The Divine Michelangelo

Michelangelo Buonarroti is arguably the most famous artist of all time, and was as celebrated in his own day as he is today.

His success as a sculptor, painter and architect allowed him to transcend the traditional notion of the artistan and to become the first true artist.

His fame spread throughout the world, and he became known as the Divine Michelangelo.

[music] When Michelangelo was born on March 6th of the year 1475.

He was not born in his native city of Florence.

His father was serving in a judicial bureaucratic role in a small town called Caprese.

Yes, like the salad, which is located next to another Tuscan town called Arezzo.

And Michelangelo was born in Caprese.

He was baptized in Caprese, and then he moved back to his hometown of Florence when he was about two weeks old.

[music] In fact.

Hence, the town of Caprese has legally changed its name to Caprese - Michelangelo, because it's the most significant thing that ever happened to that town.

[music] And when Michelangelo moved back to Florence, he moved into his family home, which was located right here.

In fact, that plaque that you see indicates that this was the location of Michelangelo's family home, just a stone's throw away from the church of Santa Croce and located on the street today called the Via Bentacordi.

[music] Michelangelo's first master was the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio, whose workshop he joined when he was only 13 years old.

While Ghirlandaio was working on his celebrated fresco cycle in the Tornabuoni Chapel In Santa Maria Novella in Florence.

[music] Although Michelangelo was supposed to remain in the workshop for three years, he left after only one because he was invited by Lorenzo the Magnificent de Medici, who was always on the lookout for young budding artistic talent, to join his school for the artistically gifted known as the Giardino Mediceo.

[music] It was there that young Michelangelo was first taught the art of sculpture by the sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni.

[music] Michelangelo was also invited to move into the celebrated Medici Palace, where he became part of the Medici household and was exposed to the defining cultural movement known as humanism.

[music] And it was while Michelangelo was under the sponsorship of Lorenzo IL Magnifico and the tutelage of his teacher Bertoldo di Giovanni that he carved his two earliest known works, which are located here in the Casa Buonarroti Museum in Florence.

[music] The marble reliefs sculpture depicts a Greek myth called the battle of the Lapiths and the centaurs.

Lapiths where humans and centaur are, these mythological creatures that are half men and half horse.

And the story goes that the human tribe was celebrating a wedding, and they invited this nearby tribe of centaurs who drank a little too much, who got a little rowdy.

And things completely degenerated when the centaurs tried to steal away the human bride.

That is the story that Michelangelo is supposed to be depicting in this scene.

Now, does anyone notice anything that would indicate the presence of a centaur?

It's there, but you have to look really hard just down below something that looks remotely like a horse heinie.

And coming off of it, you have something that looks like a how about the bride that they're trying to steal away?

Well, this figure here, who looks like she has a ponytail coming off of her hat, because otherwise, what you have here is an excuse to showcase this male nude form.

And in fact, already at a very early age.

Right, Michelangelo only 17 when he carved this.

What we see is an artist obsessed with one thing in his artwork.

And that was the male nude form.

[music] Michelangelo's other earliest known work is called The Madonna of the stairs, for pretty obvious reasons.

[music] It represents this monumental figure of the Virgin Mary, who fills nearly the entire space, and this Christ child on her lap, who was just finished nursing and in the process fallen asleep.

In fact, in many ways, it's this Madonna of the stairs image that kind of prefigures one of Michelangelo's most famous pieces, and that is his Piet.

Here she holds an infant.

Later she would hold the body of her dead adult son instead.

But what is perhaps most extraordinary about this relief sculpture is the technique that Michelangelo is employing.

It's called rilievo schiacciato, which literally translates as flattened or squished relief.

Right?

Traditionally, when we talk about relief sculpture, we talk about three different degrees of relief sculpture.

There is high relief right where the figures jump off the surface of the stone.

There is low relief when the figures are essentially very close to the plane of the surface from which they're being carved head on, appropriately what comes in between is called middle relief.

Well, rilievo schiacciato is flatter than flat.

It's flatter than lower relief.

In fact, at certain points it almost becomes incision.

And what is perhaps most extraordinary about this piece is this illusion of depth, of continuous space that Michelangelo has created on a slab of marble that is only about an inch thick.

The big question, of course, is why is Michelangelo working in relief at an early age?

He is a sculptor that most of us associate with sculpture in the round sculpture that's meant to be see from all sides and freestanding.

Well, it seems that when Michelangelo was a young man, he had a rather large chip on his shoulder.

Because when Michelangelo was just a young man, he was constantly being compared to the greatest sculptor of the 15th century, whose name was Donatello.

[music] And Donatello was the inventor of this technique, a flattened relief.

In fact, he used it for the first time in the pradella of his sculpture of Saint George.

So what it shows us is this young, proud artist in Michelangelo who is essentially showing the w Look, not only can I carve as well as Donatello, but I can beat him at his own game And using the very technique that he invented, this rilievo schiacciato.

[music] Michelangelo's first professional contract was for this statue, the Bacchus which he carved in the year 1496 at the ripe old age of 21.

Now the patron for this sculpture was a very influential man by the name of Cardinal Raffaello Riario.

[music] You've probably never heard of Riario, but you probably have heard of his uncle, Pope Sixtus the Fourth, whose greatest architectural legacy was the construction of the Sistine Chapel.

[music] And the story of how these two men met is actually rather interesting.

Vasari says that when Michelangelo was still a teenager, he was in the habit of carving sculptures in the ancient manner, in other words, making them look as if they were ancient statues.

Then Michelangelo would bury those statues in the ground for 3 or 4 months at a time, and then he would dig them up, and then he would sell them on the art market as if they were ancient originals.

In other words, Michelangelo was making knockoffs, and one of these fakes ended up in the collection of this Cardinal Riario, who supposedly had it in his collection for quite some time.

When he discovered that it was fake.

So the Cardinal asks Michelangelo to do it again.

This time, though, he wants a sculpture of Bacchus, of the Roman god of wine.

And this is the sculpture that Michelangelo produced for the Cardinal.

Okay.

After about a year, he presented the statue to the cardinal.

And when the cardinal looked at it, he did something unthinkable.

Okay.

And that was to reject it.

And so the question that people in my business have been trying to ask or for the last five centuries is, why would anyone in their right mind reject a statue by Michelangelo?

[music] We have to remember that criteria.

The very beginning of this.

The Cardinal wants a sculpture that people will look at and believe is an ancient Roman piece.

Now, when you look at this statue, just about everything about it is in fact classical and inventory.

It is a depiction of a god.

And that was the almost exclusive subject matter of classical sculpture.

The figure is nude because in the ancient Greek, in Roman world, nudity was something that was celebrated.

The figure is in contrapposto.

It's that classical stance that gives the sculpture a sense of movement.

But the one thing that this is not is idealized, right?

Classical sculpture had a tendency to idealize its subject matter.

I called them, jokingly, the 2% body fat Evian water drinking people.

Rig You see them all the time with these perfect bodies and these expressionless faces.

Well, when you look at Bacchus, he is standing in a classical contrapposto stance.

All of his weight is on his left leg.

The right leg is relaxed, but it should be right next to that left leg.

Instead, it's a little too far out, a little too far back.

That causes his pelvis to jut out.

Right?

And we see that rather unflattering belly on the figure of Bacchus left shoulder is supposed to move back, but that left shoulder is swaggering.

Right shoulder comes too far forward.

His head tilts out and slightly to the left, divided up like this, and you could almost imagine Bacchus slurring his words because he is clearly drunk.

Or as my students yell out, hammered, right?

Bacchus is clearly hammered, and he's not supposed to be, because Bacchus is a god, and he gives us thank him the wonders of fermentation.

But he's not supposed to feel the effects.

So anyone who saw this statue in the 16th century would say, hey, that's a pretty amazing representation of a man in an advanced state of inebriation.

But that's not an ancient Roman statue of Bacchus.

[music] In 1498, at the age of 23, Michelangelo made his first trip to Rome under the rule of various popes, the city was undergoing a massive transformation from a backwater medieval town into Europe's cultural capital.

It was then that Michelangelo received the contract for his first number one hit, the Piet.

[music] Carved for the old Basilica of Saint Peter.

This moving image of the Virgin Mary, holding her dead son for the last time, earned him instant fame.

It was the only work of art that Michelangelo ever signed, because it was the only one he'd ever have to.

Because this sculpture made Michelangelo a household name.

And while the whole world thought that no sculpture could possibly surpass his Piet, Michelangelo proved them all wrong with his next statue.

[music] The subject of the statue is David, as in David versus Goliath.

You'd be amazed at how many people don't realize that this is actually a representation of the biblical figure from the first book of Samuel.

The artist, of course, is Michelangelo, and it took him nearly three years to the day to complete the carving of the sculpture.

He signed the contract in August of the year 1501, and the sculpture was unveiled on September 8th of the year 1504.

And he signed that contract with the building committee of Florence Cathedral.

Because the originally intended location for the statue was on one of the back buttresses of Florence Cathedral, or about 85ft above the ground.

A very important thing for you to know, because it explains two of the most fundamental aspects of the statue right off the bat.

First, and most obvious of which is the size.

[music] Few people ask why Michelangelo carved the sculpture so large.

And the answer, of course, is because they were planning on putting it on top of a gargantuan church.

The second thing it explains is the disproportion of the statue, the most famous of which, despite what you might be thinking, are David's hands, both of which are oversize, Michelangelo essentially anticipating the distortion created by height by distorting himself.

Now, the first thing I'd like to talk about is the history of the contract of the sculpture, because that original contract did not belong to Michelangelo.

In the year 1464, or 11 years before Michelangelo was even born.

A sculptor by the name of Agostino di Ducci was commissioned by the building committee of Florence Cathedral to go to a place called Carrara, which is where all the statuary marble comes from.

And to come back to Florence with four blocks of marble, with which he was going to construct a 19ft tall statue of the Old Testament prophet David.

That's the original contract.

When Agostino di Duccio return to Florence after about a year, instead of coming back with four blocks of marble, he came back with just one.

And we estimate that that block was about 18ft tall and weighed upwards of nine tons.

How he got it back to Florence is still one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in history.

In fact, the only theory I've not heard proposed yet is the alien conspiracy theory.

He got it back somehow.

He worked on the block for the better part of a year, at the end of which his contract was terminated.

And we don't know why.

[music] In 1476, when Michelangelo was one year old, a second sculpture by the name of Antonio Rossellin was given the same contract as the first.

He worked on the block for about a year, at the end of which his contract was terminated as well.

So the moral of the story is, two guys worked on the block before Michelangelo ever even had a chance to look at it.

About two and a half years into the carving of the block.

They start to see enough of the figure emerge that they make the decision not to put the statue on top of the cathedral after all.

And the reason they gave was by describing the sculpture as being too magnifico, which of course translates into English as magnificent.

[music] Now when we use the word magnificent, we imply almost exclusively the quality of something, which is what they were implying as well.

What they meant by Magnifico was the fact that they realized then what many of us still believe today.

And that is pound for pound, the statue of David might just be the greatest work of sculpture that the human species has ever produced.

[music] But the other thing that they were implying with this word, magnifico was size.

When you magnify something, when we talk of magnitude and they knew that lifting a statue, which in its present form stands at 17ft one inch, weighs in at just over five tons, and placing it 85ft above the ground was very risky business.

Are you going to risk damaging the greatest sculpture of all time?

So that you can park it like a figurina on top of a giant wedding cake?

Well, the answer across the board was no.

So if not on top of the most important building in Florence, Florence Cathedral, the decision was made to put the David in front of the second most important building, which is City Hall, a building known as Palazzo Vecchio, about a quarter of a mile away from the Duomo, and a distance that you can pretty much walk at a casual pace in about 4.5 minutes.

It took them four days to move the statue.

That's how careful they were.

They put David on top of rollers, and they very slowly inched him down the street and then positioned him there in Piazza della Signoria.

And then finally, when the sculpture was completed, it was unveiled to the public on September 8th of the year 1504.

That is David's official birthday.

[music] The people of Florence fell in love with this sculpture, and they nicknamed it IL Gigante the Giant, which is a pretty obvious nickname to give a sculpture of this scale.

But like everything else in this city, there's a long, complicated explanation behind the nickname of the David.

Florence was a city that prided itself on its Republican tradition, and so it was constantly measuring itself against those people who invented democracy.

The Greeks.

And in ancient Greece, there was a legendary sculpture which no longer exists, called the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Great Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

And so what the Florentines were essentially saying is that the ancient Greeks had their colossus.

We have responded with our gigante.

So why exactly is this sculpture so important?

The first thing I think that strikes you when you see the David is its scale.

You just don't bump into 17ft tall, five ton sculptures every day.

Second thing is its anatomical perfection.

With the qualifiers that I gave you, the hands they had.

But now you know why they're out of proportion.

The third thing is the civic symbolism and importance that this sculpture has.

This sculpture represents Florence and its political values the same way.

A statue, let's say, called the Statue of Liberty, represents the United States of America.

And I know that's not a fair analogy, because this is an apple and the Statue of Liberty is an orange.

But I think you get my drift in terms of its kind of civic symbolism.

But the fourth reason this sculpture, so extraordinary, and I think this is the one that's most overlooked, is the dramatic aspect of the David.

And so the question is, how do we even know that this is a representation of that biblical figure, David.

Two things the sling in his left and the rock in his right, because there's really because there's really nothing else.

The age of this statue doesn't correspond to the biblical description of David, who was supposed to be a boy between the ages of ten and 14.

Michelangelo has instead depicted a man somewhere between the ages of 17 to 30.

Why has Michelangelo deviated from this biblical description?

Because I think it makes it more dramatic.

In other words, if you walk into the Accademia to see a 17ft tall statue of an 11 year old scrawny kid, it's not going to have that same impact that it does today.

And the amazing thing about looking at the David is that that muscular form that he has, essentially, if you didn't know that this was David, you could presume that it's either a sculpture of Apollo or of Hercules or some other Greek god, or if you go on Netflix and you hit the action movie genre, any leading man today either looks like this or wants to look like this.

In other words, it adds a universal quality to the heroism of the statue this guy kicks bad.

In any age, in any religion and in any place, and all you need to do is look up at that face, the furrowed brow of David.

Look at those fixed, focused eyes, those flared nostrils, that puckered mouth, that square jaw.

Everything about it is suggesting that this is this moment of intense anticipation.

And when you think about what Michelangelo was doing, it's essentially Michelangelo being the movie director, where he's reading the screenplay, which, of course, is the biblical story which tells us that David was young.

And when you're young, you're overconfident.

That tells us that David was faithful because he was defending Israel.

He thought that Yahweh would defend him, that David was super confident with his weapon of choice, which is the slingshot.

When he argued with King Saul for the opportunity to fight Goliath.

He said that when he was protecting his father's sheep, he was protecting them from lions and bears.

How much more difficult could it be to kill a man?

And of course, David would have been deadly with the sling.

So you can't just see that scene in the movie where David comes out and he's way too confident.

He has the sling casually thrown over his shoulder.

That rock being tossed up and down in his right hand.

And Michelangelo has sort of captured that split second look at that six pack, which is not just the result of the 0.2% body fat that this man enjoys.

This is physiological.

He's taking this deep breath.

And I think that David has finally come to grips with just how big Goliath actually is.

So if I could turn the volume up right now, the two words coming out of David's mouth would be oh, bleep as he realizes just how big this man is.

And this is that critical moment where he has to make the decision, drop that rock and go back to watching sheep for the rest of your natural life.

Or you stand up, you fight the giant and you step into the history books.

[music] Let's take a lap around the statue.

[music] You get up close.

You can see the erosion.

David's left foot is particularly worn down and above the ankle.

You can see what happens when that polish disappears.

You can see it's almost spongy in its consistency.

If you look up David's ribcage, you can see some of that shine that survived on this side, because that left arm has been protecting it from the elements.

When you come to the backside, you can see more details that are not visible from the front.

The first is the sling that actually comes down from David's left shoulder and goes all the way down to his right hand.

From this angle in his right hand, you can actually see that rock that I was talking about earlier as well.

And then behind his right leg, you see the tree trunk and the function of that tree trunk is nothing more than structural.

In other words, what makes marble so good as a carving material is the fact that there is no grain to it, so you can cut at it from any angle.

But because it lacks grain, it's a very weak structural material.

So if I want to keep David's right ankle proportional to the rest of the body, there simply is not enough material there to sustain the weight of the entire sculpture.

So I need to reinforce that leg, but I disguise my reinforcement as the tree trunk that you see there.

Let's look at David from another angle.

[music] And this is the angle that I like best, because I think it reveals how much of a technical challenge it was to create the sculpture.

When you're looking at David in profile.

If you take the rectangular base upon which he's standing, and in your mind imagine extended as high as the statue itself, you can kind of recreate what this block look like originally, and the block that you should be imagining was a very tall one, but a very shallow one.

In other words, the profile of David fills the entire width of the block itself.

So David's left foot, his left knee, the outside of his left hand, would have been pretty close to flush with the face of the block of marble.

The backside Instead, I'm convinced that the tree trunk curves inward, because the block probably did as well.

And that means that David's buttocks would have been pretty close to flush with the backside.

That, of course, means that there was very little or any wiggle room, or what we call margin for error in creating this.

I always remind people if what Michelangelo had created was a mediocre sculpture, you'd probably still come to the Accademia to see it.

But this is not a mediocre sculpture.

This is arguably the greatest of all time, and it makes the statue almost miraculous in that quality, because it was such a difficult block to carve.

And what Michelangelo was able to do with that block is nothing less than astounding.

[music] Soon after completing the David, Michelangelo received the phone call.

Pope Julius the Second was calling from Rome first to have Michelangelo designed and carve his magnificent tomb, which was never finished, and then eventually to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

So in many ways, it was the statue of David that marked the turning point.

When Florence passed the torch to Rome as the new capital of the Renaissance, and where Michelangelo would spend the next ten years of his life.

[music]