 Good morning. We're going to talk about one of the most interesting characters that we're going to encounter in the history of architecture, history of art, history of the world today, and that is Michelangelo, Michelangelo Buonorotti, the great Florentine. He's one person I'm sure you have all heard about. We mentioned him briefly the other time when we were talking about work going on under the patronage of Julius II at the Vatican. We had in one part of the Vatican complex, Vermont, building his magnificent project of St. Peter's in another part of the complex. We had Raphael painting a series of lunettes. Lunette means half moon-shaped. So the School of Athens is a lunette. And Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel just next door. And in the School of Athens, we saw that Raphael did two things to honor this great moment of cultural flourishing in the Renaissance. One, he incorporated contemporary historical characters in among the great poets and philosophers and literary figures of Athens. So we have Leonardo. We have Michelangelo. We have Brimante. We have Raphael. And he also took the space of St. Peter's as it was under construction and used that as the setting for this amazing monument to culture. Great painting. I just want to show you Leonardo. This is Leonardo as Socrates in School of Athens. And this is a sketch considered to be a self-portrait of Leonardo. And this is the old 50,000, the old money with Leonardo on the money. I like the old money. It was so nice before they got those nasty little euros in. Plus you had like hundreds of thousands of them to buy a loaf of bread. So you felt like you were loaded. And you also have right here Michelangelo. And Michelangelo also got on the money. Michelangelo was on the 10,000 liter note. Also quite a lot of money. So let's look at Michelangelo and let's introduce a term to talk about exactly what's going on when we get to Michelangelo. The term mannerism is often used to describe what he's doing. And you would have to say, well, what does that mean? What is a mannerism? And it's maybe a word that you use in everyday conversation. Like if somebody comes in and says, oh, darling, you've got to try some of the, you know, diet coke. It's so super. You'd say, just talk to me like a normal person, you know, stop having so many mannerisms. And that's kind of what mannerism is in art and architecture. It takes conventions of ordinary art, and it pushes them to an extreme. So much so that the subject matter almost becomes about the conventions of the medium, rather than the content. We'll go through a little history of what painting looks like, and then we'll come back to this painting by Michelangelo, the Doni Tondo, which I think exemplifies a lot of the principles of mannerism. Look at it for a moment and just think if it looks normal, if it looks crazy to you. And then I'll prove to you that it looks crazy. In the world of normal, we have Pierre de la Francesca's Federico da Monte Feltro and dead wife Battista Sforza. And I say these are normal because these are really driven by convention. The convention, even the convention of representing someone in profile is something that comes down from Roman coins. And that's lucky for Federico because, as we mentioned before, he was a warrior. He was a condottiere and lost an eye and a chunk of his nose in battle. But we have a very, let's say, decorous presentation of the figure and an attempt to represent space. So much so that the figure almost becomes a plane in establishing foreground rather than a fully plastic figure in the round. The job of Federico and the job of Battista Sforza is to convey a certain kind of geometric clarity about what their lineaments are and to set up a ground plane, which is foreground. When we get to somebody like Leonardo Bavinci, we see a different ambition going on. Flat as a pancake, profile, pressed against the picture plane. But when we see the Mona Lisa, there's a posture that we recognize from classical sculpture going on here. And that's contra posto. That's where the shoulders are going in one direction. The head is going in another direction. There's this torsion in the body that begins to activate the space. So in Mona Lisa, Leonardo is doing this and you see that it's something he's very interested in because when he paints girl with an ermine, it almost becomes the theme of his painting. This is so great. Girl with an ermine, lovely girl, lovely ermine. But look at how the ermine twists. Maybe this is just what ermines do. Are any of you weasel owners? Show of hands for everybody who has a weasel? People keep them as pets. I don't know why. But a fancy word for weasel is ermine. And this girl has a weasel. And there's something about this little snake-like rodent that twists its body and assumes a kind of contra posto stance. And girl with an ermine is more or less imitating the stance of her little pet. So shoulders radically in one direction, head radically in the other direction, hips in another direction, twisty twisty turny. And you would think nothing could be more complex in terms of how a figure is positioned in space than girl with an ermine by Leonardo. And then you come to the Doni Tondo by Michelangelo. Doni, that's the name of the family that paid for this. They're the patrons. And Tondo is just the name of a round painting. So this is that a round painting paid for by the Doni, hence the Doni Tondo. And the subject of the Doni Tondo is more complex than girl with an ermine. Girl with an ermine has as its subject girl with an ermine. That's not complex. What exactly is the subject of the Doni Tondo? And on one level you might say it's a conventional subject. It's a holy family. We've seen holy families before. We have the Virgin, we have the child, and we have Joseph. And that seems fine. But what exactly are they doing? I mean, what is happening? You recognize in the posture of the Madonna, something akin to the girl with the ermine on steroids. Look, legs pointing in this direction, arms pointing in this direction. She has like a corkscrew of a woman. And she's not simply posing to activate space. But this is how she holds her baby. Does anybody here have children? Could you try this at home with your child? How old is your child? 21. Yeah, you could do that. So get your knees going in one direction. Get your arms pointed in another direction. Hold the baby up. Give me a photo and I'll give you five points, okay? And I'll show it in lectures from now on. Because my hunch is you're going to have a harder time doing it than she does. What's going on here? And in fact, you might even say, where is Joseph? What is happening? And what's the subject? So in part, it looks like Michelangelo is inspired by the tondo, the idea of this round frame to begin to create a composition that doesn't do what these Renaissance compositions do. Nail the center, subdivide it, get diagonals going through it, or make a triangle. But rather somehow activate spatially the idea of a circle with this overturning and upheaval. So if we're at all comfortable with the Virgin hoisting the baby up to Joseph, you have to ask other questions about this. And that is, why are there so many naked people near the Holy Family? This is not usual, by the way. I don't know how schooled you are in Christian iconology, but usually the Holy Family stays far away from naked people. So what could this mean? What is Michelangelo trying to represent? Why are the naked people so tiny? And who is this little guy creeping on the Holy Family? Any takes on that? Yeah. Are they meant to represent something angelic, like the naked angel club? Sorry. Well, that's an idea. And I think that that's a that's a nice idea, because when we talk about Neoplatonic thought, we say the human body is beautiful. The human body is reflective of divine order. And to gaze on the human body, you're gazing on something perfect. I would say that's one possible reading. Did you have another one? Yeah, that is not an angelic little baby over there. He's coming out of the ground. He's got something over his shoulder. Luckily, I always show you images with so many pixels that there's no possible way you can know what it is. I mean, it might be Cupid. It might be a little arrow over his shoulder. And Cupid might be talking about, I don't know, love in a pagan sense. It might be John the Baptist, cousin of the Christ, who would have been maybe this age when Jesus was this age, and who is typically represented by wearing wild animal skins to represent the time that he spent in the wilderness. So it's an ambiguous figure. It's really an ambiguous figure. And it kind of walks in to the triangles or the Xs anyhow that are going on in here. Any other takes about the naked angel club? Yes? Are they mutants? Did you say mutant? Muses. I like the Holy Family and the mutants better. I think that's a good theme. Are they muses? Well, I think you're onto something. I think Jesus, historically, comes very, well, overlaps the time of pagan antiquity. And so we're looking at something that seems to represent the culture of pagan antiquity, the pre-Christian Roman civilization, of all of these heroic, classical nudes in their landscape. And here we see something else. So this act of overturning, this act of heaving up Jesus, elevating Jesus, is a kind of representation of overturning the old order and instituting a new order. But it's a bizarre painting. It's a bizarre painting because of the things that it puts together. Really complex, iconological program. Look, what's this about? Oh, I know, Federico da Monte Feltro. What's this about? Boy, it's hard to know. And you can even say there are things about the space of the painting that are as confusing as the subject of the painting. Now, radical foregrounds slam these people against the foreground and whoosh, whoosh these people back in such a way that the actual scales of the people are ambiguous. And if you think about the representation, say, in medieval sculpture, like the carving of a door panel, you'd have a large Christ and tiny little last judgment people waiting to be either put to heaven, purgatory, or hell. And it almost looks like that kind of representation of different scales are going on here too. But look at what a little classical nude we have here. And you know, it's really hard to say whether this figure is a kind of Bacchus or a kind of Cupid or a kind of Christ. Or is this figure all three of those things at the same time? And that's mannerism. Manorism is making dense the iconological program so that you can barely figure out what's going on so that one meaning begins to support and simultaneously cancel out another meaning and that it's just a loaded mannerism also has to do with this complex spatial construction. Frequently in manner of stuff you see this game of, let's say, the viscosity of the picture plane. Stuff smushes to the front, stuff whooshes to the back, and you get very strange scale readings that happen in there. Just to show you again how odd the Donetondo is, I'm just showing you other people have been able to represent a similar subject matter in a much, much more contained way. This is Giotto in 1310, one of the late Gothic foundational figures for the early Renaissance. And here we have the Madonna and the Christ in a throne in a landscape that is, let's say, denatured out of this world. Not trying to represent this world gold leaf background. By the time we get to the Botticelli, a couple of differences are going on. One, the niche that the Virgin is in looks like architecture. It doesn't look like the flat space of heaven. It looks like architecture. And there is a kind of psychological complexity going on between a baby that looks like a baby and the Virgin that looks like a woman who lives in this world. And here we have an early Michelangelo, really done when he was maybe about 15 years old. And compare this with stuff that you did when you were 15 years old, just to make you realize that, yeah, you're as good as Michelangelo. You both did good things when you were 15, the Madonna of the Stairs. Or again, even here, even at this early moment in Michelangelo's career, he's doing strange things. He's taking a license. He's doing things that you have not seen before. Look at the posture of the baby. There is this twisty baby going on. There is also this Hercules baby going on. And the Botticelli baby, I think, is a pretty convincing, pretty naturalistic baby. But this baby is more about representing this kind of muscle torso that a little Hercules would have. So Michelangelo is playing strange games here, too. But by the time he gets to the Doni Tondo, he's really let loose. And you can see that again and again when you look at Michelangelo's take on conventional subject matter. David was the emblematic figure of Florence. Florence self-identified with David, David and Goliath, the story. And here is Donatello with his sword, with his foot on the head of Goliath. This is one of the great Quattrocento artists. And the Donatello gets it right, let's say. He gets the Contrapasto. He gets the Classical Nude. He gets the Easter Bonnet. He gets everything that you associate with David. Let's say this is a helmet, right. And there's a balanced repose to this. This is also a classical moment to represent. It is a moment after the action, after the completion of the action where the full cycle of the anticipation and the completion of the event have been realized. Here we have Michelangelo's David. And I'm sure you know this one, too. He's got his sling over his shoulder. He's about to act. He's contemplating the act. So there's the tension of incompleteness going on in Michelangelo's David. And this idea of moving away from repose and balance toward tension and anxiety seem to be themes that are played out in mannerism, both in art and in architecture. A couple of things to say about the David is that it's an astonishing work for a lot of reasons. It was carved in a block of marble that was expensive to quarry. This kind of, I think, 18-foot tall block of marble that had been brought to Florence. It was a very narrow proportion for such a tall block of marble. And another sculptor hacked at it and said, whoa, there's nothing that can be done with this. The proportions of this block of marble are so strange that there's nothing to be done with it. You know, chop it up, make fascia for buildings. And Michelangelo was given the task. And Michelangelo found a way to position this figure in this narrow, narrow piece of marble. And even in this figure there are all these distortions going on, like giant head, giant hands. There's classical repose to the torso, but the veins are popping out of his hands as the blood is pulsing in anticipation of the act. He's about to complete. Another famous Michelangelo, also really early in the career of Michelangelo, is this one, which you probably know, the Vatican Pietà. Pietà means the lamentation of the Virgin over the dead Christ. And so here we have the Virgin holding her child. And it's a beautiful work of sculpture, even from a technical point of view, polished marble, incredibly refined, crisp sense of gravity, pulling the drapery down, and amazing kind of psychological complexity in the engagement between the Virgin and the dead Christ. But something is really odd about this sculpture also. Does anybody see anything odd going on? Yes? You're exactly right. She said she thinks that the size of the Christ's body is really off compared to the Virgin. We could do a demonstration in class of having one of the young women in the class take a large 33-year-old man and swirl him out on her lap. I think you'd probably find something more like this, right? And this is Perugino's Pietà. It's a painting. And look, we have basically three or four people supporting the length of the Christ. What's going on? Is it that Michelangelo just got mixed up? Was he unable to get the size right? Was he so interested in making this perfect pyramid that he decided he would sacrifice the size? Or again, was he trying to collapse multiple meanings on the subject? And you think, well, what could the multiple meanings be? And you go back to something that we've seen before. Let's say, let's look at this one, like enthroned Madonna and child. This is a common representation of the Virgin and her child, the child on the lap, the Virgin seated, a triangular composition. We get it in Giotto. We get it in Botticelli. We don't quite get it in Michelangelo because he's nuts. But we get it in the typical topos of how this is composed. And if you look at the Pietà, it is more the standard position of Virgin and child. So what is being represented here is not simply one moment in the life of Christ or the life of the Virgin, but this whole arc of birth and death. And it's amazing. Also, if you look at the face of the Virgin, you'll see that she looks really young. There's no way that this is the mother of an adult child. And part of that also has to do with the idea that she is being represented in two modes. She's being represented as the grieving mother of the dead child and the Virgin mother of the baby. Oh, Michelangelo, you're so clever. And the only way he can pull this stuff off is by distorting stuff like crazy. There's no way that keeping the sizes normal will allow him to have this kind of symbolic and emotive power. Michelangelo does not play by the rules. And he's a really interesting figure because of that. Because everything we've been looking at so far has been people trying to recover the rules from antiquity, trying to figure out the formula, and trying to apply the rules. And suddenly we have somebody like Michelangelo who realizes that by breaking the rules, you can actually make more meaning happen and get more emotional power out of it. This is the Pietà. This is the idea of grieving the dead Christ. This is a theme that Michelangelo came back to again and again in his work. How about this one and this one? Late Pietà. This is kind of amazing. This is almost the opposite in terms of its expression about scale that we had in the Vatican Pietà, where the Christ is overwhelmingly large and overwhelmingly heavy. The legs of the Christ are not liberated from the stone as though all of the earth is pulling him down. And these figures are desperately trying to hold him up. And the same sort of thing is going on here too. In these classical paintings we would see things like a center line creating order. And here we have as our center line the heavy arm of the dead Christ pulling things down. And look at the scale of these figures. And who does this look like, for example? And the answer is it's a self-portrait of Michelangelo. He includes himself in the representation as Joseph of Armitia. I've included that 10,000 Lira note here to prove who it is. So what Michelangelo is beginning to discover here in these later works of sculpture is that materiality matters. There's something about the Vatican Pietà that is all about mastery of the craft. It's all about making marble shine like alabaster or like skin. And as he moves forward he realizes that there is something also incredibly powerful about the relationship of the figure to the block of stone that it came from. It's almost analogous to the creation of Adam and Eve from the mud of the earth. And so he begins to not simply play with engaged figures but play with deliberate rustication of these figures. Like look at this. You know, hacking it up, denaturing the face. And here's another Pietà. This is one that Michelangelo kept in his studio for decades and would constantly come back to and work at again and again. And Michelangelo lived to be almost 90. He lived to be about I'd say 89, which is a hugely long lifetime for that period. The sensibility that he begins to reprise as he keeps coming back to the Rondonini Pietà is one that seems almost gothic, right? That there's something about denying the weight of these figures. There's something about eroding the physical beauty of these figures that is more powerful or as powerful as the extreme beauty that he saw in things like the David and the Vatican Pietà. Really amazing looking stuff. One might say part of Michelangelo's taste for the figure that's not fully liberated from the stone could have to do with the difficult history he had with Pope Julius and the Julius tomb. We mentioned last time that Pope Julius commissioned Michelangelo to do this colossal tomb with, you know, over 30 figures, 30 sculptural figures. Michelangelo quarried the stone and he was in the midst of working on this stuff and the commission stopped. So you had a lot of figures like say this one, Atlas, who is trapped in the marble. And Atlas, the mythological figure, has as his burden holding up the earth. And so the idea that there is this perfect, contrapostal, classical torso caught in the earth, holding up the earth, head not quite liberated, becoming the earth is pretty, pretty powerful. Or here we have these various slaves like bearded slave or rebellious slave, some of which are still caught in the marble in a provocative way. Let's look at this sensibility that Michelangelo has shown us and see how it applies to architecture. This interest in playing with scale, this interest in disrupting syntax or the usual way that things are combined, this interest in material. Michelangelo of Florentine began his career in Florence. He began his career as a sculptor in Florence and in a very, very particular way. I think I might have mentioned this before that after the Black Death there was only one sculpture master left in Florence, this old guy called Bertoldo. And the Medici, Lorenzo de Medici, wanted to keep these traditions going or wanted to advance these traditions in a renaissance sense toward recovering what was classical. He asked the masters of the sculpture studios and the painting studios to send their best students to live in the house with the Medici and to be present at these discussions with the Platonic Academy. Michelangelo trained as a sculpture but also had this very classical education going on. And so a lot of his early commissions are Medici commissions. We see here an aerial view of the Church of San Lorenzo, the Brunelleschi Church that we looked at earlier. You can see the transept and the nave and the crossing. And this is a big lumpy thing from later on. But there are a couple of Michelangelo projects that are present here. One is this thing, which is a library, the Laurentian library called Laurentian because it's at San Lorenzo. And here on the opposite side, tucked in the corner, the new sacristy. We looked at Brunelleschi's old sacristy and matching that you have the new sacristy. Here's a plan to show you where everything is. Brunelleschi's Church, old sacristy, Brunelleschi, new sacristy, Michelangelo, and the Laurentian library. Great. Here's the plan of the Laurentian library. And it's on the upper level of the cloister attached to the side of San Lorenzo. So that seems like not the most glamorous place. You walk up a flight of stairs, you find a little door and in you pop. And what do you pop into? I mean what you might notice immediately is there's something strange going on in terms of the scale of those stairs for the scale of the vestibule. They completely fill it up. And you might even say there's something strange about the height of the vestibule. This is a strangely crowded space in plan and expansive space in section. So you're simultaneously squashed or pushed to the margin by this giant stair and at the same time you feel the release into the vertical. Also you're entering in this direction. You're entering from the side. And that's really quite odd also given how frontal this is. And there are all kinds of little wobbles here that begin to respond to the notion that people might be coming in from the side. But they are deflected. Here's an aerial view of what that stair looks like. Here's the vestibule and here's the stair. Really fabulous. And things that are fabulous about it is that it seems to have this kind of wonderful rhythm of these landings that are allowing you to kind of pace yourself as you move through the space. But it also seems to have the property of simultaneously allowing you to move forward and repelling you as these rounded stairs seem to push you out and move you out of the space and amplifying this sense of discomfort or crowdedness. The building gets even odder if you look at the way the walls of the vestibule are articulated. Of course this is a tiny little baby size slide but so what? You guys are good. You can't really see anything there but maybe you can see them up here. Which is to say Michelangelo is playing a game with a wall and the column. And this is a game that's been basically begging to be played for a while. As we've seen that the Greeks liked their traviation pure. They understood that the column is structural. By the time you get to the Romans you get this ambiguity about what is the structure and what is the ornament. You get walls with pilasters walls with engaged columns what's doing the work and what's not doing the work. And so what Michelangelo does at the Laurentian library is he begins to position the column in the wall in a really kind of critical way. He carves niches in the wall and sticks columns in the niches and then supports the niches with brackets. Wall and column are simultaneously vying for dominance here and and it's not clear who's winning. This technique that Michelangelo is using here in articulating the wall of the Laurentian library also allows him to do the smartest thing ever when you hit the corner. And what that is is he takes advantage of the fact that he's got this double system in play anyhow. So there's a void built into the system and when it hits the corner you get a column and a column and then you get something that seems like an edge. So everything works out really well because he's dealing with a negative as well as the positive in terms of articulating this. A couple of other odd things or things worth mentioning are the materiality or the color palette that Michelangelo is using. Have we ever seen this color palette of cream colored stucco and gray pietra serena before? Yes. Yeah absolutely in Brunelleschi's church. So right next door in San Lorenzo this is the color palette that Brunelleschi uses. So by using this choice of material he's really making a direct confrontation with Brunelleschi. He's taking on Brunelleschi at his own terms and remember how we laughed and laughed when Brunelleschi tried to make a corner and now Michelangelo is doing it in this incredibly robust gutsy Roman way. We mentioned that there was this kind of funny sense of compression in plan and expansion in section and that's another thing that Michelangelo does with his wall. He begins to play with the idea that things are translating to the vertical things are floating up things are flying up so that the pediments seem to be detached from the supports and in fact the supports seem to get incredibly thin like gum like you stretch it and it gets thin as things are detaching or even these blind windows and by blind window I mean it looks like a window but it's not a window it's a niche. Have a funny inframement and that is the sides are flying up so there's this whooshing, wishing, wishing upward in the space of the Laurentian library and at the same time this radical pushing outward in plan. Really great all about the tension all about the putting into play forces that refuse to be reconciled and allowing people to experience that not necessarily rationally like you would experience a Renaissance building. You go next door to San Lorenzo you count the modules and you say got it. You come in here and you don't quite know what's going on and it's even more disturbing because it's so Brunelleschi and in its language that you think you should be able to understand what's happening and you just can't. Then there's also that tension between the verticality of this space and then the extreme horizontality of this space which is the space of the library. Another kind of radical juxtaposition is put into place between the vertical and the horizontal. These little brackets that become substitutes for the columns and then begin to suggest well it's all about the wall except the place that had been wall when it gets down low seems to become a kind of peer and so the structural reading shifts as you move from level to level. This is the tube of space that you get for the library. This is really well worth visiting for a number of reasons. One greatest thing ever and two there are these beautiful illuminated manuscripts done by the monks of the San Lorenzo community that are frequently on display on these desks so you're not simply admiring the architecture but you're also having a chance to admire all of this stuff. And as a point of comparison I have Brunelleschi in San Lorenzo on the left and Michelangelo at the Laurentian library on the right. You see the same palette of materials and you see the extreme decorous flatness and thinness of the Brunelleschi in comparison with the incredible plasticity of the Michelangelo that the wall is all about the space of the wall and not about the edge of the wall quite the opposite of what Brunelleschi is doing. The techniques of Brunelleschi and Michelangelo come into even more close relationship if you look at the new sacristy versus the old sacristy because here they are new sacristy and old sacristy they are located really in matchy matchy places along the transept of the San Lorenzo church they're exactly the same size so it offers Michelangelo an opportunity not simply to play with the language of Brunelleschi but to play with the spatial challenge and the program of Brunelleschi. So he does don't worry he matches everything he needs to do this is a section and a view and a plan of the Brunelleschi sacristy and I think you remember this we observed that we had pendentives positioning this round dome on a square plan and that there were these medallions that ornamented things kind of nice ribbed window and we also thought boy that's kind of flat I mean there's a kind of thinness about the articulation of these edges and this moment of struggle as Brunelleschi tries to figure out what to do in the corners. Here we have left Michelangelo and right Brunelleschi and one thing that you can see immediately if you look at these two plans is the carving of the wall that the Brunelleschi plan is wall wall wall wall wall wall and if you look at the Michelangelo level of the wall it's hard press to say what the level of the wall is because it has to do with this layering of columns on top of it and niches carved into it so that the rhythm is much more syncopated and developed spatially instead of just through the articulation of bays mapped out in flat space. There's lots of quotation going on because Michelangelo loves playing these complex games we saw how he enjoyed in the Donitondo making his statement about what what the holy family meant more powerful by juxtaposing it to say pagan antiquity and the same kind of thing is going on here he's getting a lot of his meanings across by juxtaposing it to the Brunelleschi church here's the Brunelleschi and here's the Michelangelo and one thing you can see immediately is the dome right this is coffering this is more Roman this is more pantheonic and this is that typical Brunelleschi insensibility that is fabulous but not so Roman not so plastic not so carved and similarly we have ideas about the thickness of the wall that we saw going on in the Laurentian library also going on here with a kind of interesting solution to the corner and this interesting translation to the vertical inside the new sacristy there are works by Michelangelo I'm sure you know these everybody knows these these are the sculptures of night and day dawn and dusk and portraits of two Medici Lorenzo and Giuliano the Medici they're not the famous Lorenzo and Giuliano the Medici they're different ones because they kept reusing the names but so what they don't look like them anyhow if you look at this sculpture group here we have a sarcophagus and a sarcophagus is a roman stone tomb but it's developed in a way that seems quite different than the boxy boxy evenness of a real roman sarcophagus and instead you have these opposing figures night and day conjoined here on this kind of pediment thing but they're not relating to each other their backs are turned to each other and even the thing that's kind of a pediment isn't a pediment it's broken becomes two scrolls sliding them away so there is this kind of impossible union being suggested there is this tension of incompletion being promoted here with the sculpture of the fake Giuliano up above here's a detail of the corner where he's even wrapping it in a Brunelleschi in way but doing so against the layers of the carved and expanded niches of the window inframed ones began by talking about the patronage of Julius the second and Michelangelo's project at the Sistine Chapel this is the commission from hell really imagine this you have to build a scaffold and you have to lie on your back painting something giant so Michelangelo felt that this was a bad thing to do not simply because of the physical discomfort but also because of the way the different arts were considered you know one reason theory was being so eagerly embraced by architects in the Renaissance is that they wanted to be taken seriously as scholars you have the mechanical arts you have the liberal arts you have the mathematical arts painting sculpture even stone cutting architecture at least in Gothic times were considered to be mechanical you're just making stuff you're working with your hands you're not thinking but if you begin to take all this mathematical theory and apply it to architecture apply it to art then you can begin to consider yourself a practitioner of the mathematical arts and this is something that Michelangelo and many of the Renaissance artists were striving to do they were striving to improve the condition of of the architect and the status of the architect so to be told no you have to paint made Michelangelo crazy he gets the Sistine Chapel and this is the Sistine Chapel full of Michelangelo stuff and Pope Julia says I'm going to get Bramante to build you some scaffolding scaffolding because he's an architect he could do it and Michelangelo says I can do it I know how and Pope Julia says he's the architect you're here to paint let let Bramante do it so Bramante builds scaffolding it takes Bramante and a team of like I don't know let's say two dozen people three months to build the scaffolding and then Michelangelo comes in and says Julius they've hung the scaffolding from the ceiling how am I going to paint the ceiling if all the connections are to the ceiling and Julius says oh so Michelangelo of course is not one to pay attention to what Julius wants he and his team of three guys dismantle the scaffolding and rebuild it using like what 25 percent of the material over the weekend and what makes Julius really good and what Michelangelo was able to do was not simply fill the whole thing up but have side supports so that the scaffolding could constantly be slid along the length of this building as they as they worked and the whole ceiling was free if you look at this thing there's a technique of fresco painting going on here which I'll say it in Italian what the heck quadro riportato it means that canvas is carried up to the ceiling so you have these various panels it's not a continuous space that's being represented but a series of scenes a series of scenes like famous ones the creation or Adam and Eve lots of different biblical scenes and over time Michelangelo's technique became more and more and more amazing the frescoes were cleaned the ceiling was cleaned maybe about 25 years ago and I know people that got up on the scaffolding to look at the work that the restores were doing as they cleaned all this grime years and years of grime smoke off the ceiling because the Sistine Chapel is the place where the popes are elected you bring all the cardinals into the Sistine Chapel you lock them in there until they can choose a pope and so they eventually choose a pope or they just become really miserable but during that period of time for hundreds of years lamps are burning oil gets on the ceiling so when they cleaned the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel people were close enough to this surface to understand how Michelangelo was working when they looked at early ones they discovered that it was technically done in a way that was more or less conventional which is to say you take a piece of wet plaster no bigger than three by three feet that's all you could do in a day let's say giornata a day's work you pounce the image you take a cartoon a big piece of paper you put pinpricks over your drawing you stick it up there you put graphite there and then you know where to draw and then you put the thing up there you ensize it you put it up you do your painting this is taking too long and apparently by the end of Michelangelo's work here he was doing chunks of wall that were like 15 by 20 feet in a single day and he wasn't using drawings he was just winging it yet he knew what he was doing and think about that that is so hard to imagine because what you see three inches away from you and what you see from the bottom of the Sistine Chapel looks so different that you can't even imagine somebody having the spatial imagination to understand when they're three inches away from this surface what it's supposed to look like but Michelangelo he is fabulous Michelangelo is said to have sculpted like typing that you start at the top and then you finish it which is really an unusual way to do it if you've ever taken an art class they've probably told you you know work in the round so that you develop the whole object in an even way and you understand how this whole thing hangs together but Michelangelo's plastic imagination was so strong that he didn't need to do that which is why he had these really provocative incomplete figures where one part was highly refined and another part was less confined but you look at famous scenes like this like like the creation of Adam you know even here there are things like these mannerist moments of the incredible energy of God and the incredible lecissitude of Adam I'm barely alive and this gap between the fingers like the gap between dawn and dusk in the Medici tombs about to about to take action about to have something amazing happen and this is creation of the moon and the sun and this represents one of the later moments in the conception of what the stuff on the ceiling was and as he moved forward things became less and less planar and more and more exaggerated and crazy there are a few sketches that remain showing us how Michelangelo thought about these things this is a Libyan symbol the symbols are in these little triangular panels over here at the edges Michelangelo would sketch from life but he would sketch men because that's the kind of model you could get and so he would sketch men and then he would slap breasts on them here right you have a male torso and then these little cylinders added magnificent bad plastic surgery a bit later on the far wall of the Sistine Chapel Michelangelo had an additional commission and that was the last judgment and the last judgment in many ways is the same image that you saw in Gothic cathedrals where you have the judgment happening in the middle and these rows of people the damned purgatory the saved and of interest is this figure which is a self-portrait of Michelangelo as flayed skin this is how some martyrs were were killed Saint Bartholomew in particular was killed by having his skin removed from him while he was alive and so Michelangelo represents himself as the flayed carcass of Saint Bartholomew and he presents himself again and again in these states of anguish and states of grief because he had a tormented and complex life he couldn't find enough hours in the day to do all the work that he had to do it is said by his biographer this man called Condivi who sort of knew him that he would work all night long sometime and I'm sure you do that but I'm sure you have electricity so how do you work all night long if you don't have electricity and Michelangelo who is said to be a smart guy had this solution that I don't think is smart he would make a paper hat and fill it with candles and if you do that it seems like you can work all night long for a while and then something wakes you up and you make a new hat and off you go again he also he also apparently had really incredibly bad hygiene and was incredibly stingy he had to support his entire family everybody was a freeloader he himself was incredibly frugal and his nephews lived like kings in Florence or at least spent his money as fast as they could so he would sleep in a bed with three assistants because why would you want to have more than one bed for your whole workshop of people you wouldn't it would just be too expensive and he also is said to take one bath a year and when he would take his one bath a year he would remove his dog's skin pants and when he removed and oh pants that's an interesting word why is pants plural do you know that the answer is that you have a pant on each leg and you tie them together with your codpiece and so you would remove each pant well you don't do that I hope but that's what they would do in the olden days and the codpiece is the part in the middle so when Michelangelo would remove his dog's skin pants layers of skin would come off it was really quite the event let's examine some of the underlying historical and cultural reasons that there was such a shift and I think one answer is Michelangelo was a genius he was going to do ingenious stuff no matter what but Michelangelo was not the only practitioner of this manner of sensibility it really begins to transform Cinquecento art in and around let's say 1527 and you might say well what happened in 1527 and the answer is Rome was sacked the emperor Charles the fifth who was the holy Roman emperor up in Germany comes marching into Italy comes marching into Italy and he's trying to fight against this alliance of France the papacy and some other they finally realized that Charles the fifth doesn't have any money to pay the troops and so the troops mutiny and decide they're going to go after the richest town they can get and the richest town they can get is Rome the commander of the armies is killed and at that point there's nobody leading the troops they're in Rome and they just pillage for like about three days they burn the city and they steal stuff and about 10,000 people died the pope was guarded and the pope by this point is clements he's a Medici the pope is guarded by his swiss guards and his swiss guards fight something like 75 of them get killed by the by the looters but they get the pope off to Hadrian's tomb which is off by the river this is the place that if you read some of these damn brown novels stuff happens there i don't quite i don't quite know what the mausoleum of Hadrian so the pope manages to hole up in this area eventually reinforcements come and dispel the looters but but at that point really the renaissance ends you know Rome is in ashes so many people are dead and the confidence that reason and logic and this great civilization had in itself was really undermined this is an image of Charles the fifth an allegorical image of him with all of the people he defeated and he defeated quite a lot of people he was quite the effective warrior like Suleiman the Magnificent Pope Clement France is the first of France and then a whole bunch of other people the population of Rome dropped from 55,000 before the sack to a meager 10,000 afterwards it's also possible to say that one reason that Rome got sacked by these Germans or these northern people is that the Vatican was becoming greedier and greedier and greedier and one reason the Vatican was becoming greedier and greedier and greedier had to do with the great architectural projects that were built under the patronage of the pope like Julius you know in order to raise money to build Saint Peter's Julius had these ingenious ways of raising money by selling indulgences an indulgence is you pay a certain amount of money and you can get somebody out of purgatory and into heaven or you pay a certain amount of money and you can at least shorten the amount of time that your loved one spends in purgatory the church is laundering money like crazy to pay for these vat for these projects and they're increasing the the taxes on all the parochial churches and that gives rise eventually to Protestantism which is happening right up there right about the time that Rome is undergoing these difficulties in fact Martin Luther did not urge people to go sack Rome but there's a quote from him which is Christ reigns in such a way that the emperor who persecutes Luther for the pope is forced to destroy the pope for Luther because some of the armies that were sacking Rome were in fact Protestants and they felt that the church had no right to these kinds of treasures these treasures wanted people or at least to them so I think we will pick up with more Michelangelo next time