Great Art Ep.5: Pietà (Michelangelo) | NTD Arts & Culture

Michelangelo was a visionary artist who thought of himself first and foremost as a sculptor. He dealt as much with spirit as matter in his art and retold stories everyone knew in ways that forced us to see them with fresh eyes. He took the tradition of the Pietà and turned it into something eloquent, poetic. Still in his early 20s, the young Michelangelo worked with his might as much as he did with his hands to reach for his philosophy of perfection. With Michelangelo, one is dealing with a stone carver. I mean, he's a painter and he's an architect, but he never, he never, never thought of himself as anything but a stone carver. And when he was, the great project of the tomb of Julius II, I mean, it was a project that he devoted most of his life to, and it never got completed in the way that he wanted. Why? Because Julius took him off it early on and sent him up to the Sistine Ceiling. And Michelangelo went up there kicking and screaming, insisting that painting was not his art, that, you know, he, this is a man who, who was wet, the way the story developed, who was wet nursed by, by a woman who was the daughter of and, and, and, and mother of stone carvers in the, in the quarries. So he, Michelangelo supposedly said that he imbibed, you know, the whole sense of the, of stone with his mother's milk. Which is interesting because, again, Vasari, in talking about the, the wonderful, the wonderful personality of Raphael, he attributes it to the wisdom of Raphael's father, who was a painter also, because Raphael's father insisted that his, the natural mother, nurse the child instead of sending him out to, to wet nurse. And because of that, Raphael was, basically was psychologically sound, is the way Raphael, Vasari is telling the story. The other aspect of it is, of course, that from the wet nurse, Michelangelo says he imbibed this sense of stone. And stone was what he was all about. When, when, for example, he was asked to do bronze sculpture, he, it's not that he rejected it, but he, he said it wasn't the highest form of sculpture. What he talked about was, and he talks about this in, in, most eloquently in his poetry. He talks about the necessity of, well, the different, he differentiates between, between stone carving and bronze casting. Bronze casting requires building up a model out of clay, or wax, or whatever. And that means starting from nothing. And you start, and you build up, and build up, and it's an additive process. Stone carving, on the other hand, in stone carving, you start with a block itself. And he talks about this, again, in, in, most eloquently, beautifully in the poetry, what the artist, what the sculptor sees. He sees the figure in the block. And so, it's not merely that, that stone carving becomes an art of subtraction, doing away with material, but it is also an art of liberation. You're liberating a figure. You're liberating a, a figure that is an idea. You're liberating something, and Michelangelo will get into this around the, the Julius tomb, what you're liberating is something spiritual from pure, something purely material. So, once again, it's, it's, it's spirit and matter, only the, the profound paradox of it is that the spirit, the spiritual that Michelangelo is constantly talking about is essentially the human figure. And this is the master of the human body. I mean, they all, I mean, Leonardo, of course, was the great scientific anatomist, and Raphael, I mean, knew his anatomy well. But it's Michelangelo who really made, as it were, the body his own, and we can see this in the sculpture. So that in, I mean, he's very, one of his very earliest pieces, the, the Pietà that he did in, in Rome, as a very young man. What is so extraordinary about it is that, among other things, is that it is, it is so different from other standard images in that Christ is so, as you yourself saw it, is so calm. He's so quiet. He's so perfect, also, in his proportions, in the sense that this is an ideal, an ideal youthful, ideally young man, an ideally proportioned young man. And, and then there's the Virgin herself, who is not an old woman, but a young woman. And this was criticized, we are told, of the Virgin. After all, I mean, she gave birth at a certain age, and Christ died at the age of 33. She should have put on some, some years. Michelangelo, who was famous not only for two things, well, for many things, but he was famous as a wit, and he was also famous for his theological knowledge, his knowledge of Dante and of the Bible. And as he, as he lectured somebody who objected to the age of the Virgin, he said, don't you know that virgins never age? True or not, the other thing that is, I mean, another aspect of it, in terms of Michelangelo anecdotes, is the, the prominent signature. He signs himself right on, on the, on the garment of the Virgin. But the figure itself of Christ is what is so crucial here. I mean, once again, one is dealing with a, a, the taking of two figures. I mean, it's an awkward situation, a fully grown man in the lap of a woman. And as you can see, he uses the, he uses the extended draperies to fill out the entire form, so that what we have is this broad pyramidal shape that gives an overall unity to what is then differentiated, not only by the figures, but by the folds in the garment itself. She presents the body of the dead son. This will be a motif that will occupy Michelangelo at various stages of his life. That is the pietà. Now, the pietà is, it's a kind of epitome of the narrative of the Passion of Christ. That is, when the body is taken from the cross, it is put for a final moment in the lap of the Virgin, who laments the loss of her son, then is taken and buried. But the image itself that brings together the, the dead Christ and his mother is, in many ways, the equivalent, one might say, of the Madonna and Child. It's the same thing. It's the mother and child, only now the child is full grown. And it, what it carries, if the Madonna and, if the mother and child motif is filled with, with anticipation, that is, it's, and very often one will find the child asleep in, in, on the bosom of the mother. This anticipates exactly this, his death. But now we have the actual death, and so the way in which she responds becomes important. But it's Michelangelo who is committed to the human body. The situation is that you have a culture that is increasingly interested in the human body, in the perfection of the human body. And to find that perfection, well, that perfection, let us say, is discovered in the sculpture of antiquity, the Greek and Roman sculpture, especially Roman, since the very, relatively little Greek was available at that point. So that the whole notion of the Renaissance, that is, of the rebirth of antiquity, allowed artists to reclaim the anatomical perfection, let's say, of the figure of Apollo, which is what, and I'm not saying that this is Apollo, but the perfection of the human body that the Greeks sought, that was then reflected in Roman art, is now taken up by Christian art. And if one thinks that the body of Christ is the body that God assumed for himself, how could that be anything less than perfect? And therefore, to go back to the perfection, the human proportional anatomical perfection of the Greeks, was absolutely the highest tribute that an artist could pay to the theology. This is a gesture. I mean, in the early Pietà, this is the Virgin offering the body. I mean, she's holding it, but basically she's offering it. This is, I mean, after all, that death was necessary for our salvation, I mean, that is, for Christians. And that is an eloquent gesture. It is, as I say, it's an offering. This is a sculpture that presumably should have been placed fairly low, because looking down at it, you look down into the body of Christ. When it's up too high, you lose any sense of contact with that body. But it's the contact with the body of Christ that is so crucial in all of these cases. And it is the intimacy. They are so close, and what unites them is the stone. And this is, again, this is Michelangelo, the stone carver. It is the most eloquent, and it's very muted in the sense that, for example, the wounds in the body. An older tradition would have had these nails in the arm, the piercing of the torso. These would have been dripping with blood and so forth. Here, they're just like pinpricks. It's as though Michelangelo won't destroy the body, won't allow the body to be desecrated that way. And here, she holds the body, but she's holding a cloth. I mean, you don't directly, you touch the body. It's the way in which the priest will not touch the wafer directly, but rather there's always a cloth. But her fingers point to that very slight sliver of a wound in his side. But it is the beauty of the body that is important here, the perfection of the body that has been sacrificed for salvation, etc. This is why the Renaissance is so fundamentally Christian still. I mean, for all that it is. One of the problems for Western culture, perhaps, is that it associates Christian piety with the Middle Ages exclusively. And, you know, when we build churches, churches were built, they were built to imitate Gothic cathedrals and so forth. But this is an art, above all Michelangelo's, but not only Michelangelo, that is dedicated to the body. And being dedicated to the body, it can do more justice to the theology, which is, after all, a theology of the body, that body. And it becomes a kind of perfect union of art and religious values. For the 21st century, what is so, I think, compelling is the art of it. And I don't mean just, you know, the art of polish itself, but the way in which this artist in particular deals with the spirit in matter. I mean, takes that paradox and doesn't quite, never resolves it, because it's unresolvable, but rather takes the paradox and makes that itself the content of his art. That is, that stone can be flesh, that flesh can be spirit. I mean, that is, that he talks about the body that is imprisoned in the stone. This is a sort of platonic notion, that is, the spirit that is encased in the matter of the body. But it's the only thing that Michelangelo knows is the body, and yet he turns it into spirit.