Michelangelo (1475-1564)

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Michelangelo (1475-1564) Presentation 1 of 1 Michelangelo (1475-1564) Presented by Roger Weir Saturday, November 19, 1983 Transcript: The date is November 19th, 1983. This is a lecture by Roger Weir on Michelangelo, who lived 1475-1564. It was given at the Philosophical Research Society on Saturday morning. I want to start with a letter that Michelangelo wrote in August 1541, just before a month before the unveiling of the Sistine Chapel, to petrified crowds who were awed and overwhelmed by the artistic excellence and metaphysical explosion that greeted their eyes. Michelangelo wrote to his friend Leonardo di Moderato Simone. He writes, you write me that you want me to come to Rome with Adorno this September. I tell you that this is not convenient yet, because it would only add to my vexations over and above my other troubles. I say the same as regards myself, because I'm so busy that I haven't time to pay attention to you, and every little thing extra is a great bother to me. Not accepting even having to write this. You must wait until next lent when I'll send for you and I'll send you money to equip yourself. That you may not come here like a nobody. But for now, leave me alone. Michelangelo is the most impetuous spirit in Western history. He is simply Titanic, and he felt that he had been chosen by God to become the angel of art for mankind. And thus, given this hefty responsibility. Michelangelo, for 89 years sought to deliver what he felt was the sine qua non of the angel of art, to teach man how to see in the material world the divine forms growing therein, and to encourage man to break the forms of nature, to let loose the intelligible structures of reality. And thus Michelangelo poses a problem as well as a triumph for the human imagination. It is with Michelangelo that the modern world comes storming in. Now, he was born in 1475, at a time when the Renaissance in Florence was taking on a beautiful, uh, reddish vermilion hue. And when he was 13 years of age, he was discovered and observed to constantly have busied himself with drawing, so much so that he was incapacitated to learn any other trade. Thankfully, he was noticed by that prince among men, Lorenzo IL Magnifico, and Lorenzo went to Michelangelo's father named Ludovico, and he said, this young man is extraordinary. He cannot be left in the care of second raters. We are going to put him into the school of the Ghirlandaio, especially Domenico Ghirlandaio, who, with my financial encouragement, will mature your son. He is very special, and so that Ludovico, wanting to keep his son in the family, wanting him to go out and earn money according to the family formula, was overwhelmed when Lorenzo opened up his purse and dispersed gold ducats in each of his pockets until the protestations died to a murmuring yes. And so Lorenzo, putting his arm around around young 14 year old Michelangelo, took him in to his own family. Had him. Sit at supper with his own family, had him educated with his own voice and other words. Michelangelo was adopted by Lorenzo de Medici and given the best training in the world at that time. The family tutor, of course, ostensibly was Angelo Poliziano, but always in the background was the magnificent genius of Marsilio Ficino and his wonderful work, having translated the Corpus Hermeticum, having translated the complete dialogues of Plato. Having contemplated and begun work upon translating the Aeneid of Plotinus that hadn't seen light since the days of Proclus a thousand years ago, so the young Michelangelo was taken by the nape of the spiritual neck from a pedestrian background, and brought into the very crown of human achievement at its most glorious. And for three years the young adolescent Michelangelo Throve as few individuals ever have. And by the time he was 17, he was already a young giant, ungainly only because the conditions of life surrounding him came to a crashing close. Lorenzo died, and when Lorenzo died, his oldest son Piero, who took over, proceeded through extravagant and merciless frittering and trivial endeavours to dissipate within a year all the credibility that the Medici had built up for four generations from Giovanni di Bicci, from Cosimo, from Piero the Gouty to Lorenzo, it had been a magnificent run. Piero wasted it all. There were conversations in the street every night behind shuttered doors, and it was only a moment away before the populace of Florence would take matters in their own hands and do in Piero, and bring into Florence an era of instability wherein the populace, trying to make a commune and the commune trying to float a republic, constantly was jeopardized by the fact that the very structures and conditions of genius in Florence had been family centered and been centered on the Medici family, and it was only in those intermediate years when the Medici came back into power in Florence, that the city flourished, but in fact the democratic future belonged to the Republic. It belonged to the commune, to the people. And here we have a poignant crisscross, just like we had seen in Athens, the great age of Pericles. The genius works when the aristocratic elite makes it work, the genius flounders. When the preferred democratic community seeks to try to make it work and cannot. And so we have a conundrum a Chinese puzzle handed to us constantly by our own nature and our own condition. Michelangelo, coming of age, 19 years of old, seeing the poignancy of this whole endeavor thrown into literally his adopted family's lap, and characteristically, whenever he was overwhelmed by the violence of the times, his inner spiritual nature replied in that old archetypal motif of flight from death. And so he fled from Florence. He tried to go to Venice. He ended up in Bologna. And there, fortunately, someone, a friend of Lorenzo's, a man named Giovanni Francesco Aldrovandi, took him in and for several months quieted down the spirit and soul of Michelangelo so that he could go back to Florence. And when he came back to Florence, he saw that the fulcrum of what was wrong with the times, what was wrong with him? Was that the savior of the people, the author of the commune, the spiritual director of the Republic, Savonarola, who had impressed him, and every other figure alive at the time, Pico della mirandola, Botticelli, all of them agreed and were swayed by the simple exactness of Savonarola, who said, if we place our trust in the ornamentation of art, man will forever be caught in the labyrinth of the material world and will never be able to save himself. So we have to burn these works of art. We have to pull down these sculptures and statues. We have to return to the simple life, because it is only by the sacrifice of the material realm that man has some chance to order himself internally and go on that interiorized journey along the hierarchies of inner understanding and achieve his salvation. Michelangelo heard this as all the other artists at the time and were swayed. They agreed. And yet. And yet for Michelangelo, his particular gift was that he was the angel of art, sent to man to teach him how to achieve his salvation through art. It was an impossible situation, and so he fled again. But this time he went south and he went to Rome. And when he got to Rome, frenetic but 20 years of age, he realized that history was hounding him, that the conditions of actual political reality were enveloping his life. Because Charles, the eighth of France, had an invasion of Italy. And Michelangelo stirring in this welter of responsibility versus conviction, versus the external conditions under which he was having to live, placed. Finally, the entirety of this conundrum, this anxiety into a sculpture, which is the Pieta, which today is at the very entrance of Saint Peter's in Rome. But when you go into Saint Peter's, the very first thing, the very first non thing object that you see is the Pieta of the suffering Christ in his mother's arms, leaving this world, and by his suffering, sacrifice and willingness to do this, carving out the steps by which man frees himself a divine transcendental ladder to perfection. So he made this Pieta as a young man, and the Pieta became a cause celeb. It was the greatest sculpture that had been seen in the world since ancient times. Even the exquisiteness of Donatello's David seemed to pale to become a feat next to the incredible anxiety and life energy expressed by Michelangelo in the Pieta. He was noticed by everyone, especially by the Pope Julius the Second. He caught this, he caught the torrential genius of this young man. He caught the artistic capacity, and he saw the fiery promise. And the young man that Lorenzo had seen in the young man. And so he began to make appeals to Michelangelo to work for him. He had objects to be made for him. And what did he want made? He would like a statue of himself in bronze, please. Large five braccia high. He could see it all. The. Yes. The angel of art sent from God should make a heroic statue of the Pope. Who else should he make a statue of? And so Michelangelo, fleeing again, went back to Florence. And there, roasted by the eternal responsibility and the impossibility of the external situation again, within a year or two found another vehicle he saw in this huge monolithic chunk of marble from Carrara, the form that he alone could see that needed liberating. And this time it would not be some effete Donatello like David, but it would be Michelangelo's David, a giant uncaged from the guts of the mountains of Italy, and placed in the public center of Florence to dominate like a brash crescendo of the Renaissance orchestra of form, the clashing of symbols and the rolling of drums that the triumphal movement of Florentine artistic genius that had begun with Dante and his journey through the Inferno and the Purgatorio to Paradiso, from the guides of Virgil and Beatrice, finally, to the ultimate secret guide at the end of Paradise, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who showed him the vision of the world through the eye of the celestial Eagle, the pinnacle of Paradise. And he saw through that eye the exfoliate wings of the angels in the cosmos that made up the celestial flower that received the omnipotent power and celestial light of God in its unfolding. And from that earliest vision that there is a journey through which man progresses and finds his salvation by completing that journey. And Dante was for Michelangelo, the Virgil for himself. He always read the Divine Comedy. He was mercifully buried next to the cenotaph of Dante in Florence, and we'll get to that. But that vision of Dante had gone through a progressive development, and through the Thursday night course, we've been going through that. How the idea of the spiritual journey became the key in Giotto's fresco series, The Life of Saint Francis, the Divine Life, the stages of life, the idea of individuation through which one must move progressively to unfoldment. Giotto and the Arena Chapel had done this enormous. 42 painting series, putting together the life of man, and we have seen how individual after individual took this idea of a completed journey of experience, an interiorization of the external world and a raising of it level by level, through the architectonic of the wisdom eye, to a form of understanding. What Michelangelo had done was to reach out with his tremendous, powerful insight and pull that whole journey in, pull it in from an epic, pull it in from a fresco series, pull it in even from the great dome that Brunelleschi had finally put up after two generations, pulled all that energy in into the form of a man, so that instead of it being an experience of there it was all pulled into a human form, gigantic and titanic, expressing in itself like an exclamation mark upon the face of Western history. This is the slayer of Goliath. This is that divide. But it was a problem. It was a problem. The metaphysical genius and artistic excellence of Michelangelo could envision this in terms of a sculpture. He could make a divide. But can a human being handle that kind of pressure? Can ordinary human beings model themselves after that kind of a figure, that kind of a heroic figure? I don't think so. Don't really think so. And so Michelangelo, with his divide finished in 1504, is a watershed. It's like a great sword laid on the page of Western history. For the last 500 years, we've been trying to have individuals grow themselves large enough through ambition, authority and power to become living. Davids standing in the center of their city, their empire, and holding sway. So Michelangelo is inadvertently the author of The Megalomania of the Western civilization that we still inhabit. He was seen, of course, again, everyone was talking about Michelangelo. There he is. He was now in his 30s, and the northern Italian theory of the individual, that one had to be as full as possible because, as Ficino had in his platonic theology, when you were resurrected at the Day of Judgment, you came back in the form that you had developed for yourself. And this is why you had to develop every capacity you could to become as writ as large as you could, because when Resurrection Day came, that's how you would come back. So in the predisposition of trying to develop human personality to its ultimate extent, as soon as the divide was put up and Michelangelo was seen as this giant of possibility, he was given an assignment to paint a mural in the Palazzo Vecchio in the hall of the 500 was to be a scene from Florentine history, the Battle of Cascina that had happened in 1364. It wasn't so much that this fresco, the Battle of Cassino, was so important. It was the fact. On the other wall of the same hall, a fresco called the Battle of Anghiari was being painted by Leonardo da Vinci. And so the Florentines wanted a 15 round bout. They wanted to see Leonardo and Michelangelo in the same hall at the same time painting competing frescoes. This was the gladiatorial show of the age. Michelangelo, of course, heroically accepting the responsibility of the situation. He was the angel of art, sent by God to teach man how to break the forms of nature and fray the shapes of the spirit. But the old death, fear, panic. And that's the primordial reaction to the intuitive sense of death, is to panic, to flee. Flight. Flight. He went back to Rome into the waiting designs of Julius the Second. Make me a statue. Very high bronze. Beautiful. He couldn't stand the fact that the Pope was baiting him with his own father. So he fled Rome on horseback, trying to get away. He went to Bologna. And there he was, finally caught up with by papal envoys, who calmed him down and said in the tone that we've all heard, Will will give you everything. Of course you'll be taken care of. All you have to do is join the family. It's really a family situation after all. So he made the statue five braccia high out of bronze and finished it. 1508 and it was just as if there were some hand of the Lord. The statue was defaced within several years, and the wonderful Duke Alfonso d'Este melted the statue down into a. And of course, the paparazzi of the time seeking to find out from Michelangelo. What do you think of all this? And in this wonderful book, Michelangelo's Theory of Art is a short few line account of this. And seeing his Julius the Second metamorphosed into a canon. One biographer claims that Michelangelo was actually shown the weapon. Knowing the Italians of the time, he probably was to catch his reaction. It would have been worth everything to see his face. Michelangelo could only take solace in his belief that an artist can win glory. Now, they don't say it here, but it's not a glory of this world. It's the eternal glory. That's what an artist can win. Not just for himself, but for his people. The artist is the hero. The artist is the king is not. The king who wields the sword. Is the artist who wields the brush or the chisel or the T-Square. Is the architect, the painter, the sculptor. He is the hero of mankind because he can teach us to see through the natural form, to the spiritual shape, and how to break the formula, the spell cast upon matter. By physical law. Man, the magician can break that spell and free the spiritual shape. And by having seen that done, he can do it himself. Anyone can do that. And that's why we have architecture. That's why we have painting and sculpture, music, poetry. See. And so is written here. We should put a capital G on glory. Michelangelo could only take solace in his belief that an artist can win glory and establish his mastery by a single work, provided that it brings the genius together the genius. This is a Neoplatonic genius. The origin of genius is the guardian spirit in Plotinus. In the Aeneid, every human being has a guardian spirit. It's the old Socratic demon who whispers the truth to you at the moment when your external ambitions have been calmed. And in that equilibrium, or, as some have said in that extreme, God's opportunity comes through the guardian angel. And so for Michelangelo was the genius inside. Now this, of course, was always held by everyone, that Michelangelo was, in fact a godsend. Angel Vasari in his life. And it was Vasari who designed the tomb of Michelangelo. He knew the man, and in his life he began. Curiously, he writes, while the best and most industrious artists were laboring by the light of Giotto and his followers to give the world examples of such power as the benignity of their stars, and the varied character of their fantasies enabled them to command, while desirous of imitating the perfection of nature. Do you see how he's setting it up there? Very great artists. They model themselves on nature. Why is Michelangelo greater? Because he cracks the form of nature and frees the form of the spirit, which was buried in nature and never seen until perceived by the artist. So Vasari is setting this up. They were desirous of imitating the perfection of nature by the excellence of their art. They were struggling to attain that high comprehension which many call intelligence. Is there intelligence in the material world? It's a frozen, magical circle, a hypnotic dead end. It only goes here on the surface that intelligent know the intelligences are celestial. They are transcendent. They are divine. They're not here at all. They are in the invisible architecture of the real. And as long as man is imitating nature. Sure he's in the sandbox. He's playing games of fantasy with material. Of what use is that? This is child's play. It is for a man to turn his back on the hypnotic charm of nature and climb the stairs of his celestial phases to his salvation. And so. Vasari writes here the ruler of heaven was pleased to turn his eyes towards the earth, and clemency, and perceiving the fruitlessness of their many labors, the ardent studies pursued without any result the presumptuous self-sufficiency of men, which is farther from to truth than is darkness from light. He resolved the Heavenly Father, resolved that to deliver us from great errors that he would send to the world a spirit endowed with universality of power in each art and in every profession, one capable of showing himself alone. What is the perfection of art in the sketch? Well, well, this is quite a responsibility. This is like a second coming. This is a very difficult psychological energy to handle when you are impetuous and full of genius and talent, and still young, to conceive that you might be an artistic second coming is a very hard act to bring off. But it was up to him to make an attempt, and so he reversed his field, and instead of making sculptures that imploded the meaning into single focus, he accepted a commission from Julius the Second. He saw in it a possibility that he had constantly been running into this problem of self electrocution in sculpture. So he turned from sculpture to painting. Yes, he complains in his letters, I'm not a painter. I am a sculptor. But he sees the idea of doing all of the frescoes of the new chapel put up to Sixtus. It was to be called the Sistine Chapel. And so for about eight months Michelangelo brooded on the problem. He sent for five assistants, one that he had known since he was a teenager in the studios of the grandiose, and with his five assistants, he began ordering the preparation of the plastering of the vault. There are several layers of plaster that go on, and the layer that goes under the final layer that is put on just as you paint, needs time to dry. Unfortunately, the fresco technique that he was following was engineered in Florence and not in Rome, and later on, when he began working on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, he began to notice, alone in his scaffolding, that mold was beginning to grow already on some of the paintings, because the underlayer of the plaster was not yet fully dry, it sent him into paroxysms of terror from for weeks. He was unable to paint until he finally understood that it in time it would dry, the mold would shrivel, and the paintings would be secure. It was a problem. Even everything was a problem to Michelangelo is a problem for the scaffolding. Everyone was jealous of Michelangelo Bramante, the great architect who was a friend of Raphael. And we will talk about Raphael, the gentle, beautiful, exquisite spirit of Raphael at the end of the Italian Renaissance course. But Bramante, who was a friend of Raphael, thought that Michelangelo would play himself out in a medium, that he was not controlling, like painting. And so he built the scaffolding suspended from the ceiling by ropes. He used so many ropes, it is said that the rope maker was able to dower his daughter from the sale of these ropes. You know, we all are a little. And so we love these stories. Michelangelo, of course, viewing the scaffolding, ordered it to be taken down. He said, this is this is terrible. This is foolish. Not only is someone else trying to horn in, but what's going to happen. All these holes and the and the ceiling that the ropes have come through. Who's going to fix this? So he was given the opportunity. Make your own scaffold. And so Michelangelo designed the first effective large scale scaffolding used right up until the end of the 19th century for working on high arches and vaults. And he would sequester himself up at the top of the scaffolding with all of his equipment around pacing, thinking, working like mad, sleeping an hour, getting up and furiously coming through, not to paint on the material realm, but to break the charm of the material and free the spirit. And so he constantly had to keep himself up. He had to be possessed. He had to be enthused by the divine energy in order to paint this, because this was a special command. And so the wearing tension of maintaining a very high alpha state continuously for month after month after month took its toll in the fact that Michelangelo, by the time he was 40, could not stand the petty world. Every inconvenience was simply a distraction to him. How? How dare they give me toast unbuttered, that sort of thing. But it's a concomitant of this tremendous drive that he had. Julius the second would climb the scaffolding with lanterns and would sit there in the beautiful papal robes and all of his authority, and he would watch his young protege work. And so finally, one evening he said, before you finish the Sistine Chapel, I'm getting old. They have melted my, uh, statue down. I want you to build a tomb for me, and I want it to be the most fabulous tomb since antiquity. I want it to make Alexander the Great look like a piker. We're going to really do this up. We're going to have 40 life sized statues where this is going to be a tomb that will consecrate me for the ages. And so Michelangelo began working on the tomb of Julius II, about the same time that the Sistine Chapel came in, so that he was again given a life situation that had this conundrum the glory of a man and the responsibility for all men, and the need to use his art for one and then the other, like a ping pong game at the same time. And so he had to become a recluse, a spiritual hermit, in order to sustain this drive. And of course, he felt for 50 years that he was going to die any day. How could anyone live with this high energy spiritual electrocution? And yet he lived for 89 years. Finally, Julius the Second, in order to help Michelangelo along, realizing that the man was beginning to buckle a little under the tremendous pressure, said, we're going to have a we're going to have a preliminary showing. I know the chapel is only half finished, but on Halloween night of 1512, they opened up the chapel and townspeople poured in. They'd been rumors for months about this arcane genius alone in God's house for all these months, all this equipment. And they were bowled over, even with only half the chapel finished in just a few cartoons here and there. And this was a time when Michelangelo realized that in order to keep Julius the second somewhat happy, he would have to return to the sculptural realm. And so one of the sculptures for the tomb of Julius II is the colossal sculpture of Moses with the horns of light, the mystical Merkabah Jewish mysticism of the old Kabbalistic understanding of mosaic spiritual genius. Yes. And so when the Moses Michelangelo brought together again, as he had done in the Pieta, then in the David, now in the Moses, all of his energy and the great, uh, figure, the law giver with the hands on the Pentateuch and the eyes fearlessly looking into the indefinite future, was to be the centerpiece of the tomb of Julius the Second. Then a wonderful thing happened, as he had begun to work on this. The Pope did die. Passed on and onto the papal throne came his friend, his stepbrother Leo the 10th, who was the other son of Lorenzo. He'd been raised with Leo the 10th. And for eight years, Leo said, we have the papacy now, and we're going to enjoy it. We're going to take it easy. We have plenty of time. We have plenty of genius. So we're going to do a lot of eating, and we're going to do a lot of talking together. And in between, we're going to create the greatest works of art the world has ever seen. We're going to bring back that renaissance which my ancestors had. But this time we're going to bring it back in the high level. And so the High Renaissance, Raphael, Leonardo, Michelangelo came into play, and Leo the 10th, uh, brought him back to Florence to spend some of his time in Florence and some in Rome. And in order to make a bridge for him, he understood him. The Medici always understood human nature. Eventually, within 100 years of Leo the 10th, almost every throne in Europe would have a descendant of the Medici sitting upon it. They understood human nature. So in order to bridge him, bring him from Rome, from this colossal work that he was doing on the tomb of Julius the Second, he had him begin playing with the idea of a tomb for the Medici, and to get him warmed up he would do the facade of San Lorenzo. And that, of course, Michelangelo, suddenly becoming enthused with this good fortune and change of conditions, went to Leo the 10th. And he said, you know, I have an idea. I think that what we should do is we should build a tomb for Dante here in Florence. I'll design it and we'll bring the ashes of Dante here. And we will. We will make Florence the envy of the world for all time. It'll be as great or greater than Athens or the Periclean age. And so, Michelangelo, feeling his wonderful oats, began to toy with the idea of creating better and bigger and more forms, and with it would transform the conception of what the Sistine Chapel was going to be. We must take a break now. I think it'd be a very advisable. Well, break. Break will be outside, and you may bring your coffee as well as life. And you can you can well appreciate how eventful and titanic a life it must have been. He didn't have any personal life at all when he began to find within himself the reserves. Um, the increasing scope of maturity. Michelangelo. Turned to another art form to complement those that he had already mastered painting and sculpture. From 1530 to about 1546, Michelangelo wrote some of the greatest Italian poetry of all time, and his sonnets especially, which were largely unknown in his own time, but were brought back in an edition of 1623, and from that time forward Michelangelo has become in the company with Petrarch and Boccaccio, one of the great Italian poets. And he writes at this time with a very sublime dignity. Now my life hath across the stormy sea, like a frail barque reached that wide port. Where all are bidden. Ere the final reckoning. Fall of good and evil for eternity. Now know I well how that fond phantasy which made my soul the worshipper and thrall of earthly art is vain. How criminal is that which all men seek unwillingly? Those amorous thoughts which were so lightly dressed. What are they when the double death is nigh? The one I know for sure. The other dread painting nor sculpture can now lull to rest my soul. That turns to his great love on high. Whose arms to clasp us on the cross were spread. So thoughts like this were able to be brought into manifestation, brought into words. And his work in the Sistine Chapel began directing itself towards the culmination point. He had done a great series on the ceiling. He had begun with the division of light from darkness, the creation of light by God. I have a slide of it here. We'll show them in a little bit. So on the ceiling at the top, beginning the concourse of the world. The creation of light and darkness. The first separation of opposites. And in the next panel down was the creation of the sun and the moon. That is, there's the creation of light and darkness as metaphysical dynamics. Then there is the creation of the sun and the moon as phenomenal manifestations of those noumenal dynamics. And only then is there the great mural in the third place of the Spirit of God upon the waters. The only time that God becomes visible as a form is within the context of visible light, and the only way that visible light becomes real is within the context of a metaphysical dynamic that permits that light to exist, that permits that form to be seen. And so, in the Neoplatonic hierarchies of Michelangelo's mysticism, we find this ceiling like a great progression, very much akin to Giotto's Arena Chapel, beginning to lay out the ABC's of reality. And the fourth, the creation of Adam. And with this fourth, usually art historians or those who would lecture upon Michelangelo say this is the center, and they usually show God's finger coming very close to Adam's finger, the creation of Adam. But in fact the center of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is not the creation of Adam, but the creation of Eve. That is at the center, that is, at the fifth place and in the creation of Eve. Michelangelo hushes the symphonic drums and goes into a slow oboe rendition of God not floating in a cosmic eternity, but standing as a man, like being upon an earth, not creating by powerful fiat, but inviting forth by invitation Eve from man. And so the center of the Sistine Chapel is a mystery. The creation of woman, the mother of all things, the mother of all men. She is brought forth by a royal, dignified invitation to life that is at the center of the Sistine Chapel. And then the series continues. One has the fall of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from Paradise. Then one has the three final panels associated with Noah Noah's Sacrifice, then the deluge, and finally the drunkenness of Noah. But is the creation of Eve that is important. And in order to counterpoint this progressive major chord, nine fold unfolding, folding the Aeneid of the architecture of reality in order to give it a polarity, an electrostatic context within which it could be understood by the higher intelligence. He counterpointed on either side of these nine series, the ultimate forms of men and women, the ultimate forms of men were the prophets from the Old Testament, and the ultimate forms of women were the sibyls of antiquity. The feminine sibyls were the pagan Greek mystery religion, culmination of human power and manifestation, and the male manifestation was in the Old Testament Hebrew prophets. And so the prophets and the sibyls are counterpoised. And we'll see some of them, and many of them are presented as very spry, not imitations from life, but exuberances of Michelangelo's artistic vision. But they're presented as young men or young women. And I have two examples here. I have Daniel the prophet Daniel, shown as a very fine young man, quite able to be one of the three highest councilors in the Persian Empire, which he was. Daniel was not a slave. Daniel was one of the counselors to the Emperor of the Persian Empire. He was put into the lion's den as a trial to show his kingdom that he was trusting a Hebrew man with the keys of power to the kingdom. He often ruled the empire, and he was showing that his trust was well placed because Daniel would not break even in a lion's den. But the fact is that the young Daniel is transformed when it comes to the panel about the creation of Eve, because the prophet on the side of the creation of Eve is that last great hurricane. Voice of integrity in the Old Testament, Ezekiel is the Ezekiel who has the vision of the New Jerusalem is Ezekiel and the Old Testament, the Book of Ezekiel that rounds out the second great cycle in the Old Testament. There are two great cycles. The first is rounded out by job, and the second is rounded out by Ezekiel. And Michelangelo portrays Ezekiel for all time. One of those great images in world art. East or West? An old man of titanic inner strength. His huge neck and his face turned, and Ezekiel becomes the epitome of the old venerable oak of a man who is immovable in terms of the baits and jibes of the phenomenal world. He becomes the ultimate prophetic figure who inherits the authority of the patriarchs in the transcendent voice and vision which he then gives. If Moses gives the laws, Ezekiel gives the transcendent vision beyond the laws to their culmination. And just so the Sibyls, beautiful young women, will see the Delphic Sibyl in, Michelangelo has given her that bright, spry, almost cheerfulness, contradistinction to everything that was known of the Delphic oracle. She was not spry, she was not cheerful. But he shows her, with her beautiful eyes upraised, in a very light position. But when it comes to the other side of the panel of the creation of Eve across from Ezekiel, he goes to the feminine form of Ezekiel and presents us with an old, gnarled Sibyl, the Cumaean Sibyl, the Cumaean Sibyl, very, very influential in Virgil, very influential in Dante, and for Michelangelo, the epitome of the wise old woman of the world, who has nursed and mothered and loved and understands life from the feminine in a way that is unshakable. And so the creation of Eve is framed by these parents of the metaphysical world, these archetypal mother and father images. Ezekiel and the Cumaean Sibyl. While he was working on this whole series, he was all the time thinking of its culmination. And the culmination is not at the far end, but back at the beginning, under the earliest creation, the division of light from darkness. There is a portion that has the figure of Jonah. And then there's the wall, the back wall of the chapel coming down. And the back wall was to be the culmination of the series. And the way that one would get back to this back wall from the beginning was that below the ceiling were the ancestors of Christ, the lineage of the Savior in its progression back all the way to the beginning of the world and the end of the world, the Alpha and the Omega at the same place. And that wall was to be the great fresco of the Last Judgment. And while Michelangelo was working on this, an accident happened to him. Vasari gives us. The best trustworthy account, he writes. But to return to the story, Michelangelo had brought three fourths of the work to completion when Pope Paul went to see it, and Monsieur Biagio di Cecina, the master of ceremonies, a very punctilious man being in the chapel with the pontiff, was asked what he thought of the performance. To this he replied that it was a very improper thing to paint so many nude forms, all showing their nakedness and that shameless fashion, and so highly honored a place. Where were these nude forms? These nude forms were not in the frescoes. They were outside the frescoes into a sculptural reality, put at all the vortexes of all the angles in the Sistine Chapel, so that nude male figures dominated the architectural space that permeated down into the chapel space itself. Why? Because man must free himself from the magic charm of materiality, and just as a spiritual presentation of wholeness. For instance, say a Navajo rug always has a spirit trail. They call it one thread that goes off outside. You have to have a way out of this. How would the young know how to transcend this? How would the lesser talented know how to live with this? They would become trapped within the genius of special human beings. So we must always leave an opening for them to escape. For them to see that beautiful as this is tight as this cycle is, it is not real. It is only an appearance. It is only a presentation that one must go beyond it. And so these male nude forms sculpturally put in juxtaposition to this great painting, fresco, tapestry, are the way to allow us to come back and see we are naked like this at our essential, phenomenal reality. And that nakedness feeds not into a shame of the conception of the mind, but into the sacred space of the chapel wherein we are bringing ourselves, and thus that sacrifice space of prayer has a direct access to us in our primordiality in this phenomenal realm. And so the measurement is not life and death over here, but brought back together and that linchpin within the great cycle itself that was to present. This was the Last Judgment fresco. So he is working on this. It chanced, Vasari says, that at that time Michelangelo fell from no inconsiderable height from the scaffolding around this work, and he hurt his leg. Yet in the pain and anger that caused him, he would suffer no surgeon to approach his bed. Wherefore the Florentine physician Maestro Bocchi Aurantium, the friend of Michelangelo and a great admirer of his genius, who was a very eccentric person, taking compassion on his state, went one day to knock at the door of the house, obtaining no reply, either from the neighbors or himself. He strove to make his way in by a secret entrance, and from room to room at length arrived at where in the master lay. He found him in a desperate state. From that moment he would not leave his side, and never lost sight of the patient until he had effectively cured the injured leg. The malady overcome, he returned to his work, and in the great fresco of the Last Judgment, Michelangelo bringing all of the motifs, all of the elements that had been meaningful throughout his life together places a very angry Christ in judgment, and one sees this glow not as a beautiful Fra Angelico halo around the body of Christ, but as somewhat a smeared and blurred glow of a manifestation not come here in grace, but to come here and judgment. And next to him what appears to be the Virgin Mary, but looks very much like Mary Magdalene, her skirt transparent, showing the legs. And I think that is the key, that this is Magdalene, and not the Virgin Mary, who is there by his side, the male and female powers together, and just below the Christ. Saint Bartholomew, who had been martyred, beheaded in the second century AD, looks up at the angry Christ who is holding his hands in this way, and Saint Bartholomew is looking. Up with the expression. The Delphic Sibyl looks up and in one hand he holds a knife, an ancient knife, the kind of knife that was used in the circumcision sacrament. Do you remember that sacrament came in with Zipporah, the wife of Moses, who, when Moses had a moment of not believing that he was God's messenger, thought in his mind not to go to Pharaoh. And so does recounted in Exodus that the Spirit of God moved in to kill him. And Zipporah, seeing this, his wife, Moses wife, seeing this, ran to the crib and took the knife and cut the foreskin from their young son, and threw it bloody at the feet of the specter of the Lord coming in to kill her husband. And she vowed that on this sacrifice, as long as man shall live, shall God respect man as man, respects him, and carries out his work. And so that blood covenant of sacrifice is echoed in the Last Judgment by Michelangelo, by Saint Bartholomew holding up that knife, and with the other hand draped like some shaggy pelt from his hand, is the body of a man who has lost all his skeleton and all his flesh, and is just like a skin pelt. And we see the face of Michelangelo on that pelt. And when they opened it up on Halloween night of 1541, the population of Florence came in and their usual Roman chatter was hushed and stilled. And in the packed silence of the multitudes has carried on for almost 500 years. The feeling that man has said something here of a great mystery, and put himself in it, and extracted from himself that material skeleton that would have held him up in the phenomenal world, and thrown it away, and said, for all intents and purposes, I am not there. Whatever I may have thought, I am elsewhere. Well, he lived for 23 years after that, and I have to skip over everything except one thing. He had been lionized in his time to such an extent that he had even been asked by the Turkish sultan to build a bridge from Constantinople, across the straits, that he was an engineering master. And so before he died, they wanted to take advantage of this. And from 1557 on, Michelangelo doing like he had used Giotto's Arena Chapel to redo and make the Sistine Chapel. He used Brunelleschi's Duomo in Florence and redid Saint Peter's cupola in Rome and rebuilt it in his engineering genius built this enormous cupola, which houses the experience and the sacred ground that is entered into past the Pieta. And so Michelangelo, literally remaking the world at that time, single handedly proved to be the angel of art. And he is the author in many respects, of the High Renaissance. He is the author in many respects of the mentality that made the Reformation. He is the author in almost all respects of that age called the Baroque. And so single handedly spanned three great artistic eras and four great mediums painting, sculpture, poetry and architecture. In himself and in his letters. The two volume set published recently by Princeton University Press, Stanford University Press. We find a willingness on his part to constant confide to others the exactness of his feelings from day to day. And so we know more about Michelangelo than almost any figure of the time. We can follow him hour by hour, day by day, week by week, year by year, through almost 90 years, and from 1475 when he was born, to 1564, when he died, the world changes dramatically. Thomas a Kempis had just died a few years before he was born, and Shakespeare was born the same year that he died. So it's an enormous era that's far more than 90 years of time that has transpired, from The Imitation of Christ to a midsummer Night's Dream. It's a very long journey. When he died, his friend Tommaso Cavalieri closed his eyes and there was immediately a scramble for the body. They wanted it for Rome. Others wanted it for here and there. Very close friends of his packed the body in a packing crate and took it by Bullock to Florence, and they put it there in Santa Croce. Vasari designed the sepulchre, and it was placed right next to, in tandem with the cenotaph to Dante. So in Santa Croce, Dante and Michelangelo meet, and they come together like two great bookmarks, making the Renaissance before the one and after the other. The world was different, but in between the two. Florence. In particular, the human spirit had glimpsed something true about life and our capacities, and had expressed it to the best of their capacities. I have some slides. Most of them are on the Sistine Chapel. Just this one slide is a very early painting by Michelangelo. But we can turn out the lights. Well, we'll have these. This is called ultimately the entombment or the deposition. Here is Saint John on the left in the red. And here is Mary Magdalene on the right. And you can see how the dance length of the hands and the scarves, uh, leads along here, that the middle line is actually a sacred dance motif. There is a very good essay written in 1909 by Grace Mead, who was the secretary of this good lady whose painting is up here. He wrote a wonderful essay called The Sacred Dance of Jesus. This is the final play of that spiritual movement, and the stilted movement backwards of Mary Magdalene here is actually like reflecting a very high energy electromagnetic field that is bending her back and bending Saint John forward with his feet. He is moving a step and she is coming back a step. He is coming down and she is going up. And you see the ground in steps behind and up at the top, uncompleted. Here are two human forms just beginning to come out of a space left unpainted. That space was the rock in front of the tomb. In other words, the tomb of Christ was not sealed by a rock, not by something phenomenal, but by a mystery that was a space to man, a not to man, and that it is moved aside by mysterious figures who are able because they are like the non materiality of that space, to move that threshold aside and allow for the passage of the mystery. What is the mystery? It is the dance sacred of the meaning of transcendence along the steps of the hierarchy, while all the rest of the slides are of the Sistine Chapel. So let's see here. This is a whole interior. And. Here's a view from the floor looking above. These slides, incidentally, are all from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and you could go and find them yourself. You can check them out. They rent you 50 slides for $2 per week. This is the beginning on the ceiling. The separation of light from darkness. Notice the molding hands. Notice the shape and form. The feminine and masculine together. Notice the face uplifted. There was a patch of paint missing from the chin. They had, disappearing upwards into a mystery of light, the swirl of the fabric accentuated by the movement of the knee and the movement of the arms. This is creation in the world which. The creation of the sun and the moon. The pointing. The arms wide spread into a very broad angle, probably about 125 130 degrees. The fingers pointed out almost like a calipers. William Blake later would have the calipers. The sun and the moon. The creator. God moves not in a vacuum, but in a mystery swirl wherein the little angelic figures that were the putty of Donatello become the co-workers of the creator. The creation of man. And there's the swirl of the putty, even more intense, reaching out towards that birthing context. Reclining figure, the fingers almost touching. Detail the creator figure creating through low power. In its most intense dynamic. Here are the creation of the totally different presentation she has been invited to come forth. She's not created by fiat, but brought forth by invitation. And the expulsion. The temptation and the expulsion. Look at the serpent wound around the tree. Here's the prophet Daniel. Spry man in his 30s, full of integrity. Keeping the ledgers. Being helped by the divine powers. As a little putti holding his book. Here's the old prophet Ezekiel. I'm sure you've seen this many times. Perhaps did not recognize it. And you see Ezekiel, with his great courage and his massiveness, turning to hold down the scroll. You notice, whereas Daniel had a book in front of him. Ezekiel has the book is a scroll held down. Daniel is still young and needs to consult the books. Ezekiel is old. He has read them all. And he is now explaining the New Jerusalem. Here's the Delphic Sibyl. Shiny, bright and her femininity. Able to divulge the inner secrets of the world. But she, like Daniel, grows up. And becomes the Cumaean Sibyl. And so there's Ezekiel and the combined seven who frame the creation of Eve by invitation. And here she is. The feminine wisdom of the world. Capable. Astonished. Here the brazen serpent. Almost a replay. We've come now off the central ceiling, along to one of the spandrels on the sides of the corner. This is one of the spandrels that frames the approach to the Last Judgment. This is not a very good slide, but it's the only one I could get in time. This has the color washed up. On the bottom of the Last Judgment is this chorus of angels with their long trumpets heftily mightily blowing the call to a rising. They are in color. Unfortunately, this slide is washed out to a sepia rosette. The dam. Sir Kenneth Clark and his film series civilisation A Personal View. Remarks that this heralds, prophetically, the Titanic collision happening that were to overtake Europe soon after this was finished. Here one catches the mystery of form. Michelangelo's incredible rendering, the power of the figures, but the mystery of the figures occurring in some mystic pictorial space that moves back labyrinthine li into planes that are hardly imaginable to the mundane mind. And here, the angry, judgmental Christ. And the figure always said to be the Virgin Mary. I'd rather I would think, Mary Magdalene next to him, near him, his diaphanous halo members coming out of the raised right hand, wraps over his body to hers and becomes diaphanous on her legs, an eternal pair. And down below, below what would be his left foot. I guess that's him. Below what would be his left foot as Saint Bartholomew, holding the pelt of Michelangelo. And as if they say it again, it is as if the hand pointing down. This is the eye looking down past this hand to the knife. This is the hand held not by this figure, but by this figure. Here. This is Saint Bartholomew. Here is his eyes looking up, and with this shoulder and the other hand, the pelt of Michelangelo is hanging down. And below Michelangelo's pelt is the scene of the damn. Well, that's about all we can do for one two hour stint. The course continues on Thursday nights. There is in the there is in the program. END OF RECORDING