Simon Callow on Michelangelo: the most heroic toiler of the human race | Art - The Telegraph

Simon Callow, The Telegraph narrates Michelangelo, God's Architect - the Story of His Final Years and Greatest Masterpiece by William E Wallace (published by Princeton University Press)

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"Michelangelo, God's Architect is the first book to tell the full story of Michelangelo's final two decades, when the peerless artist refashioned himself into the master architect of St. Peter’s Basilica and other major buildings." writes Amazon.

 

Final masterpiece: Michelangelo's Pietà
Photo: Carrieri/De Agostini

Biopics have a great deal to answer for. Lawrence of Arabia, famously, presents an extremely dubious  view of the history of the Middle East and a ludicrously glamourized version of the eponymous hero; Night and Day, celebrating Cole Porter, features Cary Grant, 6ft 1 and impossibly handsome, as Porter –  5ft 5, bug-eyed and energetically camp.   Painters have been similarly airbrushed, but in this area the tide has turned. Derek Jacobi as  Francis Bacon and Timothy Spall as both Turner and Lowry have introduced a high degree of realism to their depiction; as far back as 1937 Charles Laughton played Rembrandt at his easel with a specific kind of concentration on his subject which has drawn the admiration of painters themselves. 

The grandest and most expensive of all films about a painter was Carol Reed’s The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965) hinging on the fraught relationship between Michelangelo and his employer Pope Julius II; the artist – 5ft 6, broken-nosed, built like a welterweight boxer – is depicted by Charlton Heston, 6ft 2, an acteur noble to his fingertips,  with long limbs, broad shoulders and fine diction. And as with all the examples above, this is the image that has stuck. Heston had just come from playing Moses in The Ten Commandments, and it shows; Michelangelo and Moses  even have a mad scene together up in the mountains when the great artist is seeking inspiration. 

In fact, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarotti  Simoni, though one of the most prodigious geniuses in all of human history, was remarkably down to earth, matching inspiration with perspiration - which perhaps  explains how, after an astonishingly productive maturity, he went on working into an unprecedentedly fecund old age...

Clement kept Michelangelo continuously employed in the city:  he was involved in virtually every public works project in Rome. If you seek is monument, look around you:  the Campidoglio, San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, the Sforza Chapel, Porta Pia, Santa Maria dei Angeli. None of these were completed during his lifetime, but his contribution to them is critical. He was now feeling his age; at 70, he had outlived most of his contemporaries. Astoundingly, a year later, in 1546, he accepted the position – something of a poisoned chalice - of architect of the long delayed Dome of the Basilica of St Peter’s, not only solving the formidable engineering problems and imposing aesthetic unity on the building. He  was not just the  Dome’s architect: he was the capo maestro: supreme overseer, responsible for the achievement of his designs. The energy and attack with which the aged man approached his huge task is in itself awe-inspiring,  especially since he was now often far from well and convinced that he was going  to die at any moment.  
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Michelangelo, God's Architect:
The Story of His Final Years
and Greatest Masterpiece

Source: The Telegraph