TALKING OF MICHELANGELO

The first half of The Two Popes, a movie about the friendship and rivalry between Pope Benedict XVI and his successor Pope Francis, is screamingly beautiful, offering astounding views of Rome, Vatican City and Castel Gandolfo, the Pope’s summer residence. Watching, one feels goddess-like, peering into a resplendent private world.

But then the overall formal beauty of the movie starts to oppress. In flashbacks we see Frances as a young priest in Buenos Aires forging a prudent and costly alliance with the fascist government, and then exiled in rural southern Spain. These scenes are shot in recognizable movie styles: the city in a romantic black-and-white, like Casblanca, and the country in flat acrid tones, like The French Connection. These palettes aren’t linked to any spirit, but serve as tinny pop cultural references.

When Benedict, the reigning Pope, calls Francis to the Sistine Chapel one morning, before public hours, to broach his voluntary retirement, the opulence of the surroundings feels slightly obscene. The room is empty and floodlit, the frescoes rendered in crisp candy colors like wallpaper. One marvels at the architectural spectacle rather than the anguish in the human figures stretched across the ceiling or sitting quietly below.

This scene made me remember my own experience at The Vatican. While waiting in line to enter an older man, dressed in a fine pinstriped grey wool suit that hung off his ravaged frame, threw himself from his wheelchair and crawled on elbows to the altar. There’s no expression of faith like that in this movie. Even Francis, a complex, articulate, and self-questioning priest, doesn’t emerge as a full-blooded person. He gets lost in the surroundings.

April 08, 2020 by Nalina Moses

SCRATCHINGS

To see Michelangelo’s drawings, on display now at The Met, is to see mastery. Even the tiniest, earliest studies for paintings and architecture projects – his scratchings – have an awesome sense of certainty. Michelangelo draws a lot, at different scales, and to different levels of finish, but he never draws incorrectly or unnecessarily. All his work, even his painting, is sculptural, about the expression of three-dimensional form. He seems to be continually pulling forms out of the air and pinning them down on the page.

Some drawings have a quick, off-the-cuff quality, as if noting an idea that might or might not be pursued. On a facade study for the Church of San Lorenzo, the left half is expressed with light ink strokes in shadow and ornament, while the right half remains in outline, as was the convention when presenting symmetrical designs. Simple shadows pop columns and frames forward dramatically. Figural sculptures along the roofline, depicted in rough streaks of ink, spring to life. They are recognizably human, and look as if they might jostle with one another or jump off the ledge. Even a drawing this diagrammatically conceived, non finito, has a rich physical and emotional presence.

Among many gifts, Michelangelo has a gift to see the reality of a thing in its smaller parts. Many drawings on display are fragments, sometimes surreal, depicting a single arm, thumb, claw, doorway, or base molding. Though most are studies for larger realized works, each is rendered with such sculptural richness so that it is, in itself, fully realized. The paper these fragments are drawn on, small squares of faded parchment, act as a film between this and the next world, upon which the figures leave a swift, bold impression.

Michelangelo Buonarroti (Italian, 1475–1564), with additions and restorations. Demonstration Drawing for the “First Design” of the Facade of San Lorenzo. Pen and brown ink, brush and two hues of brown wash, over underdrawing in leadpoint, compass work, ruling in leadpoint and stylus, black chalk, on six sheets of paper. Casa Buonarroti, Florence.

February 10, 2018 by Nalina Moses