Posted on 03/18/2006 4:40:46 AM PST by billorites
You know that famous Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling whose fingers are nearly touching Gods but not quite? Well, Ive stroked him. Ive run my hand along his naked body, and Ive slapped that big, muscled thigh of his. Not a hard slap, mind you. Just a soft slap of affection that ended on a rub. Ive even stroked his sweet little willy. I know I shouldnt have done. But I couldnt stop myself. And it was probably the single most exciting moment I have had in art.
How did I come to touch the naked Adam high up on the Sistine ceiling? Well, a couple of decades ago the ceiling was being cleaned in a huge restoration campaign that lasted many years and cost many zillions of yen. Why yen? Because the cleaning was being paid for by a Japanese television station. How did a Japanese television station get involved? Thats a long story. Basically, the Japanese were charmed out of their money by the last pope, the one before Uncle Fester. While planting kisses on the airport tarmacs of the world, the Polish pope fetched up in Japan, where he met the wife of the owner of a local cable-television station who happened to be a Catholic. Japan has a tiny but fierce Catholic population left over from the days of St Francis Xavier, the apostle of the Indies. The owners wife was one of those. She pestered her husband, a Buddhist, until finally, in the name of eternal peace, he agreed to fund the entire Sistine restoration.
As it happens, I had some projects on the go at the time with the same television station, and with a bit of ruthless wheedling of my own was able to persuade the man at the Vatican who was in charge of Japanese TV access to let me climb the scaffold while the cleaning was in progress.
I sneaked up there a few times. And under the bright, unforgiving lights of television, I was able to encounter the real Michelangelo. I was so close to him I could see the bristles from his brushes caught in the paint; and the mucky thumbprints hed left along his margins.
The first thing that impressed me was his speed. Michelangelo worked at Schumacher pace. Adams famous little penis was captured with a single brushstroke: a flick of the wrist, and the first man had his manhood. I also enjoyed his sense of humour, which, from close up, turned out to be refreshingly puerile. If you look closely at the angels who attend the scary prophetess on the Sistine ceiling known as the Cumaean Sibyl, you will see that one of them has stuck his thumb between his fingers in that mysteriously obscene gesture that visiting fans are still treated to today at Italian football matches. It means something along the lines of: how would you like this inserted into your rectum, ragazzo?
Another figure I touched while the restorers backs were turned was a biblical character called Booz, who appears in the Old Testament as a kindly Jew who marries a much younger woman, Ruth, from a different tribe.
Michelangelo didnt see Booz as kindly. Michelangelo saw him as stupid and senile. His Booz has escaped from an episode of Steptoe and Son where he played the dad. With his Jimmy Hill chin and a nose like a bottle opener, this orrible little man gibbers away at a miniature version of himself stuck onto the end of a stick. Its a seriously rude piece of characterisation.
I remember all this now because a chance to know the real Michelangelo better is also heading your way. Opening soon at the British Museum is the largest Michelangelo exhibition of recent years: an extravagant selection of his drawings. Getting close to Michelangelo is tricky because so little of what he did is portable. You obviously cannot move the Sistine ceiling, or the giant David, or that thunderous Moses embedded in the tomb of Julius II in Rome. The extra-large scale of a typical Michelangelo commission makes it terribly difficult to put him into exhibitions. Unless you feature his drawings. Britain is lucky to possess lots of them. The Queen owns some choice ones. The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford has a funny little sketchbook for the Sistine Chapel. But the biggest depository of all is the British Museum, which is sitting on a basement full of Michelangelo sketches. Something like 600 pages of his drawings have survived, and about 100 of these are going on show in London. These drawings wont only emphasise his thrilling skill as a draughtsman although God knows theyll do that; they will also reveal how his mind works. Which isnt necessarily a good thing. Because as his letters home to his family make hilariously clear, the divine Michelangelo could be devilishly mean, grumpy, possessive, sneaky, suspicious and paranoid.
The creator of this show is a jolly British Museum scholar called Hugo Chapman, who used to work at Christies, and who has about him that pleasingly crumpled air that you get with English eccentrics who are too busy thinking great things to worry about the stains on their tie.
I met with Hugo in the bowels of Hogwarts sorry, I meant in the staff corridors of the British Museum and he led me down into the cellars, where theres a vault in which the Michelangelo drawings are stashed. Hugo pulled out one after another and we examined them at our leisure. It was just the two of us in there.
When you go to see this show, one of the first things youll notice is that it is not packed with obvious masterpieces. Rather, its full of scraps, fragments, quick ideas. Most of the sheets came directly from Michelangelos studio. The Buonarotti family kept them together after his death for 300 years, and only began dispersing them in the 19th century, when the art market soared to the first of its crazy peaks. Michelangelo used these drawings to work out his ideas for bigger works theres a stupendous sequence of studies for the figures on the Sistine ceiling or sometimes as teaching aids for his students.
Hugo Chapman, who giggles a lot, likes particularly to giggle at the notion that Michelangelo was a very bad teacher. Some of the most fascinating pages in the exhibition show Michelangelo correcting the work of his pupils, and its immediately clear that his main teaching technique was to outshine them at every stage in order to make them feel feeble and inadequate. To prove this, Hugo picks out a sheet with lots of staring eyes on it, in which the various weak hands having a go at drawing an eye are shown up by the two eyes Michelangelo adds. Why were all of Michelangelos pupils mediocrities? Because thats how he preferred it. Read his letters, and youll see this same thunderous insecurity and meanness of spirit being directed at his family.
The puerile streak that I had noticed on the Sistine ceiling is also in evidence in the drawings. Peep into the corner of a sheet covered with heroic warriors heads and youll find a cheerful little chappie, as Hugo puts it, having a dump. Michelangelo hasnt only captured perfectly the contentment on his happy little face, but also the fresh curl of his excretions, brought to a point like ice cream in a cone.
Because he was so parsimonious, the great man would invariably draw on both sides of the paper, or in the margins, or over the top of other things. Some of the drawings have poems worked out on them, or drafts of his notoriously grumpy letters, or even his expenses. They convey a fantastic sense of a real and busy life, and have none of that unshakable sense of purpose to them that distinguishes the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. One sheet from Oxford has a song on it, a skull, a horse, a rider, a vase, a ladder, a pyramid, and finally another little chap in the corner with his legs around his neck, showing you his tackle. What are those phallic-shaped knobs and balls further up the page? Why, theyre knobs and balls.
Among the most striking of the drawings is the famous portrait of Andrea Quaratesi, with whom the ageing Michelangelo is said to have fallen in love. Its such a beautiful thing a black chalk head-and-shoulders of a pretty boy made noble and deep by the introspection in his eyes. Whatever did or didnt happen between them, Michelangelo in his drawing has given Andrea the ultimate lovers gift: an immortal presence. Andrea was one of the great mans most useless pupils, and seems to have been responsible for some of the most cack-handed efforts preserved in the show. Andrea abbi patientia, writes Michelangelo in his lovely script beneath the many bad attempts to draw an eye. Andrea, have patience.
All this is fascinating. It brings a genius to life, and makes him human, and tangible. But thats not why you need to see this show. You need to see this show because it will take your breath away again and again. Around the time he was painting the Sistine ceiling, Michelangelo also began drawing with red chalk, and with this gorgeous medium, with its heightened tinge of drama, he produced some of his most stunning figure studies. Theres one here for Adam, the familiar reclining pose so naturally achieved, even though, if you try it, its impossible to do.
Red chalk is particularly suited to the evocation of naked flesh, and it is in the suite of male nudes, stretching, rearing, gliding, that Michelangelos genius is most clearly revealed. The whole show is a love song to the masculine muscle. Thighs, torsos, six-packs, pecs those are the bits of the body that thrilled him most. But tear your eyes away, if you can, from these red chalk masterworks, and other aspects of his genius become easier to spot. He had an instinctive ability to see a pose in three dimensions. Its a sculptors talent. Very few artists have it. The other day at Kenwood House I was looking at a wonderful Turner of some fishermen pulling their catch from a boat. Everything about this fine painting the rough sea, the sense of climate, the moist atmospherics was perfectly done. But the fishermen werent really leaning, or pulling. The figure in motion was beyond Turner. But its never beyond Michelangelo.
Although he complained ceaselessly about the scrounging of his family, it was from these Buonarottis that he received his most precious inheritance: the constitution of a horse. The 89 years Michelangelo spent on Earth were a lot more than most artists of his times were granted. This unusually long life enabled him to have many phases, all of which are recorded in the drawings. Near the end of his life he produced a series of crucifixions. I held the most moving of them up to the light and saw immediately that the man who drew this could barely hold his quill. His hands were shaking. He couldnt finish a straight line. So he broke the cardinal artistic rule and used a ruler for Christs cross. But the shadowy Jesus that this old man was trying to draw is one of the most moving sights in Michelangelos art. What love there is in this shaky effort. What fire. What sadness.
Congressman Billybob
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I vote ror his ignorance. The name should be "Boaz".
Not sure if this is either GGG or Industrial Strength Humor ping-worthy.........
That was the hard part. A lot of folks will want to hurl at the start and won't get to anything substantive.
I wouldn't let this guy touch my son's Paint-by-Numbers version of dogs playing poker.
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"I vote ror his ignorance. The name should be "Boaz"."
Not in my KJV. It's Booz.
You've been around here long enough to know that this article requires a ***BARF ALERT!!!***
Straighten out your act or I'll report you to the Mods for abusing your posting privileges.
;^)
Michaelangelo had a big crew of painters working for him. The master generally drew the figures and along would come the help or understudys to fill them in. It's conceivable that these helpers added the figures like the figure doing the dump. The same sort of thing is sometimes seen in architecture and is sort of a signature for the workman. I believe they have even found them on the Great Pyramid.
Argue about something important.
"Argue about something important."
Why? This is fun. Some poster calls the author of the article ignorant for naming a Biblical character correctly. I point out that Booz is the correct name, according to the King James Version, the most widely-used version of the Bible.
So, who's ignorant? Apparently it can be spelled both ways, and is Boaz in other translations. Yet...in the most popular translation, it's Booz. It's pronounced the same in both spellings.
Who care's if it's important? It's at least as important as the subject of the thread. Who cares what some British writer thinks about the Sistine Chapel ceiling? That's important?
Anyone who knows the details of the Nagasaki mission, original target was Kokura, knows that that claim is bulls***.
You got me.
I am at work and am in a pissy mood because of it.
Lack of booze.
Carry on!
Yeah, well most men only have one penis that they need to be concerned about.
Take care of it, and don't abuse it, and it'll last you a life time.
Obviously, there is something defective in the one that Waldemar was issued.
Art Ping
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Definition
Boaz = "fleetness"
ancestor of David, kinsman-redeemer to Ruth, daughter-in-law of Naomi
name of the left of two brazen pillars, 18 cubits high, erected in the porch of Solomon's temple
"Basically, the Japanese were charmed out of their money by the last pope, the one before Uncle Fester."
Hard to take this article seriously when they start out calling the Pope names.
"So.....Michelangelo was a fag. I did not know that."
Yeah, that part is actually true..I don't know about the rest of it though. it is not a coincidence that his greatest works are the male form.
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