's painting of the Sistine Chapel, which a few years later was turned into a film in which Charlton Heston, no less, played Michelangelo.

• 1:14Alastair Sooke?

  Right.

• 1:14James Fox?

  And in this episode, we are going to tell the thrilling tale of the Sistine Chapel ceiling and much else besides. Now, Alastair, last time we talked about David, world famous piece. You would think it would be impossible to outdo it.

• 1:30Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 1:30James Fox?

  But with the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Michelangelo probably does.

• 1:34Alastair Sooke?

  I think he definitely does. I am slightly still mindful of your accusation at the beginning of this series, when you said I was trying to wriggle out of doing Michelangelo. And you are right, I did feel a bit daunted, partly because I'm still sort of toying with it. I think it felt a bit like we were attempting to scale Mount Everest before in the podcast we got into any other peaks in art history. And yet, here we are.

• 2:04James Fox?

  Here we are.

• 2:05Alastair Sooke?

  We have our ice picks, we have our masks, the oxygen is thinning and we're ascending towards the Sistine ceiling, which is this canonical high point, isn't it, of Western art? And I think the thing that's fascinating, I didn't know you were going to read out that extract from that, would we call it a pot boiler?

• 2:22James Fox?

  I think so.

• 2:24Alastair Sooke?

  But it gets to the heart of this tension within Michelangelo, which is that we think of him as often as a sculptor, but of course it's in painting, which he himself tried to resist half the time, that he achieves some of his greatest things. And I think the Sistine Chapel is the perfect example of that, right?

• 2:46James Fox?

  It's one of the greatest achievements in human history, I think. So there's a lot to get through. First of all, a little recap, just to remind listeners where we got to. Michelangelo was born in 1475, trained as an artist in his native Florence, but really announced himself as an emerging talent with his great sculpture of the Pietà in Rome in 1499.

• 3:06Alastair Sooke?

  So graceful, we touched on that. Beautiful work of art.

• 3:09James Fox?

  Wonderful piece that he makes as a young man. He then returns to Florence, creates the statue of David, one of the most famous artworks in Western history, we've already said. And Michelangelo was then offered the chance to construct Pope Julius II's tomb.

• 3:24Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 3:24James Fox?

  But the Pope, famously, as we discussed in the previous episode, withdrew that commission, much to Michelangelo's rage.

• 3:30Alastair Sooke?

  I think you used the word ghosted him.

• 3:32James Fox?

  He ghosted him. Yeah, he ghosted him. And in 1508, when Michelangelo was 33 years old, he asked him instead to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. So this then is the next instalment of our mighty series on the life and work of Michelangelo.

• 3:56James Fox?

  Right, Alastair, I think we should begin really by saying something about the Sistine Chapel itself.

• 4:03Alastair Sooke?

  Ah, what it is.

• 4:04James Fox?

  What it is.

• 4:04Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 4:05James Fox?

  So this is a building that's built in the 1470s, within the Vatican, by, as that passage at the start of the episode made clear, by- Julius the Second's uncle.

• 4:16Alastair Sooke?

  Also Pope.

• 4:17James Fox?

  Pope Sixtus the Fourth. That's why it's called the Sistine Chapel, because it's named after Sixtus. So it's effectively a very important building because it's the private chapel for the Pope himself within the Vatican. But it's also, as people who might have read and indeed watched the recent film Conclave will know, it is the space in which the College of Cardinals is gathered to select the next Pope. So it's got great political significance, great spiritual significance. So Sixtus builds this structure in the 1470s and soon after invites the greatest painters from Florence to decorate the walls. So he has Perugino, who's Raphael's master, he has Sandro Botticelli, he has Domenico Gillandia, Michelangelo's own master.

• 5:02Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 5:03James Fox?

  Beautiful frescoes all around the wall.

• 5:05Alastair Sooke?

  And these are depicting scenes from the life of Moses.

• 5:08James Fox?

  Yes.

• 5:09Alastair Sooke?

  And also Christ.

• 5:10James Fox?

  Yes. The ceiling is not quite so elaborate.

• 5:13Alastair Sooke?

  No.

• 5:14James Fox?

  So the ceiling is really just a blue sky with some stars.

• 5:17Alastair Sooke?

  Possibly gold.

• 5:18James Fox?

  Possibly some golden stars in there. I'm sure it's very pleasant. Actually, it's something that happened a lot in that period. So the Arena Chapel, for instance, painted by Giotto, is a blue sky with golden stars. But there were some problems because in the subsequent decades after the construction of the building, there's subsidence. The building starts to move under the soil and the ceiling begins to crack. And in the very early 1500s, they'd done some remedial works, they'd installed some iron bars into the ceilings and patched it up. So if you had gone into the Sistine Chapel in the early 1500s, the ceiling would have been an absolute mess.

• 5:55Alastair Sooke?

  As in you could visibly see a crack.

• 5:58James Fox?

  There was like a stitch, you know, a white plaster stitch running all the way down the ceiling. You'd still see some of the blue sky, but essentially it was a mess. So there was a, there had been a plan for a while that they had to try to do something about this. And of course, Michelangelo, 1508, is down in Rome.

• 6:15Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 6:16James Fox?

  Julius doesn't want to lose him because he's the greatest artist in Italy. The tomb that Michelangelo was so desperate to do is not happening. And he thinks, you know what, I'll get him to paint the ceiling. And of course, famously, Michelangelo does not want to do it.

• 6:29Alastair Sooke?

  He's not keen. He even suggests that, well, he's quite paranoid about it, isn't he? Because as you've established with that Irving Stone passage at the beginning of this part, he considered himself primarily a sculptor.

• 6:44James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 6:45Alastair Sooke?

  He could also be quite paranoid and competitive. And he thought there was a bit of a plot going on with other factions, didn't he? Yes. Within the Vatican, with other artists and architects.

• 6:57James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 6:57Alastair Sooke?

  Some of whom were kinsmen. Two in particular, Bramante, the great architect, and Raphael, the kind of young Turk painter who was coming along and was clearly preferred as a painter by Pope Julius II, and in fact would be by his successor Leo X. And he's thinking that the plot is, tell you what, Julius, why don't you get Michelangelo in? Get him to paint the ceiling because they're thinking, he won't be able to do this. It's a vast piece of work. This is a guy who's known as a sculptor. His last experience painting something on this scale would have been as an apprentice in the workshop of Gialldetto, when they were working on a chapel in a church in Florence for a big, which survives as this fresco cycle.

• 7:40Alastair Sooke?

  But that's what, that would have been in around about 1490, early 1490s. So that's going back a bit. He doesn't have the first hand experience. So Michelangelo's thinking, this is a trap. And he actually, I think he even says to the Pope, according to Vasari and other sources, I think you should get Raphael to do it.

• 7:58James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 7:58Alastair Sooke?

  It can't be me.

• 7:59James Fox?

  He's properly cornered because if he refuses, he gets in serious trouble. He's already been in trouble with the Pope. He's lucky to still have his life. If he says no again, he's in trouble. And if he takes it on. He's really got, as you say, very little experience painting at this scale. He's done some lovely paintings there, two in the National Gallery, both of which are unfinished.

• 8:22Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 8:22James Fox?

  There's another lovely picture he does in the Uffizi earlier on in his life. But these are relatively small, easel pictures, pictures on panel. He has never painted at this scale before, 500 metre squared ceiling.

• 8:36Alastair Sooke?

  So do you think he's also feeling a bit knocked because he was so into the vision of the tomb?

• 8:41James Fox?

  Oh, I think so.

• 8:42Alastair Sooke?

  And it was so ambitious, it's going to be the lifetime's work. And obviously he loves being in the quarries, he loves selecting the marble, he's fastidious about marble, he loves carving. And then suddenly that's taken away.

• 8:52James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 8:52Alastair Sooke?

  And this other thing that he's invited to do, which he doesn't really like. And we know that he himself, I mean, you know, that extract at the start alludes to the fact there was always this butting of heads between these two great egotists in Michelangelo and Julius II, which I really wanted to bring this up in a previous part, and this is the moment to do it because I forgot. But I always find it weird with Julius because he's the warrior pope. There is this wonderful portrait by Raphael, which is in the National Gallery, in which you see him with a beard and his robes on a throne. And the surprise of it to me is that he looks always in this picture, he looks quite feeble. He looks to me like this kind of, he's in red with the big beard, like a miserable Father Christmas who's there in his throne.

• 9:33Alastair Sooke?

  And he doesn't seem like this guy who has this great ego who's impressing himself on the age. And yet, we know that's what's going on. And in a funny way, the Sistine Chapel, we're discussing it through the artist prism and thinking about it's Michelangelo's great achievement. But in a sense, it is the great monument to Julius himself, even though the tomb that eventually is created in a very different reduced form, isn't quite the original intention.

• 9:59James Fox?

  Yeah, Michelangelo was very attached to the tomb and was hoping, you know, that if he kept refusing other things, he would eventually get the tomb. But he is basically screwed, he has no options, he has to do the ceiling. And so in May 1508, he relents to Julius II's demands and he signs the contracts, actually a very good contract, gets paid a lot of money. To do the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

• 10:23Alastair Sooke?

  And whilst we're on Julius, I mean, the interesting, one of the great questions with the Sistine ceiling the whole time is, which I know we'll get into, but is the programme and what he paints and who comes up with it. And we do know a bit about Julius's original idea, right, for the ceiling. I don't know whether that was where you were particularly going at that moment or not, but he has an idea that somehow the decoration of the ceiling should involve painting the apostles. And Michelangelo has other ideas about it, doesn't he?

• 10:54James Fox?

  Yes. Well, we will come to that. We will come to the programme because it's a fascinating programme. I think the first thing we need to address straight off is, so he signs the, he signs the deal in May 1508. There is a myth about the Sistine ceiling, in many ways promoted by the Charlton Heston film, that Michelangelo worked alone. That he was there in this building for four years, you know, this Titanic achievement.

• 11:18Alastair Sooke?

  Well, partly because it's put about by Versari.

• 11:20James Fox?

  And by Michelangelo, indeed. But the truth is that it was actually, at least initially, a quite sizable team of people. So there was Michelangelo, here was old childhood friend Francesco Granacci, who was the foreman, one of the only people Michelangelo actually trusted at this point. There were four painting assistants, there were rope makers, there were scaffold builders, there were plasterers. So if you had gone into the Sistine Chapel in 1508, surely after the project started, you would have, it would have been like a construction site today. There had been a group of men, maybe as many as half, maybe as many as a dozen men actually in the building, laughing, joking, making things, building things, fixing the ceiling.

• 12:01Alastair Sooke?

  And just as an aside on that, I mean, he, Michelangelo, comes of course from Florence. This isn't a moment, as you've already established in this series, when Italy is unified, there are these different states. And I find it quite interesting that some of the assistants that he involves, he gets them back, they're from Florence, they're people he's known and worked with, old friends, probably in the workshop, perhaps even people who'd worked on that fresco cycle that I mentioned before, around about 1490. And there's this sense of kind of rival factions. And also, it's a reminder, I think, of the fact that although Michelangelo is seen as being such a difficult figure, he could also really inspire quite fierce loyalty. He could really inspire fierce loyalty. And that's, as you're saying, if you'd gone in in the early days in the Sistine, into the Sistine Chapel, you would have had that

• 12:46Alastair Sooke?

  sense of collegiality, that a bunch of people all working together, who were kind of mates.

• 12:51James Fox?

  Yes, exactly. And so, and they were all relatively young. They were all, you know, in their twenties and thirties and so on and so forth. So, in the first few months, Michelangelo, while those men are building the scaffolding and looking at the ceiling and making good and getting the plaster work ready, Michelangelo is drawing. And in fact, I think he spends about four months drawing, plotting out the the composition. He makes hundreds, perhaps even a thousand drawings.

• 13:16Alastair Sooke?

  Very few survive.

• 13:17James Fox?

  Very few survive. Those that do are extraordinary. So he spends four months making those drawings, and it's eventually in October 1508, so five, four or five months after signing the contract, that Michelangelo is ready to start painting his fresco. We should tell, I think, the listeners what a fresco actually is, because it's not as straightforward as it might seem, even though it probably doesn't seem straightforward anyway.

• 13:42Alastair Sooke?

  I, I, I think it's the, the sort of technicality of it and the process involved is interesting. And the fact that there was a big team working on it, when you know what fresco is, that becomes apparent that that had to be the case. So fresco, it's, it's a wall painting technique. It involves using pigments, which have been dissolved in water, which are applied to this prepared surface on the wall, which is a fresh and wet lime plaster. And I think the Italian term for this layering is the intonaco.

• 14:12James Fox?

  Intonaco.

• 14:13Alastair Sooke?

  The intonaco. So, I mean, it's very complex. You'd have a kind of rougher layer which is put down first, and then separately, you have the artist working on the design that would be painted eventually on the wall. And those designs are known as cartoons, and they are full-scale, one-on-one preparatory drawings.

• 14:32James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 14:33Alastair Sooke?

  And then the point is that when the pigment is eventually painted onto the plaster,

• 14:40Alastair Sooke?

  The stuff bongs, doesn't it?

• 14:41James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 14:41Alastair Sooke?

  There's a chemical reaction and the pigment, when that dries, it becomes integral to the surface of the wall itself.

• 14:48James Fox?

  Yes.

• 14:49Alastair Sooke?

  And it has this quite vitreous, slightly glossy but resilient layer.

• 14:53James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 14:53Alastair Sooke?

  So you don't need any varnish afterwards. But what it does mean is that there's a time pressure to paint.

• 14:59James Fox?

  Yes.

• 15:00Alastair Sooke?

  And so fresco painters would know that you'd basically have to, you had a few hours. The plaster gets put on the wall whilst it's still wet, you can apply the pigment. And I don't know whether we've got time to get into, but you know, you have the design of the cartoon that has to be transferred onto the wall. That's fascinating. That's why a lot of these preparatory drawings don't survive because.

• 15:25James Fox?

  Sometimes you would cut through them.

• 15:26Alastair Sooke?

  You cut them up.

• 15:27James Fox?

  To score, to incise the outline of the figures onto the wall.

• 15:30Alastair Sooke?

  Well, there are two techniques. I mean, I find this really interesting. I don't want to get bogged down in it, but you have the cartoon.

• 15:36James Fox?

  Pouncing now.

• 15:36Alastair Sooke?

  I'm going to talk about pouncing. Pouncing is such a good word. It deserves to be in any podcast, possibly every podcast we do. But so you have your drawing. It gets applied to the surface and either, as you say, you use a stylus. So you sort of rub around the outline and that's transferring the image in terms of a sort of faint incision into the plaster. Or you do your pouncing where you prick the outlines of the drawing with tiny little holes and then you pass probably charcoal dust through those holes, take away the drawing, the cartoon, and you're left with that, you're left with that outline which you can work. But there is this time pressure.

• 16:14James Fox?

  That is, I think, the crucial thing to understand with a fresco. You are working against the clock. Unlike in an oil painting where you can work on an oil painting and rework it for years, fresco, you have a few hours. You know, if it's, if it's a very hot day, it could be, you know, two hours. If it's a cool day, you might be able to get as much as a day's worth of work. But you have to complete your. Part of the picture, so you have something called a Giornata, so you make the plaster for the day's worth of work.

• 16:44Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, that's literally what it means, right?

• 16:45James Fox?

  It means the day's work, yeah. And you need to complete that part of the picture before the plaster dries. And if you don't, then, you know, that whole part of plaster needs to be removed and you need to start again. And if you make a mistake, well, it's game over. You have to remove everything and start all over again. It's a very difficult technical exercise, and there are many people in the history of art who are great painters on oil and tempera, who would not have known how to do a fresco. It's a specialist skill.

• 17:12Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, you can do some touch-ups, and you can apply some pigment, it's called Aseco, working when it's on the dry, but that would come later. And that wasn't really what you were meant to be doing. There's also, there's a technicality which I find quite amazing, like an added layer of complexity, that you can apply highlights when you're painting fresco, but if your colours you're using, if their base is green or black, when they dry, they become lighter.

• 17:39James Fox?

  Yes.

• 17:40Alastair Sooke?

  And if you have colours which have got iron oxides in them, when they dry, they become darker. So that, if you're a fresco painter, you need to be mindful of stuff like that when you're actually creating the painting. So, you know, huge, there's a huge amount of technical stuff you need to be on top of, and also technical stuff which assistants can help with, the preparation of cartoons, obviously the building of a scaffold, you know, you've alluded to that already, the applying of these different forms of plaster.

• 18:08James Fox?

  And frankly, it's a nightmare, isn't it?

• 18:09Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 18:10James Fox?

  No wonder he didn't want to do it.

• 18:12Alastair Sooke?

  Exactly, get Raphael to do it.

• 18:13James Fox?

  Exactly. So anyway, then of course, we have, we've mentioned this very briefly, Alastair, there's the scheme of the ceiling. So the scheme, to put it very, very simply, the ceiling is dominated by the Book of Genesis, the first book in the Old Testament. So you get the creation of the world, the creation of Adam and Eve, you get the expulsion from the garden, you get Noah and the flood. And this central set of panels is surrounded by an architectural framework with prophets and sibyls and various other figures. It's a very complicated scheme, and there's a lot of debate about where it comes from. I don't know where you stand on that.

• 18:50Alastair Sooke?

  So, I mean, as I've said already, there is this idea that, to begin with, Julius himself has an idea for what the scheme should be. And he's suggesting that probably around the edges at the top, I think, Michelangelo should be painting the apostles, and there could be conventional decorative ornaments in the barrel vault, the ceiling of the chapel itself. But there are a couple of sources where Michelangelo talks about this, that he, Michelangelo, thought that this scheme would be, quote, "a poor thing", and that he goes back to the Pope and basically tells him this, and this is the idea that Michelangelo puts about. The Pope eventually goes, "Well, you know what?

• 19:31Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, if you think you can do something more magnificent, you must do it." I can't help wondering whether there's, again, like, myth-making at play here. There must be, right? Because it's sort of, Michelangelo's taking sole credit. We've already established that it's highly unlikely, this idea that he's put about, that he can paint it all by himself, even, Versari says, down to grinding and preparing the pigments. The scheme, in such an important place within the Vatican, ceremonial heart of the papal state, the idea that this artist can come in...

• 20:05James Fox?

  The most powerful man in Christendom would essentially delegate the scheme itself, the iconography in this building, to effectively an artisan. Of course, Michelangelo is challenging those conventions, but it's still a manual worker, seems for the birds to me.

• 20:20Alastair Sooke?

  Totally. So, we have to assume that there must have been some sort of theologian, some council, some advisor from the Vatican, who's working with Michelangelo to arrange what the scheme would be. And, I mean, you know, you've just summarized it in a very effective fashion, but it's worth just reminding listeners that just the sort of, even the things you've described, there are complexities to how he's going to paint around the ceiling, because you have all of these... I went down a slight rabbit hole before this, which I won't drag you down into, but...

• 20:55James Fox?

  It's not pouncing again, is it?

• 20:57Alastair Sooke?

  It's not pouncing, but it is some other kind of amazing terminology. Because there are all of these weird architectural things that he's having to contend with. Lunettes, spandrels, pendentives, groynes. These are basically complex architectural zones and spaces in and around the ceiling, which he is having to decorate. And it's giving him a headache, one would assume creatively.

• 21:21James Fox?

  And literally.

• 21:22Alastair Sooke?

  And literally, because, yeah, it's not straightforward.

• 21:25James Fox?

  No, no, it's not straightforward. So anyway, he's done all these drawings, months and months of drawings. Eventually, in October 1508, they can actually start painting this fresco. And they begin by painting.

• 21:36Alastair Sooke?

  You don't want to talk more about the spandrels?

• 21:38James Fox?

  Well, maybe the groynes. No, so he starts in October 1508 and they begin painting the part of the ceiling near the entrance, which is the east part of the building. And they probably start painting that panel first because it's the least visible.

• 21:55Alastair Sooke?

  And this is in, it's worth saying that, so this is, you're describing one of the nine central scenes from the Book of Genesis that run along the length of the ceiling.

• 22:04James Fox?

  Yeah, right through the middle.

• 22:05Alastair Sooke?

  The altar is at the west end of the chapel. The entrance is at the east end. And so he's starting weirdly, narratively, in reverse.

• 22:14James Fox?

  Yes, and I think he's starting at the east end because it's not so easy to see. You don't see it so easy. If you go into the Sistine Chapel today, you don't see it quite so easily. Because he's thinking, well, you know, I haven't got any experience doing this. If it's not that great, it will be okay. And indeed, it turns out to be not that great. So the first scene Michelangelo paints is the flood, the story of Noah. And it's an absolute catastrophe. So they spend about a month painting it. They're not happy with the composition at all. And then, of course, very appropriately, that autumn and winter 1508, there are terrible rains. It's a very, very wet autumn. And the plaster work starts to get damp, starts to get mouldy.

• 22:57James Fox?

  And so they have to take everything off and start all over again.

• 23:01Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, he is quite dispirited.

• 23:02James Fox?

  He's furious about this. He, you know, as we say, he did not want to do this. He did not want to take on this project. He doesn't have sufficient experience. And indeed, that first panel takes months and months and months. And by the time you get to early 1509, Julius is coming in and he's thinking, well, I signed this deal seven, eight months ago, and there is nothing on the walls, there is nothing on the ceiling at all. So he begins to get very frustrated about this. There are all these wonderful stories, probably apocryphal, told by Vasari and Condivi, about these altercations between Julius and Michelangelo, aren't there?

• 23:40Alastair Sooke?

  It's the art history soap opera.

• 23:42James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 23:42Alastair Sooke?

  It's the kind of butting of heads.

• 23:44James Fox?

  Yes.

• 23:44Alastair Sooke?

  Is this the moment where the Pope threatens Michelangelo to chuck him off the scaffold?

• 23:48James Fox?

  Yeah, there are various stories. I mean, there's one story in which the Pope comes up onto the scaffold and says, you know, when are you going to finish? And Michelangelo says, when I can. And the Pope gets furious and starts beating him with his staff. He threatens to throw him off the scaffold. There is another incident in which the Pope is so desperate to see the progress, Michelangelo has bolted the doors, that the Pope bribes one of Michelangelo's assistants to let him in in the night time. Michelangelo catches wind of this scheme, so hides on the scaffold. And when the Pope walks in, he starts throwing bits of wood at him. So there are real tensions there. But Michelangelo carries on working through 1509, and he gradually gets better as he goes on, he gets more efficient as he goes on.

• 24:33James Fox?

  So the first sequence, the first scene of the flood takes several months, but he gets quicker. And he's starting moving west across the ceiling towards the altar wall.

• 24:47Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, there is, given that we're in 1509, at the very start of the year, he does write to his dad. And it's quite an amazing, I don't know if you, I'm sure you've come across this, maybe you've got it in front of you, but it's an amazing passage. Because it's this moment where, context wise, it's Sistine Chapel ceiling, it's Michelangelo. We imagine he's kind of God on earth, superhuman. But actually, as you've established, he's experiencing doubts, difficulties, it's a challenge.

• 25:20Alastair Sooke?

  And he has essentially this crisis of confidence. He writes to his dad and he says, "I'm still in a great quandary because it's now a year since I had even one grosso, a coin from this pope, "and I do not ask for anything because my work does not seem to go ahead in a way to merit it. "This is due to the difficulty of the work and also because it's not my profession. "In consequence, I waste my time fruitlessly. May God help me."

• 25:47James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 25:47Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, it's not, you know, he's not in a good place.

• 25:49James Fox?

  Oh, he's hating it. There's actually a poem as well. Can I read this poem that he writes? This is a fantastic poem. So Michelangelo wrote hundreds of poems in his life and they're a mixed bag. Some aren't so great, but some are absolutely stunning. And I'm going to read another one later on in the series because I think it's extraordinary. But this is what he writes about the physical challenges of being up on that ceiling. He writes, "A goiter, it seems, I got from this backward craning. "My belly tugged under my chins all out of whack. Beard points like a finger at heaven. "Near the back of my neck, skull scrapes where a hunchback's lump would be. "I'm pigeon-breasted, a harpy, face dribbled, see, like a Byzantine floor mosaic. "From all this strain in my guts and my hand-boned tangle, I'm bent like a bow.

• 26:34James Fox?

  "What's on my mind when express comes out weird, jumbled? "Don't berate, no gun with its barrel screwy can shoot straight. I don't belong. Who's a painter? "Me? No way, they've got me wrong." Isn't that incredible?

• 26:46Alastair Sooke?

  It is amazing. You, you obviously couldn't really sue your employer if your working conditions in those times. So you could write a sort of comical poet. Is, is this the one where when he's sending it to a friend, there's the sketch next to it?

• 26:57James Fox?

  There's a little drawing of him.

• 26:58Alastair Sooke?

  He's dangling.

• 26:58James Fox?

  upwards, yes. Because in the, in the film, in the Charlton Heston film, he's lying flat on his back on the platform, painting quite nicely. That is not how Michelangelo did it. He was standing upright and he got such neck strain, in fact, that even for years afterwards, actually, when he received letters, he would have to read the letters above his head because it was the only way he could read. So physically, as well as artistically, as well as intellectually, as well as personally and psychologically, this is a very, very grueling exercise.

• 27:27Alastair Sooke?

  I, I find that sketch quite fascinating because. Tiny detail, but he does look like a hanged man.

• 27:34James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 27:34Alastair Sooke?

  There's a sense of kind of, again, the whole project killing him essentially, physically. But you also see what could be, there's this kind of bizarre sketch of what he's painting above.

• 27:44James Fox?

  Yes.

• 27:45Alastair Sooke?

  Quite explosive.

• 27:46James Fox?

  Hmm.

• 27:46Alastair Sooke?

  You know, almost like a sort of, I mean, this is, this is, this really isn't a side, but like a sort of a mini explosion of inspiration above his head. And, and the thing that, you know, you're guest building to, but with the scenes from Genesis in particular that run along the ceiling, they really can sort of be divided into two halves in terms of quality. And we're still in that first half.

• 28:08James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 28:08Alastair Sooke?

  Where he's not quite getting everything right. It doesn't necessarily have the unity and coherence and isn't so brilliantly visible and legible from the floor.

• 28:17James Fox?

  I think that's a really important point. I think that when we, we look at the Sistine Chapel, we just think it's a work of unparalleled, completely universal genius.

• 28:26Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 28:27James Fox?

  And it is collectively, it is that. But actually, when you look at it very closely, what you see is as you look from the east where he started to the west where he finished, he gets better and better and better. And what he realizes, Alastair, is that less is more.

• 28:42Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 28:42James Fox?

  You have fewer figures, you have larger figures.

• 28:45Alastair Sooke?

  They become more monumental, more powerful.

• 28:47James Fox?

  Yeah, and you can actually see that happening. You can see those works getting better. He's also getting much quicker at it. So the flood, which is the first panel he starts, that takes months to complete. By the time he gets to the end, which is effectively the beginning in scriptural time, so it's God dividing light from darkness.

• 29:04Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 29:05James Fox?

  He does the whole panel without any drawings in one day.

• 29:08Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, th- those are the really incredible.

• 29:11James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 29:11Alastair Sooke?

  Parts of the ceiling. And you, you have God is sort of, he's whooshing about in the cosmos. We've gone into this different realm of kind of real primal origins of the universe and creativity itself. I mean, I think the very last one, you have this sense almost of this cosmic vortex where you're sort of. Because in the initial scenes, in a way, it's quite conventional picture making, where the scene is sort of parallel to the surface of the picture. So it's like you're looking through a window onto a scene. But that changes and gets switched up, doesn't it, towards the end with the way he's depicting God, going about his business, separating, what is it?

• 29:50James Fox?

  Light from darkness.

• 29:51Alastair Sooke?

  Light from dark, creating the sun and the moon.

• 29:54James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 29:54Alastair Sooke?

  Um, this kind of great, you, you just wonder whether as well, there's a sort of sense of identity on some deep, primal, unconscious artistic level of Michelangelo himself, with the great supreme creator whom he's depicted.

• 30:08James Fox?

  Oh, I'm sure.

• 30:09Alastair Sooke?

  There must be, given who he is.

• 30:11James Fox?

  Yes, he, he had a sizable ego, Michelangelo. But let's discuss, I mean, there are so many images to discuss on this evening, but let us focus on the creation of Adam. And the reason I think we select this is not necessarily that it's the best, although it is fantastic, but that it's so recognizable to the world. I think all of our listeners will be able to summon this image of God creating Adam. You've got these two male figures, their hands reaching out to each other, their fingers almost touching. This is the moment when God creates Adam, gives him life.

• 30:42Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 30:43James Fox?

  Um, for me, I do think this is a work of just staggering genius. And I know it's very well known, I know it's a bit of a cliche, but sometimes.

• 30:53Alastair Sooke?

  You've really stuck your neck out there, James.

• 30:55James Fox?

  Sometimes things are cliche, cliches are cliches because they've got something going for them.

• 31:00Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 31:00James Fox?

  And this is seriously good. One of the things, before we examine it in a bit more detail, one of the fascinating things about fresco is you can actually, you can actually, by looking at the parts of the plaster, the giornate, as we've been talking about, you can actually work out how many days it has actually taken to be made. And we know quite clearly that the creation of Adam, this was 16 days of work.

• 31:24Alastair Sooke?

  Really?

• 31:24James Fox?

  16 days, so he took four days on Adam.

• 31:27Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 31:27James Fox?

  So one day on Adam's head in the sky, one day on the torso and the arms, two days on his legs, he spent four days on God, so it's a 16 day job.

• 31:36Alastair Sooke?

  Right.

• 31:36James Fox?

  It's a pretty good outcome for 16 days worth of work.

• 31:39Alastair Sooke?

  Given this is the pinnacle of the whole Western painting tradition.

• 31:42James Fox?

  Well, I think so, and I, I think, you know, what is genius? Genius is when you.

• 31:49James Fox?

  Find a solution to something that no one would have imagined before.

• 31:52Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 31:53James Fox?

  And I think that is what he does here. I mean, to understand how truly incredible this image is, you have to look at the biblical text that he's basing it on. So there's a passage in the Bible, Genesis 2:7, and this is the passage. It says, "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul." That is the source. Now, nostrils are a little awkward, aren't they?

• 32:20Alastair Sooke?

  If you were going to depict the nostril, the breathing moment.

• 32:22James Fox?

  Exactly. I mean, how do you depict that in a nice way without it looking like CPR or something like that?

• 32:28Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 32:28James Fox?

  And so Michelangelo has to find a completely different way of representing this moment of life passing from one to the other, the moment when, if you like, the batteries get put into the machine.

• 32:40Alastair Sooke?

  What I love about that is that right in the middle, where you have the two fingers, almost touching but not touching.

• 32:47James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 32:47Alastair Sooke?

  And so having that little void, you, the viewer, almost imagine the spark passing from one fingertip to the other.

• 32:55James Fox?

  They're 1.9 centimetres apart.

• 32:57Alastair Sooke?

  Right.

• 32:58James Fox?

  But that's absolutely, you know, we mentioned in a previous episode about David, Michelangelo often chooses the moment before.

• 33:05Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 33:06James Fox?

  And it's crucial to the success of his work because the moment before is pregnant with tension and pregnant with excitement and pregnant with suspense, that the moment of and the moment after just simply don't have. So this, a lot of people think those fingers are touching. They are not. This is the moment before Adam is about to get life.

• 33:23Alastair Sooke?

  And I think you see that actually in Adam's pose. So in the image, he's on the left and he's reclining on some green landscape. And he's reclining in a way that probably recalls the pose of an ancient sculpture of a river god.

• 33:37James Fox?

  A river god, yeah.

• 33:37Alastair Sooke?

  Who would often be reclining. But he seems, he's extremely muscle bound. I mean, he's a fine specimen of a man, unsurprisingly, given that this is Michelangelo, we're talking about, who loved depicting the male nude above all else. But he has this sort of... It's not quite passive, but it's maybe languid, maybe slightly listless. The head is just moving around. His left arm is, it's almost, it's not limp, it's being raised, but it doesn't have the same sense of physical activity and assertion that if you look on the right of the image, God with the heavenly host all surrounded in this, is that his big red cape that seems to be covering the angels that he's approaching with?

• 34:21Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, I assume they're angels.

• 34:23James Fox?

  Yeah, and there's Eve in there as well.

• 34:24Alastair Sooke?

  And Eve is underneath his left arm, looking over at her future mate in a way that could be described as...

• 34:36Alastair Sooke?

  She's quite into him.

• 34:37James Fox?

  Do you think?

• 34:39Alastair Sooke?

  I don't know, slightly nervous about what's happening?

• 34:41James Fox?

  Yeah, she's apprehensive, isn't she?

• 34:42Alastair Sooke?

  Is that young virgin on wedding night kind of expression?

• 34:45James Fox?

  This has never happened before at all in history. One of the interesting things about that cape, have you read the many debates about that cape that's behind God, that it's likened to the shape of a brain?

• 34:57Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, this is the thing you get told at school. I mean, to be honest, that's the main thing I always remember about this. Is there anything in the sources that suggests that that's going on? Or is that just one of those sorts of ideas that gets... Who came up with that? Which brilliant art historian had that insight which has just stuck so?

• 35:12James Fox?

  I don't know where it originates. It certainly isn't in the primary sources. No one mentions this. But it does certainly look a bit like a brain. But it is nevertheless, the whole motif of deciding to create this idea of hands outstretching, this is brand new.

• 35:29Alastair Sooke?

  But I suppose I was just going to, just to finish the point with God, is that you have the slightly more passive figure of Adam, but God and that host within the cape, they're so dynamic. They're swooping in like a spaceship from the right of the image.

• 35:41James Fox?

  The wind's blowing in the face.

• 35:43Alastair Sooke?

  Exactly. And you can see his beard becomes a sort of rippling agent of his dynamism in itself, God the Father.

• 35:50James Fox?

  That's another aspect of the great innovation of this picture, is that when we today, in certainly the Western tradition, think of God, what do we think of? We think of an old man with a white beard.

• 36:01Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 36:01James Fox?

  Well, Michelangelo wasn't the first person to this, but he was one of the first people to come up with this idea, that God could look like that. And again, that's another example of genius. When you do something that is so... Unexpected, and yet ultimately, looking back, seems so obvious.

• 36:20Alastair Sooke?

  But you know, it's, I mean, I hadn't thought this at all until we're now looking at the image. But given that I brought up Raphael's portrait of Pope Julius II, another bearded man.

• 36:30James Fox?

  Yes.

• 36:31Alastair Sooke?

  But Raphael's Julius looks really quite feeble.

• 36:35James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 36:35Alastair Sooke?

  The point about Michelangelo's God the Father is he does have flowing grey locks and this grey beard. But he's very strong, he's still very powerful and vigorous as a figure.

• 36:46James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 36:46Alastair Sooke?

  Very active and dynamic. And although at this point, I mean, one of the things about Michelangelo is he lives until he's almost eighty nine. I mean, that's just so rare at this time, he has this great longevity. You know, we've done an episode, we've done a couple of episodes about Holbein and Erasmus, the great scholar at that moment, was featured. I think Erasmus put old age around about this moment in the, in the sixteenth century as sort of maybe late thirties. I mean, we're, we're beyond, we're several feet in the grave.

• 37:14James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 37:15Alastair Sooke?

  You know, but this God the Father, even though he must be so much older in terms of his depiction, he still has the vigour of a young man.

• 37:23James Fox?

  Yes. I'm getting a sense that you're not quite as persuaded by this image as I am.

• 37:28Alastair Sooke?

  I, I don't think that's totally fair. I think the thing that I, the trouble I have with this is that I've been to the Sistine Chapel and it's, maybe I'm just hugely spoilt.

• 37:40James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 37:40Alastair Sooke?

  As an art critic, I normally get to go and see something when there are no crowds there whatsoever. But I haven't had that experience.

• 37:46James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 37:46Alastair Sooke?

  Um, in the Vatican. Occasionally I've had to go in there maybe to film something with the BBC, but the BBC can never afford to kind of keep it all really quiet. In the way that apparently Japanese television could, where they could hire the entire chapel and do a big shoot at some stage, some legendary shoot. When you go into the chapel, you are with so many tourists. You slightly have the issue that Michelangelo had in painting the ceiling, where you're having to kind of crick your neck. You're looking upwards, it's, it's almost seventy feet above the floor, it's quite far away. My memory is that you often have attendants who start shushing the crowds quite, quite quickly and you sort of get moved on. So, and then you have the issue of.

• 38:29Alastair Sooke?

  Almost like that blooming mould that appeared on the very earliest scene, you have the mould of familiarity, which covers an image like this. It's almost impossible to look at it and see it as a work of art at all. It's just so familiar.

• 38:44James Fox?

  I think that it's been a victim of its own success. And I think that because of that, I think it's hard. This is what I'm trying to capture in the way I describe it. It's hard to understand how truly radical it was in terms of its representation of this scene. The idea of depicting life being passed from God to Adam, the creation of our own species through these two hands reaching each other, is such a brilliant idea. It seems so obvious in retrospect, but no one had done that before. And for me, that motif, the motif of the two figures reaching towards each other, and of course, not quite touching, is such a powerful one. And it's symbolic not just of God and Adam. It becomes symbolic for everything.

• 39:27James Fox?

  It's symbolic of desire, of yearning, for our attempts as human beings to connect with other people. And that is why I think this picture does transcend its origins. It transcends its subject matter and why it has become, for good or for bad, a kind of universal image. It's become something that has turned into a meme, I suppose, in popular culture as well. There's the famous example, there are so many examples of this image being cannibalized by popular culture. The most famous example for me, anyway, is the film E.T. A 1982 film, Steven Spielberg film, in which a little lovable alien makes a friendship with this boy called Elliot. And in the theatrical posters in 82, they had the two fingers.

• 40:10James Fox?

  There was the earth in the background, the two fingers reaching each other. One was obviously an alien finger.

• 40:15Alastair Sooke?

  Glowing, was it?

• 40:16James Fox?

  There was a spark of light in between. That is, you know, that is all down to Michelangelo's. Michelangelo's idea, and as I say, it has become a universal idea for connection.

• 40:27Alastair Sooke?

  I think that's very persuasive. I have, I'm not going to challenge that. I think, yeah, that makes sense.

• 40:33James Fox?

  But it's taken together, this fresco cycle is truly astonishing. And I thought I'd just quote Goethe here, because Goethe, the great German writer and philosopher, in 1787, he went into the Sistine Chapel and he wrote. Until you have seen the Sistine Chapel, you can have no adequate conception of what man is capable of accomplishing. One hears and reads of so many great and worthy people, but here, above one's head and before one's eyes, is living evidence of what one man has done. And I, I agree with him. I think that this is just, it is a great, great human achievement.

• 41:17Alastair Sooke?

  It is undoubtedly a great human achievement. And maybe we should just leave it there. Because I don't know, I mean, the only thing is that we risk, the thing I said at the very beginning of the series is that you do get with Michelangelo, you get this hagiography that surrounds him. And I, it's a sign of my triviality and insignificance in the big scheme of things, that a streak of me slightly always reacts against that a little bit. Because, you know, it makes me want to say, well, actually, as a unified programme, it has its problems.

• 41:49James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 41:50Alastair Sooke?

  It's not, the whole ceiling, it isn't the most perfect work of art in that sense, yet it has this status. But I do agree that within it, there are these scenes, and you've spoken beautifully and very eloquently about one of them in particular, that have this tremendous power. And they are seen, appropriately given their setting, high, high above us, as the great high point of Western painting.

• 42:13James Fox?

  Well, let us use this opportunity to go to a break, take a breather. And after the break, we are going to see where Michelangelo goes from here.

• 42:25Alastair Sooke?

  For more great art, go to henny.com or to the Henny Talks YouTube channel to see more than 200 videos on art and architecture. And if you're enjoying this episode, please consider following Stories of Art wherever you get your podcasts and maybe even leave a review.

• 42:50James Fox?

  Welcome back. It's October 15, 12. Michelangelo has just completed the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and he's hoping that he can now get the opportunity he's been waiting for, which is to get back to sculpture and specifically to get back to the tomb of Julius II, his great patron. But Julius, who is now in his late 60s, has fallen ill. Now, up until this point, Alastair, Julius was a kind of, he was a sort of Donald Trump figure. He was indestructible. And there's an author called Ross King, who's written a very good book about the painting of the Sistine Chapel. And Ross King says, Julius had cheated death many times, having survived dangerous bouts of illness and several assassination attempts,

• 43:35James Fox?

  eluded ambushes and kidnappings, dodged cannonballs, and defied unfavorable prophecies and portents. But in February 1513, just a few months after the Sistine Chapel ceiling is completed, he runs out of road. He falls ill. And shortly after drinking some gold...

• 43:55Alastair Sooke?

  Is that right?

• 43:56James Fox?

  Yes.

• 43:58Alastair Sooke?

  Why was he doing that to prolong his life?

• 43:59James Fox?

  Doctors told him. His doctors told him.

• 44:00Alastair Sooke?

  That was an elixir?

• 44:01James Fox?

  Yeah. It proved to have the opposite effect. He dies. And Julius II dies on the 21st of February 1513. A conclave is assembled

• 44:13Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 44:13James Fox?

  under Michelangelo's ceiling, the first conclave under Michelangelo's ceiling. And Julius is succeeded by Giovanni de Medici.

• 44:21Alastair Sooke?

  Now, he's a very, very interesting figure in the story, because he's someone that Michelangelo must, well, he knew him rather well from Florence back in the day.

• 44:28James Fox?

  He did. He was one of Lorenzo the Magnificent's sons, and would have been a childhood friend, or at least an acquaintance of Michelangelo. They would have known each other similar age. They would have known each other in Florence, in the palace in San Marco. And he becomes Pope, and he becomes Pope Leo the 10th.

• 44:46Alastair Sooke?

  There's the wonderful quote that may or may not have been uttered by him.

• 44:50James Fox?

  Go on.

• 44:51Alastair Sooke?

  Supposedly, when he attains the papacy, he said, "Since God has given us the papacy, let us enjoy it." And he's sort of associated, isn't he, with, he is a great patron of the arts.

• 45:04James Fox?

  He is, yeah.

• 45:05Alastair Sooke?

  But he's spending pretty lavishly and diminishing and exhausting the papal treasury during his pontificate. He eventually dies in 1521. And of course, this is the moment of this great schism in the church in Europe. And partly Leo's reign, if you like, his time in charge, may contribute to some of those those bigger forces that are threatening to rip the church apart.

• 45:31James Fox?

  But I quite like Leo. I think he's certainly a nicer guy than Julius was. And he does, in the aftermath of Julius's death, he does Julius a massive favour. And he says to Michelangelo, okay, you can do Julius's too.

• 45:44Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 45:45James Fox?

  He's under no pressure to do that, really. I mean, there is some pressure from Julius's family, but he doesn't need to do it.

• 45:51Alastair Sooke?

  But the family pressure is important because, you know, this is a powerful family. And a lot of money has been spoken about in the contract.

• 46:02James Fox?

  Yes.

• 46:02Alastair Sooke?

  And over time, because the tomb of Julius the Second is a horribly long-winded, complex project that

• 46:10James Fox?

  Tragic project, really.

• 46:11Alastair Sooke?

  Tragic. I mean, it was, you know, in his lifetime.

• 46:13James Fox?

  It's like HS2.

• 46:13Alastair Sooke?

  The tragic, yes, HS2.

• 46:15James Fox?

  It drags on for decades. It's constantly being scaled back.

• 46:17Alastair Sooke?

  Yes. And it's sort of bedevils scholars, but scholars also really love sort of teasing out what it should have looked like, could have looked like. And I have to say, I don't want to sound like a total heathen, but I slightly start glazing over with all of those sort of details and experiments. Because there were so many iterations of it. But the point I'm trying to make is that, yes, there is this family where the heirs of Pope Julius the Second, they're on Michelangelo's back.

• 46:40James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 46:40Alastair Sooke?

  And he starts to get the reputation for basically taking the money with no intention of wanting to complete the work. And that is a big problem for him. It seems to really eat him up over time. Um. And much later, a different Pope is going to start issuing decrees to completely absolve him of all his obligations regarding the tomb. But at this point, he does sign another contract, doesn't he?

• 47:02James Fox?

  Yeah, it's for a smaller tomb. We've said how the project keeps being scaled back. It's a smaller tomb. It's no longer freestanding. There are fewer figures. But Michelangelo is nevertheless delighted because finally, after years and years of waiting, this is eight years after he starts working on the tomb. He's finally able to get back to it. So he moves properly to Rome and moves into a house on a street called the Macchie de Corvini, the slaughterhouse of the crone.

• 47:28Alastair Sooke?

  I think this is near Trajan's Column.

• 47:30James Fox?

  Yeah, exactly. But it's a really, the street is bad. There's a meat market there. It stinks. There's rubbish in the streets. But he quite likes it. And he lives in this house on and off really for the rest of his life.

• 47:43Alastair Sooke?

  I think he's meant to pay rent, but never does. And it's part of a contract, connected with the tomb.

• 47:48James Fox?

  Right, okay, yes.

• 47:49Alastair Sooke?

  And in the end, but he's just like, you know what? It's just my house. And finally, because he lives for so long and things change, I mean, that is effectively what does happen.

• 47:58James Fox?

  Right, okay. So he spends the next three years, 1513 to 1516, working on the project. He's using actually marble that he has excavated himself years earlier and has been sitting in the piazza, ready to be used for, what, seven years? Eight years by this stage. And he makes and makes progress, starts to make a few figures. The most famous figure he makes for the tomb is this great figure of Moses. Moses of Ten Commandments fame. Actually, it's interesting. You know who played Moses in the Ten Commandments film?

• 48:31Alastair Sooke?

  It wasn't Heston.

• 48:32James Fox?

  It was Charlton Heston.

• 48:33Alastair Sooke?

  Was it really?

• 48:34James Fox?

  There you go. Gets everywhere. So this is a depiction of Moses holding the tablet, holding the Ten Commandments. It's a very impressive sculpture. It's

• 48:47James Fox?

  Really typical of Michelangelo at this heroic phase in his career when everyone looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger in his pomp. It's very muscular, it's beautifully done, it's technically excellent.

• 48:57Alastair Sooke?

  And originally was meant to be above ground level.

• 49:00James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 49:01Alastair Sooke?

  Because it obviously exists, you can see it today in a different form of the tomb than that which Michelangelo originally had conceived. And the original conception, there would have been, you know, forty odd figures, there's this cornice thirteen feet above, and when it was going to be a completely freestanding monument, Moses would have been one of the corner figures that you're looking up at.

• 49:20James Fox?

  Yes.

• 49:20Alastair Sooke?

  So there's maybe some distortions, right, to the anatomy, which are meant to compensate for how you were meant to look at it.

• 49:26James Fox?

  Hmm.

• 49:26Alastair Sooke?

  How you see it now is much closer to, well, it's ground level.

• 49:29James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 49:30Alastair Sooke?

  But it still has, as you say, this sense of monumental power, but also a sort of psychological power.

• 49:38James Fox?

  Yes, there's an intensity to it, isn't there?

• 49:39Alastair Sooke?

  As if maybe it's expressing that, that great quality we've touched on, the terribilità, which Michelangelo was meant to have, and to a degree the Pope had, Julius himself. It's sort of this, Moses almost this fused self-portrait, portrait of the Pope, that somehow those energies are being distilled in the sculpture. I have a question for you because I find it very interesting to think about the tomb and the sculptures that we know, and specifically the Moses, in relation to the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Because lots of people have said that Michelangelo has his plans for the tomb, then he's asked to do the ceiling, and the tomb is completely frustrated and is the great tragedy of his

• 50:22Alastair Sooke?

  life, and consequently, he almost, quote unquote, sort of realizes his vision for the tomb in the painting of the ceiling.

• 50:30James Fox?

  Hmm.

• 50:31Alastair Sooke?

  But I wonder whether it's the other way around, in a sense.

• 50:35James Fox?

  Right.

• 50:35Alastair Sooke?

  Because he has the idea for the tomb, but actually really early on, even before 1508, there are glimmerings that the idea of painting the ceiling is already being discussed and that Michelangelo may be involved. He paints the ceiling, and we know that there's this amazing transformation in his art that becomes more expressive and powerful and monumental.

• 50:54James Fox?

  More sculptural.

• 50:54Alastair Sooke?

  More sculptural. And then... And he returns to the tomb.

• 50:58James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 50:58Alastair Sooke?

  And creates images like this. I mean, do you think there's anything to that?

• 51:02James Fox?

  I think there's a definite crossover there. One of the things that people don't necessarily realise when they look up at the ceiling is that the architecture of the ceiling is painted. It is, you know, it's a curved ceiling, but it's just essentially plaster. All of the architectural stuff, those spandrels and groins and niches and things like that that you're talking about.

• 51:23Alastair Sooke?

  Kind of you say not droning on about, but yeah.

• 51:25James Fox?

  Yeah, those are all painted. So it's almost as though Michelangelo is trying to fulfil a sculptural commission in the painting. He's painting a lot of stonework.

• 51:35Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 51:35James Fox?

  And the figures, as you say, become very, very sculptural as they go on. By the time you get to the end, when you look at the great sibyls and the figure of Jonah, they are taking these very Moses-like forms. They look like they're carved out of marble. So I think there's a lot of overlap visually, creatively between the two. The thing that is really interesting about Moses, or curious, I should say, about Moses, is he has horns.

• 52:01Alastair Sooke?

  Yes, he does.

• 52:03James Fox?

  Have you noticed the horns?

• 52:04Alastair Sooke?

  I have noticed the horns. I thought you were going to go with the beard.

• 52:07James Fox?

  Oh, the beard is great.

• 52:08Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, very briefly on the beard, because I just, I love.

• 52:11James Fox?

  A lot of beard action in this episode so far.

• 52:13Alastair Sooke?

  There's a lot of beards popping up in this episode, it's true. But there's a very long flowing beard that Moses has and I mean, it's mentioned by some of the early biographers of Michelangelo, but you can see his hands playing with the hair. So there's this sense of it's marble, it's massive, there's monumental power, but there's something which is quite delicate about that, which gives it a slightly different complexion, I think. A lot of energy. But yes, if you follow the eye up from the fingers playing in the beard, up past Moses's face with that expression of terrible etat, you have these two cornetos which are blonked in his hair. And my understanding of this.

• 52:58James Fox?

  He didn't actually have horns, did he?

• 52:59Alastair Sooke?

  He didn't have horns. But that it's, it's what? It's, it's, this all has, the whole thing of Moses, it's a mistranslation.

• 53:06James Fox?

  Yeah, so it's a mistranslation. So effectively what happens is when Moses descends from Mount Sinai after getting the Ten Commandments in the Book of Exodus, which is written in Hebrew, of course, the text tells us that his face was radiant. And the term they use was karan or. But when this passage, in fact, the whole Old Testament, was first translated into Latin from the Hebrew by Saint Jerome in a translation that we still know as the Vulgate. Jerome had made a mistake and had thought that instead of it was Carin or, he thought it said Cornuta, which meant horns. So from that point onwards, throughout the Middle Ages, artists presumed that Moses

• 53:49James Fox?

  had horns, or at least maybe they didn't necessarily think he did have horns, but the horns became a kind of attribute. They became a signifier of Moses. If you had a complex set of paintings with lots of different figures in it, if you saw horns, you would know, oh, that's Moses.

• 54:03Alastair Sooke?

  So, question. I think it's correct to say that by the time Michelangelo is sculpting Moses, it's known that the horns is a mistranslation thing. We've established that Michelangelo is this great innovator, you see that in the Sistine Ceiling. Why is he sticking with convention here and keeping the horns, which kind of are a little distracting? What do you think?

• 54:29James Fox?

  I just don't know. I cannot, I cannot understand it. Perhaps one explanation is that in Michelangelo's vision of the tomb, there would be many figures, dozens of different figures. It would have been quite a complicated iconography to follow. Possibly the horns were considered to be useful in terms of understanding and decoding the scheme. But ultimately, I don't really know, because he was always taking liberties, he was always pushing for towards a form of naturalism, we saw that with David as well. So this harking back to a much older, more archaic way of representation doesn't quite clock for me, I don't quite understand it.

• 55:11Alastair Sooke?

  I think your explanation there, I'd buy that.

• 55:14James Fox?

  It does make the sculpture more powerful, though, in some ways. It's much more memorable.

• 55:18Alastair Sooke?

  It's much more memorable. Anyway, he works on the tomb for a few years.

• 55:22James Fox?

  But then, once again, this is the world that Michelangelo lives in, 1516, things change again. Because in 1516, Pope Leo the 10th falls out with Julius's family. They're actually, I think, battling over the town of Urbino. So I think Julius's family had run the town of Urbino. Pope Leo wanted the Medici to run Urbino. There is actually a brief war. And Urbino is taken back by Leo. And so by this stage, Julius's family are Leo's enemies. And he's like, well, why should I have the greatest artist in Italy working on their project? I want him to work on my project. And so he takes poor Michelangelo off the tomb yet again.

• 56:04James Fox?

  And Leo the 10th asks Michelangelo to work on something for his family up in Florence. And that is namely reconstructing the facade, the front of the family church in Florence, the Church of San Lorenzo. This project is another catastrophe.

• 56:22Alastair Sooke?

  So this is a project which never is realised.

• 56:26James Fox?

  Never realised.

• 56:27Alastair Sooke?

  Wasn't there some sort of...

• 56:28James Fox?

  If you go to Florence today, there is still no facade. 500 years later, on the front of the building, it looks like a building site. The real problem at the heart of this project is that Leo obviously wants a great marble facade for the church. But he doesn't want the marble to come from Carrara, which is where marble had nearly always come from since Roman times, where Michelangelo had historically got his marble. He wants the marble to come from a nearby quarry, nearby mountain called Pietra Santa.

• 56:59Alastair Sooke?

  Oh, yes.

• 56:59James Fox?

  And the reason he wants this is this quarry is run by the Medici. So it's a classic Italian backhander.

• 57:07James Fox?

  But unlike Carrara, which had been operated as a quarry since Roman times and had a pretty decent infrastructure, there was a workforce, there were roads, there was a connection to the to the to the river and the barges, Pietra Santa had nothing.

• 57:20Alastair Sooke?

  Mm hmm.

• 57:21James Fox?

  But that's what he insisted on. So Michelangelo actually spends two or three years up in the Apu and Alps, up in Pietra Santa, actually creating a quarry from scratch.

• 57:31Alastair Sooke?

  Yep, this is what he loves, isn't it?

• 57:33James Fox?

  Well, he actually has a terrible time. He has a terrible time because he's obviously dealing, he's having to build roads. Michelangelo actually building roads.

• 57:41Alastair Sooke?

  Okay.

• 57:42James Fox?

  He's trying to get hold of a workforce. No one wants to work with him because the people in Carrara are so annoyed about this rival quarry being opened that they're not willing to cooperate. They actually bribe the bargemen to not take any of the marble. And Michelangelo's plan is for these enormous blocks of marble, there are columns that are 26 feet long, and he's trying to get them out of the quarry and down the mountainside, people are killed on the, you know, as the marble slips down the mountain, bits of column burst into a thousand pieces. It's an absolute disaster. Michelangelo's injured in the process as well. It is a terrible, terrible experience for him. So it was a complete waste of time. And as I say, if you go to Florence today, you will see no marble on the front of San

• 58:25James Fox?

  Lorenzo. It's still the exposed brickwork. And all the while, of course, Alastair, the tomb lies unfinished. But there are some other works from the tomb that themselves aren't finished, but they are really remarkable pieces of work themselves, aren't they?

• 58:41Alastair Sooke?

  I find the whole unfinished question very interesting because there are roughly 40, 45, maybe 43, something like that, extant marble sculptures by Michelangelo, and a large number of them, what is it, 26, something like that, are unfinished.

• 59:01James Fox?

  Hmm.

• 59:02Alastair Sooke?

  And I think for modern viewers especially, that is something which is fascinating.

• 59:08James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 59:09Alastair Sooke?

  And a big part of his appeal as an artist. And there's a whole series of figures that were once going to be part of the Julius tomb, which have different retrospective names. Some of this, the so-called dying slave, there's the rebellious captive. And in all of them, you see a figure which seems to be only half emerged out of the marble block. And there's something quite romantic about this idea, that here is genius at work. And it's almost as if had those figures been completed, they would lack some of that X factor, which Michelangelo is bringing.

• 59:48James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 59:48Alastair Sooke?

  Now, is there one in particular you're wanting to focus on?

• 59:52James Fox?

  I love them all. Actually, if you go to the Accademia Gallery in Florence, which famously Alastair hasn't been to.

• 59:58Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:58James Fox?

  Everyone goes there to see the David, the original David, not the copy that is in the square. And everyone's standing, crowding around the David, getting their selfies. But in the next room, right next to the David, you have a group of these unfinished figures that Michelangelo intended for the tomb, but because the tomb was constantly being scaled back, they would never need it. And so he never completed them. And for me, these works are just so much more thrilling, so much more exciting, so much more moving even than David. As you know, I'm a big fan of David, for the very reason that they are unfinished, in that they give us this insight into the working process, don't they?

• 1:00:40Alastair Sooke?

  But I think it's, I mean, they do, totally. And you can see the kind of chisel marks in many of his unfinished sculptures. And that's itself quite fascinating, to see this kind of maelstrom of how quickly he's working and with a variety of tools, all of that. But there's something else where I think it starts to work on a deeper level of metaphor, where you have the finished image versus the block. And it's about What is it? It's sort of, you know, order and chaos.

• 1:01:06James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:07Alastair Sooke?

  It's the kind of creation that we saw on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It's about a sense, maybe even have come a Christian world versus a pagan world. You can see all of these oppositions in those different finishes. And I think as well, there's something quite interesting. This is the beginning of, we've already touched on this a few times, but it's kind of the way that Michelangelo is raising the status of the artist. And there's somehow this sense with the unfinished works that it's the authenticity, something that's by his own hand. That's what's being really prized by the culture more widely. And so it becomes this great marker of genius. And there's that wonderful passage, I think it must be in Vasari, where he's sort of describing the way, you know,

• 1:01:49Alastair Sooke?

  this idea that the artist has a vision in his or her mind and this vision is somehow trapped within. Like the soul is within the human body, but you can find it by just chipping away the marble and revealing it. And I think Vasari uses this image, it's as if you've got a model which is submerged and then very slowly you lift up the model and it goes above the surface of the water and you start to see it crystallise and coalesce before your eyes. And you can, you have that feeling when you're looking at those unfinished sculptures.

• 1:02:17James Fox?

  Yeah, they have become, right or for wrong, a metaphor for Michelangelo's process, Michelangelo, the act of creation, but also a metaphor for the human struggle for freedom or for whatever it is.

• 1:02:29Alastair Sooke?

  Well, partly because some of those slaves themselves have fetters. They're sort of shackled, so they're struggling against bonds. You can see around, say, a chest. And that's what you're describing of the figure emerging from the stone. It's enacting that same struggle.

• 1:02:44James Fox?

  And they will become very prophetic, Alastair, because in the 1520s, Michelangelo will himself briefly become a prisoner. So please do join us next time when we will focus on the last and perhaps most dramatic chapter in Michelangelo's life story. You're not going to want to miss it. But for now, goodbye.

• 1:03:04Alastair Sooke?

  Goodbye.

• 1:03:11James Fox?

  If you've enjoyed this episode, please do follow Stories of Art, wherever you get your podcasts, and maybe even leave a review.