Alla Scoperta dei Musei Vaticani (2015): Season 1, Episode 1 - La Cappella Sistina - full transcript
It all started here, in this place
and with this masterpiece:
the Laocoon.
It was 1506 and among the ruins of
the Domus Aurea,
in the famous Nero's palace,
near the Colosseum, on the Colle Oppio,
emerged this marble group,
this masterpiece
that evoked a powerful strength.
Everyone was impressed, even Julius II,
the Pope of the time
who acquired it and
brought it into the Vatican.
Laocoon was a high priest.
He had understood the Odysseus's trick
and he hurled a spear,
a javelin, against the wood horse
and for this
he was punished by Athena.
He was strangled
by snakes,
together with his sons.
Julius II took this
masterpiece and brought it here.
At that time there was
a garden with fountains,
statues, trees,
cypresses, a place
where art was married
with the charm of nature.
This place was just the beginning of
something extraordinary:
the starting point of the
Vatican Museums.
Other masterpieces were hosted here:
Apollo, the Apollo Belvedere,
a statue of Venus, Venus Felix.
From that moment, every Pope
acquired artworks or commissioned works,
which gradually enriched
this collection in the Vatican,
till to become what now we call:
the Vatican Museums.
Six million people a year,
twenty thousand per day,
visit this heritage of humanity.
But why do we say
the "Vatican Museums", at plural?
Because they are different Museums,
each of one impressively
rich of masterpieces.
There are: the Pinacoteca,
the Egyptian Museum, the Etruscan Museum,
the Classical Greek and Roman Museums,
the Museum of Contemporary Art,
the Ethnological Museum
and even a Philatelic
and Numismatic Museum.
In addition, there are the Galleries:
the Galley of Tapestries
and another well known as
the Gallery of Maps,
and finally the famous
Rooms of Raffaello
and the Sistina Chapel.
You'll discover masterpieces
of human genius
but also buildings and stories,
which accompanied them for centuries,
and that constitute
a World Heritage Site.
We are in the Pope's museums,
in their varied complexity.
DIRECTOR OF THE VATICAN MUSEUMS
In the Vatican, each collection
has its own history.
This is also the
richness of this place.
VATICAN MUSEUMS, DEPARTMENT
OF EASTERN ANTIQUITIES
Each collection represents
a period of human
civilization aimed
to achieve beauty.
VATICAN MUSEUMS, DEPARTMENT
OF DECORATIVE ARTS
What probably the Vatican
Museums have more
compared to other museums of
the same importance and wideness
is that they have an intimate
collecting history,
even museological,
linked to the history of the Church.
At a glance it is hard to find
a "red thread", a link
CULTURE AND CHRISTIANITY
PONTIFICIA UNIVERSITA' LATERANENSE
which can lead us through this huge
collection, so various and colorful.
For many visitors of
the Vatican Museums
CONTEMPORARY ART UNIT
the chronological leap is a shock
which is constantly repeating.
Each room of the museums preserves
collections of different eras,
within spaces
not meant to be museums,
but with functions which had been
transformed over the centuries.
It is difficult to harmonize
different artworks:
What is the link among
an ancient bas-relief,
WRITER AND ESSAYIST
an Early Christian sarcophagus,
or a work of contemporary art?
From our artistic experience
We deduce that
all the works have a point in common:
ART HISTORIAN
it's the relationship
between God and man,
a thought on Man
as a reflection of God.
When we watch an artwork,
just in front of it
there's a particular moment
in which man looks
at himself as in a mirror.
There are extraordinary artists,
which reveal all man's feelings.
They may not have
a Christian religious meaning,
often they are distant
from Christian position.
But what is the point?
All that is human concerns the Church.
VATICAN MUSEUMS, ETRUSCAN-ITALIAN
ANTIQUITIES
This, we find out in people's diversity,
of the present and of the past:
the mankind and its humanity.
We are in a special place of
the Vatican Museums:
the so-called Gallery of Statues.
VATICAN MUSEUMS DIRECTOR
It was an open loggia
on the landscape of Rome.
I always say that there are more Women and
naked men in the Vatican Museums,
- as representations of Deities
from Olympus or the Greek myth -
than in any other museum in the world.
One would expect that
in the Vatican Museums
there could be something hard religious
dogmatic, propagandist artworks,
but we will see none of this
walking together in the Pope's Museums.
Before becoming Pope, Sixtus IV
was a Franciscan friar,
who had made a career
VATICAN MUSEUMS, PAPAL CARRIAGES,
COSTUMES AND ARMS UNIT
in his Franciscan Order,
emblem of morality.
All of his nephiews were awarded
of great powers within the Curia
or in the Papal State,
not to mention the fact that Giuliano
in turn, in 1503,
will become Pope Julius II della Rovere.
Both uncle and nephew
will be elected popes.
Sixtus IV realized that the building
was rather unstable,
due to the location
VATICAN MUSEUMS, MODERN ART UNIT
where it was placed,
so he ordered
an important restoration
of the Chapel.
He commissioned the work
to, perhaps, the greatest architect
of the half of the fifteenth century
who worked in Rome:
Baccio Pontelli.
The building was a massive
architectural structure
which didn't show from outside,
VATICAN MUSEUMS,
CONSERVATORY UNIT
his Church function.
Four artists: Perugino, Botticelli
Cosimo Rosselli e Domenico Ghirlandaio
signed a single contract,
ie it was a consortium,
and these artists, who were already
collaborators and friends in Florence,
came to an agreement for the method:
the assignment of the scenes,
the use of pigments for the main figures,
the definition of the horizon area
and the proportions
of the individual figures,
then, they got to work.
The Sistine Chapel
could not be conceived
in an unharmonious way,
and for this purpose
ART HISTORY FULL PROFESSOR
ROMA LA SAPIENZA UNIVERSITY
the Pope's advisers or the Pope
himself drew up a well-defined program.
On a wall Moses
frees Jewish People,
and on the opposite one,
Christ accomplishes
his life mission through
sacrify and death.
The delivery of the Ten
Commandments to Moses
and the Sermon on the Mount
is a parallel inspired to
the Gospels:
Moses and Elijah are the link
between the Old and the New Covenant.
These Italian landscapes of
Umbrian and Tuscan areas
pictorially represent
the artists' background.
The symbolic presence of a Church,
on the Mount of Beatitudes
shows the difference
between the Old and the New Covenant.
Christ is the head of the Church,
he's in the lower part of the Mount
while the Church is on the top,
well marked by a pink shade
that stands out in the green
of the surrounding landscape.
This is the only fresco
which has no frame,
but there's a step on which
the visitor is invited to climb
in order to watch closely the scene.
As the style is concerned,
each artist has his own characteristics:
the nervous pictorial language
of Botticelli,
the perfect symmetry
of the scenes and the figures'
majesty of Perugino,
and so Cosimo Rosselli
with his peculiarity of
sometimes dissonant chromatisms
and also the
crowding of the figures.
At the beginning of the sixteenth century
the Sistine Chapel
was a treasure chest
painted by the best artists of
the fifteenth century:
Botticelli, Perugino, Ghirlandaio,
Pinturicchio, Cosimo Rosselli.
They were a kind of
"art dream team" of that time.
But a problem occured:
the buildings works which involved
St. Peter's foundations,
the new Basilica,
provoked indirectly
a series of cracks on the vault
and that was an emergency.
Bramante was able to stabilize
the vault, thanks to particular chains,
however, this didn't solve the problem.
So Pole Julius II decided to
call Michelangelo.
Before what we see today,
there was a starry sky,
designed by an artist
of whom little is spoken:
Piermatteo of Amelia.
That painting disappeared
in order to make room to the
one of the World's masterpieces;
but it is certainly surprising that
Michelangelo's masterpiece
is a result of a series of cracks.
One day, in May, 1508,
a Pope who seemed to love politics
and war diplomacy more than
art painting and sculpture,
summoned
a young man of 33 years,
the Florentine
Michelangelo Buonarroti,
and he told him: "Michelangelo,
You will paint the fresco,
the vault of the Chapel,
that my uncle of blessed memory,
Pope Sixtus IV della Rovere,
left unfinished".
Michelangelo made a little fuss
at Pope's request
replying: "But I am a sculptor,
I'm not a painter,
this is not my job".
Pope Julius II was an enlighted Patron,
he could see the genius of these artist
well before they had done anything.
Julius II finally
persuaded Michelangelo
and on May 10, 1508,
he signed the contract
for the decoration of the vault.
He agreed mainly because he
couldn't say "no" to a Pope
and also because it was an
extraordinary
opportunity of global advertising,
as we'd say today;
besides, the payment
was more than good:
the Pope paid him three
thousand gold ducats.
In conceiving the vault, it seems that
the first idea was to
represent the Apostles,
but then Michelangelo
changed the original subject.
He wanted to depict the previous story
of the frescoes
previously painted
on the two side walls,
that is the Creation.
The main episodes are from
the Book of Genesis;
the Sibyls sit
alongside the Prophets,
and foretold the coming of Christ.
Jonah is a prelude of Christ:
he had been imprisoned
for three days and three nights
in the belly of the great fish
and then rejected,
thus was an allusion to the Resurrection,
therefore to the Redemption
of mankind.
Looking at the ceiling of the Sistina,
you understand the complexity of
Michelangelo's personality.
Michelangelo began as a sculptor
and became an architect:
these were his two main vocations.
Starting from the existing structure
of the chapel, he conceived
an ideal of architecture.
The depiction develops
on a architectural scheme
in which some figures,
in particular, in the lower part,
the putti
are a representation of statues,
they are like painted statues,
which support another element.
It's a pictorial fiction,
but it seems real,
a real technical support.
And at the center of the vault
you see this architectural grid,
which has a realistic effect
but that is ideal,
inside of which alternate
smaller openings and
greater ones,
so as to create a rhythm.
Those who enter the Sistine Chapel
capture this illusionistic
architecture,
we may say, an increasing pace
which leads to a monumental sense,
as intended by Michelangelo
gradually works were proceeding.
Michelangelo began his work
with the central scene
that is above our heads:
the Great Flood.
He worked on it for long,
but he wasn't satisfied with the result,
so he destroyed it chiseling
even the plaster.
He made another painting,
the one we see today,
approximately thirty days of work,
but he wasn't satisfied yet
because, the details couldn't be seen
from below, they were
too distant.
It looked more like a
painting than a fresco,
so in the following scenes
Michelangelo changed his style:
the landscapes almost disappeared
and the human figures
became increasingly incumbent, real,
full of anatomical details.
It seems that the reasons of
this change of style
was due to the fact of having admired
two absolute masterpieces
which were the starting point of
the Vatican Museums:
the Laocoon
and the Belvedere Torso.
Michelangelo certainly
was inspired by
the Greek-Roman classical world.
Those marble statues are
the supreme reference points,
to which the artists must refer
to make art.
Michelangelo's ability to represent
the human figure
derived from observation
of the classical models
and from the deep knowledge
of the human body.
In fact, there are many anatomical studies
by Michelangelo
which reproduce
the foreshortened figures successively
painted on the vault of the Sistina.
All figures were in action
doing their tasks.
The "dockers" of the Ark
push, pull...
it is like a representation of
human activity,
that is the human condition,
the condition of the man who works.
Adam and Eve have
beautiful bodies.
Pope John Paul II called it
"the Theology of the Body".
The secrets of the art can not
be explained, but they must also be felt.
In this painting there is
a majestic strength,
a pictorial security
in the contrast
between God and man.
Michelangelo represented
angels without wings,
a representation
which was no longer occurred
since Early Christian period.
Michelangelo faces
in a kind of duel,
body to body, the entire
surface of the vault.
1080 square metre with 300 figures
He worked tirelessly,
for four years,
from 1508, when the Pope
called him, to 1512.
25 years passed
since Michelangelo's frescoed
the vault of the Sistine Chapel.
Pope Paul III Farnese
called him again,
this time to depict the wall
behind the altar of the Sistine Chapel.
To do that, he had to destroy a work
of Perugino: The Assumption of Mary
and even two of his own frescoes.
He realized then a high vertical wall
which more goes upward,
more bends towards you
perhaps to avoid dust
or for a better
visual of the works,
or perhaps for other reasons
we do not know.
Then he began to work
for four years, all by himself
depicting 180 square meters,
four hundred-four figures.
The result is a masterpiece:
The Last Judgement
or as it has been also called:
The Resurrection of the Flesh.
They were very difficult years
for the Church:
the Lutheran Reform
and the Sack of Rome
were deep wounds
difficult to heal,
which left Rome bowed-down,
the city partly destroyed or ruined.
It was even said that
the Renaissance
drown in the Tevere river.
The world was changed and so Michelangelo.
On St. Peter's throne,
there was Paul III Farnese.
The world had turned on its axis,
and a different Michelangelo
depicted his Judgment.
He began to work in 1536
and it finished it in 1541.
He was a man deeply
different from
the young artist who had painted
the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
He was close to 70, he felt old,
sick, tired, but he faced the enterprise
of the Last Judgement.
Thinking about his age, Sebastiano
del Piombo suggested him
that perhaps it would be easier use
Oil painting on the wall,
a technique that
Michelandelo absolutely
excluded as he knew that
the fresco painting,
- even if it had technical
and precise limits
dictated by the material-
is was more durable.
The fresco is a technique that paints
on wet plaster,
because the pigment reacts
When the plaster dries.
The fresco does not admits regrets
because what has been painted
is definitive.
If you want to correct it,
you have to remove it
or paint on it by a fresco-secco technique.
The Last Judgment is completely
different from the traditional iconography.
Christ doesn't sit in throne,
he has no beard
as he was previously represented
in the past times.
Christ is like a gladiator,
a young athlete,
who burts into the scene
to stop time and history.
Beside him, there are two characters:
one is the Madonna,
who clings to his son
helpless, desolate,
she knows she has no power,
everything is accomplished.
What is done it is done,
there is no more time
for mercy, for forgiveness.
Another key figure is St. Peter,
an old, muscular, athletic man
who gives back the keys to Christ
because the Church is over.
Then there are a host of Holy Martyrs,
the Apostles and other figures,
Saint Catherine, then
you see a wheel,
and then angels going up and down
like forming strips,
and then still a space
at the center.
Michelangelo had a pessimistic
idea of the Divine judgment.
The saved are few,
the damned are many.
There's Charon, a reference to the hell
described by Dante,
and others
alluding to Dante's characters.
Michelangelo was among
the artists who admired Dante.
The Apostles are not on their thrones,
and there's no St. Michael weighing souls,
and here is Christ before his judgment.
The sources of the period described
this work as the Resurrection of the Flesh.
Even in a session of the Council of Trento,
they argued about it.
There were those who asked
how it was possible
that the Magna Chapel,
in the Church of Rome,
the holiest site in Christendom,
could exhibit breasts,
buttocks, genitals.
When Biagio da Cesena saw that
Michelangelo had portrayed him in the hell,
he went complaining to the Pope.
The Pope answered:
"Unfortunately in hell I
have no power, I can not
lift you from there."
We don't know if these episodes
are true or not,
but they make us understand the reactions
that an artwork like this
can arise.
It was February, 18th 1564,
when Michelangelo died.
Daniele da Volterra,
a pupil of Michelangelo,
was commissioned to cover
the most evident nakedness.
This artist went down in history
with the humiliating nickname
"Braghettone",
as the one who he had put
trousers to Michelangelo's figures.
This intervention by
Daniele da Volterra
has been left intact
in the last restoration,
as it must be considered
as a sign of history,
back in the wheel of history,
a sign of the
Counter-Reformation.
The restorer of the modern age
has left it as a document
of an historical era.
Before the cleaning,
it was believed that the Judgment
was alluding to
a "two dimensional" meaning:
Christ is the centre,
around which revolve the whole
Creation and all humanity.
Actually When the cleaning was
provided
blue lapis lazuli came to light.
Michelangelo
could use that color
thanks to the Pope,
who as the patron of the work
could afford
an expenditure like that.
The brightness of the blue enlights
this deep endless sky.
Every year, nearly 6 million people
visit the Sistine Chapel.
People from all over the world,
different languages
cultures, religions, seculars,
about six million people a year.
There isn't another attraction equally
powerful in Rome or in ItaIy like this:
there are people who come to Rome only
to visit the Sistine Chapel.
All we know that
for the election of a Pope,
Cardinals gather here,
in the Sistine Chapel.
They gather in conclave,
derived from the Latin cum clave,
that means that the doors
are closed with a ceremony
and they will officially reopened
only with the "white smoke",
at the election of the Pope.
The room of which we don't talk
too much
is the so-called Sala Regia, the hall
that Cardinals cross
with solemn steps to go
to elect the Pope.
This room is really extraordinary:
it has a high vaulted ceiling,
covered with stuccos.
There are frescos all over the walls
and the floor, as
you see, is made
by an extraordinary geometry
of colored marble.
Now, this is called the Sala Regia
because, in the past, it was here
that Popes received the sovereigns.
Nowadays the Pope receives here
the diplomatic corps
and here the international treaties
are signed.
To remember the historic
Papacy's functions
and even its victories against
foreign kings and rulers,
there are these extraordinary
frescoes painted by Vasari,
Taddeo and Federico Zuccheri,
who depict, for example,
Alexander III kneeling,
who receives
the emperor Federico Barbarossa.
In addition, we see the return of the Popes
to Rome from Avignon;
and here one of the historical battles:
the preparation of
the naval battle of Lepanto,
and down there is the battle so bloody
and then the conquest of Tunisi.
The cardinals
who walk in these places
going to the Sistine Chapel,
can imagine, rest their eyes on these
frescoes, rich in history,
aware that
the election of a new pope
will write another
page in the history of the Papacy.
Clamorous was the conclave that led to
the election of Pope Gregory X.
In Viterbo for 33 months, 19 cardinals
were even closed in the rooms,
because the people of
Viterbo arose against them
as the cardinals weren't able
to elect
the successor of Peter.
Then the roof was uncovered
to feed them.
It was a terrible experience,
Some of the cardinals even died,
and the survivors
elected Pope Gregory X,
who, immediately
- he did not think it twice-
issued
the decree "Ubi Periculum"
which established drastic rules
for the Pope's election.
At the time there wasn't
the Sistine Chapel,
other two centuries had to pass
to choose the Papal
Chapel, and then
the Sistine Chapel could become
the theater of conclaves.
But why here?
Why in the Sistine Chapel?
I would say that maybe
no other place
can express the strength of
centuries of Christianity.
The Sistina was before
the Cappella Magna,
the place for the major events,
and what's more important than
the election of a pope?
Pope Nicholas V, born Thomas
Parentucelli
had a brief pontificate,
from 1447 to 1455,
but it marked a turning point
in the history of the papacy,
especially from a cultural and
artistic point of view.
He was an enlightened Pope,
educated and especially
interested in the classical world,
for this reason, he was
called the humanist Pope.
Beato Angelico was among those
Florentine artists who led
the Renaissance to Rome,
the renewal and the development
of a new art,
in a city that, thanks to
Nicholas V and other Popes,
was finding its own identity,
authority and a new stability.
Who were Lorenzo and Stefano?
They were deacons, first cardinals
and protomartyrs.
Both of them were martyred
at the origins of the Church history.
It is even said that
St Lorenzo was
roasted alive,
while St. Stefano was stoned,
killed by throwing stones,
by the Jews, out the
walls of Jerusalem.
These are, as usual,
parallel stories:
Stefano in Jerusalem
and Lorenzo in Rome;
they evoke, even
in the architecture, two cities,
dear to Angelico and to the Pope,
because Nicholas V had been
for a long time in Florence.
The vault of the Niccolina Chapel
depicts the four Evangelists
in a figurative way:
the authority which ideally
comes from their written word
is transmitted to the
Doctors of the Church,
four Western and two Greeks ones,
painted on the arches of the Chapel.
It's clear the reference
to the difficult dialogue
between the West and
the East Church
in light of the recent
event of the Council,
in which the city of Florence of Cosimo,
and especially the Dominicans and St. Marco
were protagonists.
These tables depict St. Nicholas
and some of the
most popular miracles
which are assigned to him:
from the birth of the saint who,
still infant
manages to stand up and
to walk alone,
to the famous miracle
of the three golden balls
thrown secretly in the house of a father,
who, for his extreme
poverty, was thinking to start
his three daughters
into prostitution.
And other many episodes,
including the main one:
the episode of the sea storm,
where the sailors, invoking
the presence of the Holy
they save themselves
from the storm.
Beato Angelico followed the
Leon Battista Alberti's theory
about the the perspective laws
and the pictorial
innovations of Masaccio:
there are a new plasticity
of the figure
and a pictorial dramatic way,
although the
Angelico's style is more composed
compared to that of Masaccio,
it is more relaxed, with that clear light.
It's also worth noting,
that the same subject,
which was typical in medieval paintings
between the 1300 and 1400,
in particularly in Central Italy
and in Florence,
was dealed by another
important artist
whose paintings are hosted in
the Vatican Pinacoteca:
Gentile da Fabriano.
The painter depicted
a real sea storm:
the ship is
shuttered by strong waves,
the sails torn, the ship
jumping on the waves
like a runaway horse,
the green water agitated by storm,
and up comes as a kind of a
fifteenth century Batman
descending from heaven: it's San Nicola
who grasps this
runaway horse, that is the ship,
and he takes it to safety.
When we look at this,
we understand how the sea is in winter
and we are caught by
a sense of happiness.
The artwork is powerful
in its meaning,
It has the strength
to cross the centuries with its beauty,
which transforms
an ideal in reality,
so that it can still talk to us,
even if we are men of another time,
of our modern times.
The Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo and
the Niccolina Chapel by Beato Angelico,
are just some of the artworks
of the 1400-1500 great masters,
which can be admired
in the Vatican Museums,
but there are many others,
just to make a name:
the Raffaello's Rooms,
which are almost set
in the architecture
of the Vatican City.
They are certainly one of
the most remarkable or more beautiful
example of the Renaissance.
The Renaissance will be the theme
of our next journey.
The Renaissance
is the happiest moment
of the human creativity:
the classical culture rebirths,
taking out from the monasteries.
The man turns to be
the center of everything
and we'll find out
extraordinary masterpieces
made just here in Italy.
It's for this reason
that the word Renaissance, anywhere,
is synonymous of Italy.
and with this masterpiece:
the Laocoon.
It was 1506 and among the ruins of
the Domus Aurea,
in the famous Nero's palace,
near the Colosseum, on the Colle Oppio,
emerged this marble group,
this masterpiece
that evoked a powerful strength.
Everyone was impressed, even Julius II,
the Pope of the time
who acquired it and
brought it into the Vatican.
Laocoon was a high priest.
He had understood the Odysseus's trick
and he hurled a spear,
a javelin, against the wood horse
and for this
he was punished by Athena.
He was strangled
by snakes,
together with his sons.
Julius II took this
masterpiece and brought it here.
At that time there was
a garden with fountains,
statues, trees,
cypresses, a place
where art was married
with the charm of nature.
This place was just the beginning of
something extraordinary:
the starting point of the
Vatican Museums.
Other masterpieces were hosted here:
Apollo, the Apollo Belvedere,
a statue of Venus, Venus Felix.
From that moment, every Pope
acquired artworks or commissioned works,
which gradually enriched
this collection in the Vatican,
till to become what now we call:
the Vatican Museums.
Six million people a year,
twenty thousand per day,
visit this heritage of humanity.
But why do we say
the "Vatican Museums", at plural?
Because they are different Museums,
each of one impressively
rich of masterpieces.
There are: the Pinacoteca,
the Egyptian Museum, the Etruscan Museum,
the Classical Greek and Roman Museums,
the Museum of Contemporary Art,
the Ethnological Museum
and even a Philatelic
and Numismatic Museum.
In addition, there are the Galleries:
the Galley of Tapestries
and another well known as
the Gallery of Maps,
and finally the famous
Rooms of Raffaello
and the Sistina Chapel.
You'll discover masterpieces
of human genius
but also buildings and stories,
which accompanied them for centuries,
and that constitute
a World Heritage Site.
We are in the Pope's museums,
in their varied complexity.
DIRECTOR OF THE VATICAN MUSEUMS
In the Vatican, each collection
has its own history.
This is also the
richness of this place.
VATICAN MUSEUMS, DEPARTMENT
OF EASTERN ANTIQUITIES
Each collection represents
a period of human
civilization aimed
to achieve beauty.
VATICAN MUSEUMS, DEPARTMENT
OF DECORATIVE ARTS
What probably the Vatican
Museums have more
compared to other museums of
the same importance and wideness
is that they have an intimate
collecting history,
even museological,
linked to the history of the Church.
At a glance it is hard to find
a "red thread", a link
CULTURE AND CHRISTIANITY
PONTIFICIA UNIVERSITA' LATERANENSE
which can lead us through this huge
collection, so various and colorful.
For many visitors of
the Vatican Museums
CONTEMPORARY ART UNIT
the chronological leap is a shock
which is constantly repeating.
Each room of the museums preserves
collections of different eras,
within spaces
not meant to be museums,
but with functions which had been
transformed over the centuries.
It is difficult to harmonize
different artworks:
What is the link among
an ancient bas-relief,
WRITER AND ESSAYIST
an Early Christian sarcophagus,
or a work of contemporary art?
From our artistic experience
We deduce that
all the works have a point in common:
ART HISTORIAN
it's the relationship
between God and man,
a thought on Man
as a reflection of God.
When we watch an artwork,
just in front of it
there's a particular moment
in which man looks
at himself as in a mirror.
There are extraordinary artists,
which reveal all man's feelings.
They may not have
a Christian religious meaning,
often they are distant
from Christian position.
But what is the point?
All that is human concerns the Church.
VATICAN MUSEUMS, ETRUSCAN-ITALIAN
ANTIQUITIES
This, we find out in people's diversity,
of the present and of the past:
the mankind and its humanity.
We are in a special place of
the Vatican Museums:
the so-called Gallery of Statues.
VATICAN MUSEUMS DIRECTOR
It was an open loggia
on the landscape of Rome.
I always say that there are more Women and
naked men in the Vatican Museums,
- as representations of Deities
from Olympus or the Greek myth -
than in any other museum in the world.
One would expect that
in the Vatican Museums
there could be something hard religious
dogmatic, propagandist artworks,
but we will see none of this
walking together in the Pope's Museums.
Before becoming Pope, Sixtus IV
was a Franciscan friar,
who had made a career
VATICAN MUSEUMS, PAPAL CARRIAGES,
COSTUMES AND ARMS UNIT
in his Franciscan Order,
emblem of morality.
All of his nephiews were awarded
of great powers within the Curia
or in the Papal State,
not to mention the fact that Giuliano
in turn, in 1503,
will become Pope Julius II della Rovere.
Both uncle and nephew
will be elected popes.
Sixtus IV realized that the building
was rather unstable,
due to the location
VATICAN MUSEUMS, MODERN ART UNIT
where it was placed,
so he ordered
an important restoration
of the Chapel.
He commissioned the work
to, perhaps, the greatest architect
of the half of the fifteenth century
who worked in Rome:
Baccio Pontelli.
The building was a massive
architectural structure
which didn't show from outside,
VATICAN MUSEUMS,
CONSERVATORY UNIT
his Church function.
Four artists: Perugino, Botticelli
Cosimo Rosselli e Domenico Ghirlandaio
signed a single contract,
ie it was a consortium,
and these artists, who were already
collaborators and friends in Florence,
came to an agreement for the method:
the assignment of the scenes,
the use of pigments for the main figures,
the definition of the horizon area
and the proportions
of the individual figures,
then, they got to work.
The Sistine Chapel
could not be conceived
in an unharmonious way,
and for this purpose
ART HISTORY FULL PROFESSOR
ROMA LA SAPIENZA UNIVERSITY
the Pope's advisers or the Pope
himself drew up a well-defined program.
On a wall Moses
frees Jewish People,
and on the opposite one,
Christ accomplishes
his life mission through
sacrify and death.
The delivery of the Ten
Commandments to Moses
and the Sermon on the Mount
is a parallel inspired to
the Gospels:
Moses and Elijah are the link
between the Old and the New Covenant.
These Italian landscapes of
Umbrian and Tuscan areas
pictorially represent
the artists' background.
The symbolic presence of a Church,
on the Mount of Beatitudes
shows the difference
between the Old and the New Covenant.
Christ is the head of the Church,
he's in the lower part of the Mount
while the Church is on the top,
well marked by a pink shade
that stands out in the green
of the surrounding landscape.
This is the only fresco
which has no frame,
but there's a step on which
the visitor is invited to climb
in order to watch closely the scene.
As the style is concerned,
each artist has his own characteristics:
the nervous pictorial language
of Botticelli,
the perfect symmetry
of the scenes and the figures'
majesty of Perugino,
and so Cosimo Rosselli
with his peculiarity of
sometimes dissonant chromatisms
and also the
crowding of the figures.
At the beginning of the sixteenth century
the Sistine Chapel
was a treasure chest
painted by the best artists of
the fifteenth century:
Botticelli, Perugino, Ghirlandaio,
Pinturicchio, Cosimo Rosselli.
They were a kind of
"art dream team" of that time.
But a problem occured:
the buildings works which involved
St. Peter's foundations,
the new Basilica,
provoked indirectly
a series of cracks on the vault
and that was an emergency.
Bramante was able to stabilize
the vault, thanks to particular chains,
however, this didn't solve the problem.
So Pole Julius II decided to
call Michelangelo.
Before what we see today,
there was a starry sky,
designed by an artist
of whom little is spoken:
Piermatteo of Amelia.
That painting disappeared
in order to make room to the
one of the World's masterpieces;
but it is certainly surprising that
Michelangelo's masterpiece
is a result of a series of cracks.
One day, in May, 1508,
a Pope who seemed to love politics
and war diplomacy more than
art painting and sculpture,
summoned
a young man of 33 years,
the Florentine
Michelangelo Buonarroti,
and he told him: "Michelangelo,
You will paint the fresco,
the vault of the Chapel,
that my uncle of blessed memory,
Pope Sixtus IV della Rovere,
left unfinished".
Michelangelo made a little fuss
at Pope's request
replying: "But I am a sculptor,
I'm not a painter,
this is not my job".
Pope Julius II was an enlighted Patron,
he could see the genius of these artist
well before they had done anything.
Julius II finally
persuaded Michelangelo
and on May 10, 1508,
he signed the contract
for the decoration of the vault.
He agreed mainly because he
couldn't say "no" to a Pope
and also because it was an
extraordinary
opportunity of global advertising,
as we'd say today;
besides, the payment
was more than good:
the Pope paid him three
thousand gold ducats.
In conceiving the vault, it seems that
the first idea was to
represent the Apostles,
but then Michelangelo
changed the original subject.
He wanted to depict the previous story
of the frescoes
previously painted
on the two side walls,
that is the Creation.
The main episodes are from
the Book of Genesis;
the Sibyls sit
alongside the Prophets,
and foretold the coming of Christ.
Jonah is a prelude of Christ:
he had been imprisoned
for three days and three nights
in the belly of the great fish
and then rejected,
thus was an allusion to the Resurrection,
therefore to the Redemption
of mankind.
Looking at the ceiling of the Sistina,
you understand the complexity of
Michelangelo's personality.
Michelangelo began as a sculptor
and became an architect:
these were his two main vocations.
Starting from the existing structure
of the chapel, he conceived
an ideal of architecture.
The depiction develops
on a architectural scheme
in which some figures,
in particular, in the lower part,
the putti
are a representation of statues,
they are like painted statues,
which support another element.
It's a pictorial fiction,
but it seems real,
a real technical support.
And at the center of the vault
you see this architectural grid,
which has a realistic effect
but that is ideal,
inside of which alternate
smaller openings and
greater ones,
so as to create a rhythm.
Those who enter the Sistine Chapel
capture this illusionistic
architecture,
we may say, an increasing pace
which leads to a monumental sense,
as intended by Michelangelo
gradually works were proceeding.
Michelangelo began his work
with the central scene
that is above our heads:
the Great Flood.
He worked on it for long,
but he wasn't satisfied with the result,
so he destroyed it chiseling
even the plaster.
He made another painting,
the one we see today,
approximately thirty days of work,
but he wasn't satisfied yet
because, the details couldn't be seen
from below, they were
too distant.
It looked more like a
painting than a fresco,
so in the following scenes
Michelangelo changed his style:
the landscapes almost disappeared
and the human figures
became increasingly incumbent, real,
full of anatomical details.
It seems that the reasons of
this change of style
was due to the fact of having admired
two absolute masterpieces
which were the starting point of
the Vatican Museums:
the Laocoon
and the Belvedere Torso.
Michelangelo certainly
was inspired by
the Greek-Roman classical world.
Those marble statues are
the supreme reference points,
to which the artists must refer
to make art.
Michelangelo's ability to represent
the human figure
derived from observation
of the classical models
and from the deep knowledge
of the human body.
In fact, there are many anatomical studies
by Michelangelo
which reproduce
the foreshortened figures successively
painted on the vault of the Sistina.
All figures were in action
doing their tasks.
The "dockers" of the Ark
push, pull...
it is like a representation of
human activity,
that is the human condition,
the condition of the man who works.
Adam and Eve have
beautiful bodies.
Pope John Paul II called it
"the Theology of the Body".
The secrets of the art can not
be explained, but they must also be felt.
In this painting there is
a majestic strength,
a pictorial security
in the contrast
between God and man.
Michelangelo represented
angels without wings,
a representation
which was no longer occurred
since Early Christian period.
Michelangelo faces
in a kind of duel,
body to body, the entire
surface of the vault.
1080 square metre with 300 figures
He worked tirelessly,
for four years,
from 1508, when the Pope
called him, to 1512.
25 years passed
since Michelangelo's frescoed
the vault of the Sistine Chapel.
Pope Paul III Farnese
called him again,
this time to depict the wall
behind the altar of the Sistine Chapel.
To do that, he had to destroy a work
of Perugino: The Assumption of Mary
and even two of his own frescoes.
He realized then a high vertical wall
which more goes upward,
more bends towards you
perhaps to avoid dust
or for a better
visual of the works,
or perhaps for other reasons
we do not know.
Then he began to work
for four years, all by himself
depicting 180 square meters,
four hundred-four figures.
The result is a masterpiece:
The Last Judgement
or as it has been also called:
The Resurrection of the Flesh.
They were very difficult years
for the Church:
the Lutheran Reform
and the Sack of Rome
were deep wounds
difficult to heal,
which left Rome bowed-down,
the city partly destroyed or ruined.
It was even said that
the Renaissance
drown in the Tevere river.
The world was changed and so Michelangelo.
On St. Peter's throne,
there was Paul III Farnese.
The world had turned on its axis,
and a different Michelangelo
depicted his Judgment.
He began to work in 1536
and it finished it in 1541.
He was a man deeply
different from
the young artist who had painted
the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
He was close to 70, he felt old,
sick, tired, but he faced the enterprise
of the Last Judgement.
Thinking about his age, Sebastiano
del Piombo suggested him
that perhaps it would be easier use
Oil painting on the wall,
a technique that
Michelandelo absolutely
excluded as he knew that
the fresco painting,
- even if it had technical
and precise limits
dictated by the material-
is was more durable.
The fresco is a technique that paints
on wet plaster,
because the pigment reacts
When the plaster dries.
The fresco does not admits regrets
because what has been painted
is definitive.
If you want to correct it,
you have to remove it
or paint on it by a fresco-secco technique.
The Last Judgment is completely
different from the traditional iconography.
Christ doesn't sit in throne,
he has no beard
as he was previously represented
in the past times.
Christ is like a gladiator,
a young athlete,
who burts into the scene
to stop time and history.
Beside him, there are two characters:
one is the Madonna,
who clings to his son
helpless, desolate,
she knows she has no power,
everything is accomplished.
What is done it is done,
there is no more time
for mercy, for forgiveness.
Another key figure is St. Peter,
an old, muscular, athletic man
who gives back the keys to Christ
because the Church is over.
Then there are a host of Holy Martyrs,
the Apostles and other figures,
Saint Catherine, then
you see a wheel,
and then angels going up and down
like forming strips,
and then still a space
at the center.
Michelangelo had a pessimistic
idea of the Divine judgment.
The saved are few,
the damned are many.
There's Charon, a reference to the hell
described by Dante,
and others
alluding to Dante's characters.
Michelangelo was among
the artists who admired Dante.
The Apostles are not on their thrones,
and there's no St. Michael weighing souls,
and here is Christ before his judgment.
The sources of the period described
this work as the Resurrection of the Flesh.
Even in a session of the Council of Trento,
they argued about it.
There were those who asked
how it was possible
that the Magna Chapel,
in the Church of Rome,
the holiest site in Christendom,
could exhibit breasts,
buttocks, genitals.
When Biagio da Cesena saw that
Michelangelo had portrayed him in the hell,
he went complaining to the Pope.
The Pope answered:
"Unfortunately in hell I
have no power, I can not
lift you from there."
We don't know if these episodes
are true or not,
but they make us understand the reactions
that an artwork like this
can arise.
It was February, 18th 1564,
when Michelangelo died.
Daniele da Volterra,
a pupil of Michelangelo,
was commissioned to cover
the most evident nakedness.
This artist went down in history
with the humiliating nickname
"Braghettone",
as the one who he had put
trousers to Michelangelo's figures.
This intervention by
Daniele da Volterra
has been left intact
in the last restoration,
as it must be considered
as a sign of history,
back in the wheel of history,
a sign of the
Counter-Reformation.
The restorer of the modern age
has left it as a document
of an historical era.
Before the cleaning,
it was believed that the Judgment
was alluding to
a "two dimensional" meaning:
Christ is the centre,
around which revolve the whole
Creation and all humanity.
Actually When the cleaning was
provided
blue lapis lazuli came to light.
Michelangelo
could use that color
thanks to the Pope,
who as the patron of the work
could afford
an expenditure like that.
The brightness of the blue enlights
this deep endless sky.
Every year, nearly 6 million people
visit the Sistine Chapel.
People from all over the world,
different languages
cultures, religions, seculars,
about six million people a year.
There isn't another attraction equally
powerful in Rome or in ItaIy like this:
there are people who come to Rome only
to visit the Sistine Chapel.
All we know that
for the election of a Pope,
Cardinals gather here,
in the Sistine Chapel.
They gather in conclave,
derived from the Latin cum clave,
that means that the doors
are closed with a ceremony
and they will officially reopened
only with the "white smoke",
at the election of the Pope.
The room of which we don't talk
too much
is the so-called Sala Regia, the hall
that Cardinals cross
with solemn steps to go
to elect the Pope.
This room is really extraordinary:
it has a high vaulted ceiling,
covered with stuccos.
There are frescos all over the walls
and the floor, as
you see, is made
by an extraordinary geometry
of colored marble.
Now, this is called the Sala Regia
because, in the past, it was here
that Popes received the sovereigns.
Nowadays the Pope receives here
the diplomatic corps
and here the international treaties
are signed.
To remember the historic
Papacy's functions
and even its victories against
foreign kings and rulers,
there are these extraordinary
frescoes painted by Vasari,
Taddeo and Federico Zuccheri,
who depict, for example,
Alexander III kneeling,
who receives
the emperor Federico Barbarossa.
In addition, we see the return of the Popes
to Rome from Avignon;
and here one of the historical battles:
the preparation of
the naval battle of Lepanto,
and down there is the battle so bloody
and then the conquest of Tunisi.
The cardinals
who walk in these places
going to the Sistine Chapel,
can imagine, rest their eyes on these
frescoes, rich in history,
aware that
the election of a new pope
will write another
page in the history of the Papacy.
Clamorous was the conclave that led to
the election of Pope Gregory X.
In Viterbo for 33 months, 19 cardinals
were even closed in the rooms,
because the people of
Viterbo arose against them
as the cardinals weren't able
to elect
the successor of Peter.
Then the roof was uncovered
to feed them.
It was a terrible experience,
Some of the cardinals even died,
and the survivors
elected Pope Gregory X,
who, immediately
- he did not think it twice-
issued
the decree "Ubi Periculum"
which established drastic rules
for the Pope's election.
At the time there wasn't
the Sistine Chapel,
other two centuries had to pass
to choose the Papal
Chapel, and then
the Sistine Chapel could become
the theater of conclaves.
But why here?
Why in the Sistine Chapel?
I would say that maybe
no other place
can express the strength of
centuries of Christianity.
The Sistina was before
the Cappella Magna,
the place for the major events,
and what's more important than
the election of a pope?
Pope Nicholas V, born Thomas
Parentucelli
had a brief pontificate,
from 1447 to 1455,
but it marked a turning point
in the history of the papacy,
especially from a cultural and
artistic point of view.
He was an enlightened Pope,
educated and especially
interested in the classical world,
for this reason, he was
called the humanist Pope.
Beato Angelico was among those
Florentine artists who led
the Renaissance to Rome,
the renewal and the development
of a new art,
in a city that, thanks to
Nicholas V and other Popes,
was finding its own identity,
authority and a new stability.
Who were Lorenzo and Stefano?
They were deacons, first cardinals
and protomartyrs.
Both of them were martyred
at the origins of the Church history.
It is even said that
St Lorenzo was
roasted alive,
while St. Stefano was stoned,
killed by throwing stones,
by the Jews, out the
walls of Jerusalem.
These are, as usual,
parallel stories:
Stefano in Jerusalem
and Lorenzo in Rome;
they evoke, even
in the architecture, two cities,
dear to Angelico and to the Pope,
because Nicholas V had been
for a long time in Florence.
The vault of the Niccolina Chapel
depicts the four Evangelists
in a figurative way:
the authority which ideally
comes from their written word
is transmitted to the
Doctors of the Church,
four Western and two Greeks ones,
painted on the arches of the Chapel.
It's clear the reference
to the difficult dialogue
between the West and
the East Church
in light of the recent
event of the Council,
in which the city of Florence of Cosimo,
and especially the Dominicans and St. Marco
were protagonists.
These tables depict St. Nicholas
and some of the
most popular miracles
which are assigned to him:
from the birth of the saint who,
still infant
manages to stand up and
to walk alone,
to the famous miracle
of the three golden balls
thrown secretly in the house of a father,
who, for his extreme
poverty, was thinking to start
his three daughters
into prostitution.
And other many episodes,
including the main one:
the episode of the sea storm,
where the sailors, invoking
the presence of the Holy
they save themselves
from the storm.
Beato Angelico followed the
Leon Battista Alberti's theory
about the the perspective laws
and the pictorial
innovations of Masaccio:
there are a new plasticity
of the figure
and a pictorial dramatic way,
although the
Angelico's style is more composed
compared to that of Masaccio,
it is more relaxed, with that clear light.
It's also worth noting,
that the same subject,
which was typical in medieval paintings
between the 1300 and 1400,
in particularly in Central Italy
and in Florence,
was dealed by another
important artist
whose paintings are hosted in
the Vatican Pinacoteca:
Gentile da Fabriano.
The painter depicted
a real sea storm:
the ship is
shuttered by strong waves,
the sails torn, the ship
jumping on the waves
like a runaway horse,
the green water agitated by storm,
and up comes as a kind of a
fifteenth century Batman
descending from heaven: it's San Nicola
who grasps this
runaway horse, that is the ship,
and he takes it to safety.
When we look at this,
we understand how the sea is in winter
and we are caught by
a sense of happiness.
The artwork is powerful
in its meaning,
It has the strength
to cross the centuries with its beauty,
which transforms
an ideal in reality,
so that it can still talk to us,
even if we are men of another time,
of our modern times.
The Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo and
the Niccolina Chapel by Beato Angelico,
are just some of the artworks
of the 1400-1500 great masters,
which can be admired
in the Vatican Museums,
but there are many others,
just to make a name:
the Raffaello's Rooms,
which are almost set
in the architecture
of the Vatican City.
They are certainly one of
the most remarkable or more beautiful
example of the Renaissance.
The Renaissance will be the theme
of our next journey.
The Renaissance
is the happiest moment
of the human creativity:
the classical culture rebirths,
taking out from the monasteries.
The man turns to be
the center of everything
and we'll find out
extraordinary masterpieces
made just here in Italy.
It's for this reason
that the word Renaissance, anywhere,
is synonymous of Italy.