Art Stars of the Italian Renaissance with Dr. Rocky Ruggiero

Buona sera, buona sera everyone. First and foremost, I'd like to thank Bonnie for her hospitality in inviting me back. I thought that perhaps after our first event, you might not ever see me again, but I think this is our third or fourth. In fact, we were trying to figure that out. I'd also like to thank Bonnie for her inspiration because every time she invites me to give a lecture here, she always inspires me to come up with some other new kind of theme with which to address, of course, the great art and history of this period that, of course, we call the Renaissance. And I concur with Bonnie regarding the fact that these artists who ran around Florence and Rome and Venice between the years 1300 and 1500 really were the first sort of artistic celebrities. And so let's begin our voyage with the artist, of course, that I love most of all. And if what Bonnie says is true and you're all listening to my webinars and online courses habitually, then I don't have to worry about you mispronouncing that name. It's not Jado, it's Giotto, right? I wanna see the hand move as well. Giotto, right, when you say it. And even an artist as early as Giotto who was active in the first half of the 14th century has a kind of hagiography, has a celebrity status that, in my opinion at least, is on level with the even more famous artists such as Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. And in fact, much of the sort of celebrity sizzle that we associate with these artists is, of course, the consequence of a certain book called The Lives of the Artists. So I decided to bring down my 30-year-old copy. I've had this since I was an undergraduate student back at Holy Cross in 1993. My wife was kind enough to actually repair it for me the other day. Some of you have seen this pop up on screen and the pages are falling out or what have you. So she showed mercy on me and actually put the whole thing back together again. And this book, which was first published in the year 1550 when Michelangelo was still alive, when Leonardo da Vinci had only been dead 30 years, is a primary source of inspiration regarding all of the greats, again, starting with the period around Giotto and going all the way up pretty much to the death of Vasari himself in the year 1576. Now, two things. One, I like to call this book the National Enquirer of the Renaissance because this is where we get all of our dirt on the artists. Secondly, many of you have written me these rather heated emails because when I read excerpts from Vasari, it sounds like one of the most entertaining books that you've ever heard of. And then you go out, you buy a copy, and after page three, you're like, is this the right book? Because what you need to do is skip the boring parts. When you get to the tedious itemizing of all the paintings that Giotto did or Michelangelo, just move on. You don't need to know all that stuff. Get to the juicy parts. And in fact, I'd like to open up with a little excerpt from Vasari's life of Giotto about how Giotto was actually discovered. So you know this romantic idea that we have of a genius working as a janitor at a city college in Boston. You remember that movie Good Will Hunting? And suddenly they find him doing advanced physics or whatever it was. Or of the cashier working at the local supermarket who happens to be a genius or a wizard or what have you as well. Well, that's kind of how Vasari describes Giotto's discovery because he actually has Giotto's teacher, his master, whose name was Cimabue, walking through the countryside. In fact, I'll read directly from Vasari because of course he says it much better than I can. Vasari writes, one day Cimabue was on his way from Florence to Vespignano where he had some business to attend to. When he came across Giotto, who while sheep were grazing nearby, was drawing one of them by scratching with a slightly pointed stone on a smooth, clean piece of rock. And this was before he had received any instruction except for what he saw in nature himself. Cimabue stopped in astonishment to watch him and then asked the boy whether he would like to come and live with him. Giotto answered that if his father agreed, he would love to do so. Doesn't that just warm your heart? So you got this wild Tarzan-like artist living out in the countryside. I'm sure he was living a very difficult life outside of Florence and using these very rudimentary tools, a sharpened stone drawing the sheep that he was condemned to watch for the rest of his life if not for the fact that Cimabue happened to pass by that day see his extraordinary talent and invite him, become my apprentice. It's almost like a Star Wars type saga if you think about it, right? Discovering Luke out there in the desert or what have you. And then of course Giotto's response. If my dad says it's okay, then I'll come. So he's also just a really nice guy and obedient son as well. And I think most of you know, of course, that extraordinary talent would be put to good use because Giotto's fame spread far and wide so much so that a very wealthy banker from Padua would call him to decorate the walls of a chapel named after him, which of course is the Scrovegni Chapel. And again, if you follow me, you know that without the slightest doubt, this is my absolute favorite work of art on planet Earth. In fact, we've also talked about this particular painting cycle here and its cinematic qualities. And in the Scrovegni Chapel, there is a painting that represents the New Testament event of the wedding feast at Cana, where of course Jesus worked his first public miracle, turning water into wine. And one of the most celebrated personages of the Scrovegni Chapel is the gentleman that you see over there, who in the context of the story represents the wine taster. And how else would a wine taster look, if not similar to the large container of wine that is positioned just below him? Now, the joke is a good one, but in trying, oftentimes people in my profession kind of act and sound as if we knew these guys firsthand. You know, Bonnie mentioned Walter Isaacs in biography, and I know Walter spent a lot of time researching Leonardo, but at certain points, you almost imagine the two of them bowling together on Wednesday nights, right? And I'm guilty of it as well, but in my mind, I do try to visualize who Giotto was, what he looked like. And this is a big problem for an artist as early as this one, because there are no known portraits of Giotto. But it was thrown out there years ago by one art historian that perhaps this figure could represent him. And off record, I wouldn't be surprised if in fact Giotto looked like this jolly fellow who looks like he knows how to suck the marrow out of life, because that's exactly what Giotto was putting back into his artwork at the time. So I would say that of all the great Renaissance artists, Giotto would in fact be the first to obtain a kind of celebrity status, one of what we would call fame today. Another, and in fact, I was fortunate enough to just complete an online course dedicated to him, is of course the great Sandro Botticelli. Now you all know Botticelli for his celebrated mythological paintings. I'm not gonna show them to you now, the Primavera and the Birth of Venus, because if I do, you all start to ooh, and ah, and I lose you in the ether of your beauty and what have you. I'm gonna show you the painting that Zio Giorgio, that Uncle Giorgio, says is the one that launched Botticelli into the stratosphere of notoriety, and it's this one. Now, I imagine most of you are probably not even familiar with this painting. It's in the Uffizi, it's in the same rooms as the other two that I just mentioned. Nobody ever looks at this, if not for the fact that they want to identify the Medici family members that are actually depicted in the painting. The gentleman that you see there rubbing the feet of the Christ child is the Michael Corleone of the Medici family, that's Cosimo the Elder de' Medici. The gentleman down here in red is most likely his son Piero, who was so stricken with gout that his nickname is Piero the Gauti, il Gotoso in Italian, and more likely than not, the gentleman that you see right there representing the Third Magus is Giovanni's younger brother, I'm sorry, is Piero's younger brother, whose name was Giovanni. The figure standing over him is the most celebrated of all the Medici men, Lorenzo il Magnifico, and then his younger brother, the Fredo Corleone of the Medici family, who is Giuliano. He was the one who lost his life in the Pazzi Conspiracy of 1476. So everyone looking at this to spot and see where the Medici are, but way over here on the far right-hand side of the painting, in the location which became the kind of traditional place for artists to insert their self-portraits, looking you right in the eye, who do we have but Alessandro Botticelli, a self-portrait, almost as if he was aware of the ramifications of what this particular painting would do for his career, and he wanted everyone, of course, to give credit where he thought credit was indeed due. And in fact, this is what Zio Giorgio has to say about this particular painting. His adoration of the Medici made Botticelli so famous, both in Florence and elsewhere, that Pope Sixtus IV, having finished the building of the chapel for his palace at Rome, and wanting to have it painted, decided that he should be put in charge of the work. So according to Vasari, this painting made Botticelli so famous that his reputation went beyond the borders of Florence all the way to Rome. Now folks, at the end of the 15th century, as some of you know because you took my Renaissance Popes in the late 15th century course, Rome was a backwater city, not even close to what Florence was in terms of population, political importance, economy, or what have you as well. But when Vasari wrote this book, Rome was the European capital of culture. So the point that he's trying to make essentially is that look, this painting made him so famous that the Pope called him to Rome, the same way Popes would call Michelangelo to Rome, the way they would call Raphael to Rome, and other celebrated artists as well. Also I want you to realize something else. The life of Botticelli in this book is seven pages long. Okay, just remember that number, it's gonna come back a little bit later on. Now, we all have our favorite celebrities, actors, actresses, rock stars, I don't know, even people who are famous for being famous, right? Today with social media. My son drinks this sort of Gatorade alternative that was produced by some YouTube-er, er? I think you can be a YouTube-er now. And I ask, why? He's like, well, because this guy drinks it. And it's amazing how celebrity has now kind of spread out, of course, of the sort of traditional, if you will, definitions that we actually have for it. But you know when your favorite celebrity kind of follows a road that you're not ready to follow? You know, whether it's sort of Christian Scientology, or whether it's some other particular diet plan, or somehow, she's just not the same person that I used to know, or what have you. Well, the same can be said of Alessandro Botticelli. Because it appears, at least to some art historians, that he fell under the spell of the fire-breathing doomsday prophet by the name of Girolamo Savonarola. And when you say that name, it's usually followed by dun-dun-dun at the end. Savonarola, of course, who preached that the end of the world was at hand in Florence at the end of the 15th century, that the city needed to purge itself of its vice. And so on two occasions, in 1496 and 1497, he and his followers, which pretty much meant the entire city, carried vanities, carried luxurious objects into the main piazza of Florence, things like paintings, books dealing with mythological subjects, sumptuous dress, playing cards, dice, and they piled all of it up, and they burned it in a catharsis, trying to show God, of course, that their sinful ways were over. Now, our last class in the Botticelli course was about whether or not Botticelli was indeed a disciple of Savonarola. And to be perfectly frank, there really is no direct evidence. And if he was, then he was really no different than anyone else in Florence, because everyone was sort of under his spell. But one thing can be said with certainty, and that is after Savonarola came and went, we can pretty much break it down to four years, 1494 to 1498, the Botticelli paintings that come after Savonarola's eventual arrest and execution are weird, like this particular painting in the National Gallery in London. We pull this thing apart, and in fact, the Greek writing that appears at the top is all about the apocalyptic atmosphere that was in Florence around the end of the 1490s. He actually signs his name, it's up there in Greek, Mariano, or Sandro di Mariano, as his father's first name was, these dancing psychedelic angels with this vortex opening up in the sky, presumably representing heaven, these three weird-looking angels reading from a book. All of them are dressed, I mean, this is almost 1960s, you know, sort of flower children kind of stuff. Everyone's wearing olive branches up and down. The three magi, who are dressed in rags over here on the side, instead of being rich and ornate and detailed, the shepherds over here, looks like there's a wrestling match going on up here in the front, when instead, they're all embracing each other. It's like, I love you, man, and I love you, man. You can see them down at the bay. This is a very different, in fact, I didn't want to ruin the atmosphere by showing the primavera and birth of Venus, because I wouldn't get you back, as I mentioned before, but that's the Botticelli who comes out of that whole sort of Savonarola period. And so when we look back on some of our celebs who, towards the end of their careers or lives, again, became involved with complicated and weird sorts of circumstances, we can add Botticelli to that list as well, because he was one of them. And right around the same time, there is another artist who appears on the scene. And this one, of course, you have all heard of. Leonardo da Vinci. So famous that we pretty much cut out the whole da Vinci part, right? He is just Leonardo. And Leonardo, who, of course, is celebrated for his extraordinary artwork, so much so, you know, Boddy mentioned the surprise of discovering that Leonardo was a very successful and willing events planner, and that is absolutely true. The parties that he organized for Duke Ludovico Sforza were legendary. And in fact, Vasari, to emphasize just how celebrated Leonardo actually was, writes this dramatic ending to his life. I'm gonna skip all the way ahead to the end of Leonardo's life, right? And this is what he writes. If you don't know, by the way, Leonardo spent the last two years of his life in France. He was the official court artist of King Francis I, and this is how Vasari describes his death in France. Then he was seized by a paroxysm, the forerunner of death, and to show him favor and to soothe his pain, the king held his head. Conscious of the great honor being done to him, the inspired Leonardo breathed his last in the arms of the king. He was then 75 years old. So what a fitting way for someone like Leonardo da Vinci to meet his end, in the arms of the king of France, this great leader, right? And in fact, so much so, this became part of the Leonardo kind of hagiography, if you will, that Ang actually immortalized it in the painting that you see here, where you see the two, I mean, this is like a Hollywood ending, isn't it? Look at that, King Francis staring into the eyes of Leonardo, Leonardo, rosebud, rosebud, right? And then of course, we're gonna spend the rest of the movie trying to figure out what the hell it was that he was talking about about his death. Folks, as far as we know, Francis was in Paris and he was in Fontainebleau when he died, so that made it, and they couldn't FaceTime each other either, right? Technically, upon Leonardo's death, but it's creating that celebrity, oh yeah, that Leonardo, I mean, he died in the arms of the king of France, right? Which of course is the only way to go if you are an artist of that particular caliber at the time. So why is Leonardo so celebrated as an artist? All of us know a little bit about Leonardo da Vinci, but I think if we wanna distill it down to the core, you know, what is it most, or that generates most, let's say, attention, is of course, a single work of art that he produced, which is, oops, let me back up one. Oops, sorry, there it is. There she is, okay? M-L, as I like to call it. In fact, right here on my little cheat sheet of slides, M-L, Mona Lisa for me is M-L. There is no other M-L in the world than the Mona Lisa. The most celebrated work of art, not painting, but work of art on planet Earth. I think as you all know, I've given you the dimensions as well. Just to prepare any of you who've not seen the Mona Lisa in person, because oftentimes when people finally do get to Paris and get into the Louvre, this is what they find waiting for them, okay? It is a veritable madhouse of humanity, and I mean mad because people just kind of lose control when they're in there, and they're elbowing each other, and they're kicking each other, and they're jostling for position. Most of the time, you can see people taking photos of it, but of course, also people taking photos of themselves in front of it. And oftentimes, the comment that I get, people will come to Florence right after they've been to Paris, saying, you know, I was a little disappointed. I thought it was bigger, right? And my response is always, it's not her fault that she's this small. But the fact of the matter is, it's blown so out of proportion in terms of notoriety that a majority of people, not only who are in the Louvre, but who are in the city of Paris, are there for one reason, and that is to say that they can check off the Mona Lisa from that bucket list, right, that we all have. And so, of course, what is it then about the Mona Lisa that makes it so famous? Well, it must be something intrinsic in the painting, of course, right? Bonnie mentioned the last topic that we covered when I came here, which of course was that enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa. What is she smiling about? Songs have been written about this particular painting, and that smile. Books, volumes have been written about it. Is she pregnant? Is it a self-portrait of Leonardo in drag? There's so many different proposed ones. Folks, what makes this painting famous has nothing to do with what Leonardo painted. I just wanna be clear about this. The painting was well-known. It is one of just a few paintings that exist in the entire world by Leonardo. I mean, if we're gonna be very strict about counting off the number of paintings, finished and or unfinished that we can attribute to Leonardo, including the one that recently sold for a half billion dollars, meaning the Salvatore Mundi, were up to about 15 paintings. So that means anything that Leonardo did would be sensational, what have you. But what launched this particular Leonardo painting into the stratosphere of notoriety was its theft in the year 1911. Because it was already famous, and because it was arguably the most famous museum in the world at the time, the Louvre in Paris, and what have you, its theft from the museum became a media circus. Now, consider that we're pretty much talking about what? Radio and newspapers at this time. But word got out real quick. Can you imagine if something of this caliber happened today with all of the mass media technology that we have? I mean, it would probably short-circuit everything, and everything would start breaking down. It disappears from the Louvre, and every major newspaper on planet Earth covers the story and continues to reproduce the image. And they keep hammering it into people's minds and hammering it into people's minds until finally everyone knows a little bit about art history now. Because all of us can recognize at least one really famous painting, and that really famous painting is ML, the Mona Lisa. And in fact, I have clippings. I've only shown you two, one in English here, one in French, and this one actually shows the kind of conclusion of the story. But Russian newspapers, you name it, covering the theft of the actual painting known as the Mona Lisa. And if the theft of the painting wasn't sensational enough, how about its rediscovery two years later in 1913? In other words, it's almost as if the whole thing was orchestrated, because only two years had gone by, so it was enough time to keep the Mona Lisa in people's immediate consciousness, you follow? In other words, if it was a theft that had happened 50 years ago, and then, oh yeah, by the way, you know they finally found the guy? Few of us, I think, would really care, because an entire generation and a half had gone by since its theft. But because it was only two years, because of course news traveling much slower then it did today, that theft was still an immediate reality. And many people actually traveled to Paris to look at where the Mona Lisa had been. I mean, think about that. You can always call this today a contemporary installation. Let's pull the painting out, right? See how people react. Like, wasn't there a painting there once? Like, yeah, I think there was. And folks, by the sheer arrangement, I think you can tell how, think about what the Mona Lisa looks like today in that photograph that I showed you, and how it's presented. It has its own wall. They built that wall for the Mona Lisa. It has a wall of bulletproof glass in front of it. It has that railing that keeps you about six feet away, and what have you. Back then, there's really nothing except that one single railing that you see here, and it was sandwiched really tightly between two other paintings. I mean, so clearly it wasn't as popular as it is today, until this actually took place. This, of course, being the theft. This was the media circus, of course, that launched the Mona Lisa into the stratosphere of notoriety. This is the gentleman who became famous for stealing the Mona Lisa, Vincenzo Perugia. Now, Perugia actually worked at the Louvre at the time. He was an employee there, and decided to pretend to go home one night, and instead locked himself into the janitor's closet. Went out, took the Mona Lisa off the wall, put it under his jacket, waited for the museum to open the next day, and then calmly walked out with the painting wrapped up underneath his coat. Perugia always claimed that his motivation for stealing the painting was nationalistic. Remember, this is 1911. This is, what, 40 years, 50 years after the unification of Italy, and so Italy was on fire with nationalism at this time. You know, Italia, Italia, and because supposedly Perugia thought that the Mona Lisa had been brought to Paris by Napoleon, he thought that its rightful place was back in Italy, so his plan was to actually take it home. Now, folks, Napoleon did not take the Mona Lisa to France, so if Perugia simply did his homework, he would have discovered that Leonardo took the painting with him when he went there in 1517, and that's a whole other cat to skin, because what business did Leonardo have possessing a portrait that he was painting for somebody else? All right, and that's another great mystery regarding the Mona Lisa. So in all probability, either Perugia was that dumb, or Perugia was using the nationalism story to cover up the theft, and I actually opt for the second proposal here, because in all likelihood, it appears that the theft of the Mona Lisa was actually done on commission, but because no one thought that they had actually pulled the thing off, once the painting was stolen, it was too hot to handle, as most famous works of art actually are, because who would, I mean, unless you're some kind of really deranged, megalomaniacal oligarch who wants to put it somewhere in a Swiss vault and go look at it once every 10 years, simply to know that you possess it or what have you, but that was clearly not the case with Perugia, but he went the safe route, and in fact, when the painting was finally retrieved, and of all places, where do they find it? Florence. Think about that. She went home. I mean, she ends up in the very place where Leonardo painted her, because if you don't know, that is an actual human being, everyone. I think people, the painting's so famous, it almost transcends the fact that it's a portrait. Her name is Lisa Ghirardini. She was the wife of a man, really nasty man, but a man by the name of Francesco del Giocondo, which is why the Italians call the painting La Gioconda. We don't call it Mona Lisa. The French don't even call it Mona Lisa. They call it La Gioconda instead, and so the excitement, of course, that Mona Lisa, or La Gioconda, è tornata a casa, she's come home, and they actually kept her in the Uffizi. This is when the painting was there. Can you imagine being that close to that painting? The gentleman that you see, the first gentleman here in the black coat, is Ugo Poggi, who's a god in Florence. He's the guy responsible for kind of redesigning the entire city. He was the director of the Uffizi at the time, and he essentially was the one who then worked out the negotiations with the Louvre, saying, hey, look, we found it, so please just let us hold onto it for a little while, so that Mona Lisa could, in a sense, stay home, so the idea that at that time, again, 1913, you could actually see the painting more or less like this. Today, of course, it's more or less like this, and so Leonardo da Vinci, we love to dwell on the fact that he was the polymath, and he was the hydraulic engineer, and he was the first physiologist, and he was the, yeah, and he did all that, but I think ultimately, that celebrity status goes back to one simple work of art, and that is what you're looking at right now, and in fact, all it took was a little doodle on this celebrated, iconic, almost holy relic of a work of art to get everyone up at arms, when it actually happened, and in fact, this became, for a while, even more famous than the Mona Lisa, and that is, of course, the reworking there with the moustache and the goatee by Marcel Duchamp, which I've always found particularly funny, all right? Of course, another of the celebrity artists up on the Mount Olympus, if you will, of the Renaissance is the gentleman that you see here. Now, Raphael is my third member of the high Renaissance holy trinity, all right? My GTF, my god, the father, is Leonardo da Vinci. My GTS, my god, the son, is Michelangelo Bonarotti, and my god, my GTHS, my god, the holy spirit, is Raphael Sancio da Urbino. Now, you know he's famous because he's one of the four teenage mutant ninja turtles, and I know that sounds facetious and silly to all of you, but sometimes, in order to really get a grasp of how famous these guys are in popular culture, we need things like the teenage mutant ninja turtles, because the, I don't know who the creator was, and I probably heard the story, what have you, but the fact that he would choose three Florentine artists, you know, I'm just counting to be sure, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael, and of course, the fourth was Donatello. Raphael was the only one of the four not from Florence, by the way, and this is kind of a big deal, per se. He was a true rock star, Raphael was in Rome. I know you don't hear about him as much as Michelangelo, and the reason is because his major paintings are not as sensationalized as those by Michelangelo. I dare say that his most celebrated is the School of Athens, fresco, located in the apartments of Pope Julius II, or what we call today the stanze, the Raffaello, even though they weren't Raphael's rooms. It's funny, actually, my daughter was studying ancient Greece last week, and she had a test, and she came home, and she had all this stuff printed out, and this was the image that was on her cheat sheet for the test, you're using a Renaissance painting of ancient Greek figures. I mean, the idea that that's how this painting has come to somehow symbolize, if you will, that ancient Greek world, and remember what I said. The far right-hand corner of a painting becomes the signature place for an artist's visual signature, and if you don't know, way over here in the corner, peering out at us, is in fact a self-portrait of the young Raphael. Now, how young? 25 years young, all right? He was a true boy wonder, a wunderkind. When he showed up, in fact, Pope Julius hired him, he fired the guy who was working on this room previous to Raphael, and then gave him total responsibility for the execution, and Raphael certainly did not disappoint. Are we sure this is a self-portrait of Raphael? Absolutely, and in fact, something else that happens, everyone, is that our familiarity with what these guys look like increases as well. Remember, Giotto, I was relying on effigies and probable self-portraits or wishful self-portraits or what have you, but now we know exactly what Raphael looked like, we know exactly what Leonardo da Vinci looked like, we know exactly what Sandro Botticelli looked like, and that, too, is part, of course, of the development of this celebrity status, if you will, and in fact, here we can put the alleged self-portrait in the Uffizi on the left-hand side up against the alleged self-portrait in the Raphael rooms on the right-hand side, and you can see that they are one and the same. Now, in the 15-teens, this guy was bigger than Mike. Okay, you're looking for the expression bigger than Jesus. Well, being bigger than Jesus in the second decade of the 16th century in Rome meant being bigger than Mike, and by Mike, I mean Michelangelo, all right? And so if somebody was saying, well, how come I've never, I mean, yeah, I heard of Raphael, but I don't really know what he did. How come he's not as famous as the other guys? The reason is because his life was cut prematurely short. He died at the ripe old age of 37. So you remember there was that period when all of these celebrities were coming forward and vanting the number of sexual encounters they'd had in their lives? I'm thinking primarily of Gene Simmons from Kiss. You remember that? 5,000 women, and then the next guy went on, David Letterman, and he's like, I slept with 6,000 women. This guy, well, according to Giorgio Vasari, it was, in fact, Raphael's sexual promiscuity, which was the cause of his premature death, right? And in fact, if Leonardo's death was entertaining, how about Raphael's? Meanwhile, Raphael kept up his secret love affairs and pursued his pleasures with no sense of moderation. And then on one occasion, he went to excess, and he returned home afterwards with a violent fever, which the doctors diagnosed as having been caused by heat stroke. Raphael kept quiet about his incontinence, and very imprudently, instead of giving him the restoratives he needed, they bled him until he grew faint and felt himself sinking, and then eventually he dies. So one night of partying, and again, today we've become almost numb to this, but that celebrity who was found dead under mysterious circumstances in the hotel room in Vegas, we think it was this. It's the same sort of thing. Now, did someone literally love Raphael to death? Folks, there's no direct evidence to support that idea, but hey, if you're gonna go, right? What better way is there than for Vasari's description of Raphael's premature death? And so that sex, drugs, and rock and roll kind of idea is not as new as we'd like to think it is, because obviously some of this pertains to these great artists as well. All right, let us address the elephant in the room, right? And of course, we're talking about Big Mike himself. Now, I want you to realize something. How long was Vasari's life of Botticelli? Seven pages. His life of Michelangelo is 117 pages long, all right? So just the fact, and in fact, what I haven't mentioned yet is that the organization, the structure of the book, The Lives of the Artists, is biblical. In other words, Vasari's organized it such that it's kind of an evolutionary idea. So the Cimabue's and the Giotto's at the beginning would kind of be like the Noah's and the Moses in the Old Testament, right? And then, of course, as we get closer and closer to the true period of the Renaissance, the figures take on greater importance. So I always said that Adonitello might be an Old Testament prophet Isaiah. I'd say that Leonardo da Vinci would be John the Baptist, all right, and Michelangelo for Giorgio Vasari was nothing less than the Messiah himself, at least in terms of art. And I just want to read you the opening here, because it's epic. What better way to begin the life of your hero than the way that Vasari does? Enlightened by what had been achieved by, oh, no, here it is. I'm sorry, I'm gonna skip that preamble, because it's kind of useless. Meanwhile, the benign ruler of heaven graciously looked down to earth, saw the worthlessness of what was being done, the intense but utterly fruitless studies and the presumption of men who were farther from true art than night is from day, and resolved to save us from our errors. So the benign ruler, God himself, was resolved to save all of us from our errors, and that includes everyone I just mentioned, by the way, right, Leonardo and Raphael as well. So he decided to send into the world an artist who would be skilled in each and every craft, whose work alone would teach us how to attain perfection in design by correct drawing and by the use of contour and light and shadows so as to obtain relief in painting, and how to use right judgment in sculpture and in architecture create buildings which would be comfortable and secure, healthy, pleasant to look at, well-proportioned and richly ornamented. Moreover, he determined to give this artist the knowledge of true moral philosophy and the gift of poetic expression so that everyone might admire and follow him as their perfect exemplar in life, work, and behavior. Life, work, and behavior, everyone. It's not just the artistic thing. I mean, this Michelangelo's like, I mean, he is the second coming of Christ, right? And in every endeavor, and he would be acclaimed as divine. Vasari writes that he, this person that God is sending down to us, would be acclaimed as divine. And believe it or not, everyone, during his lifetime, Michelangelo was known as the divine Michelangelo. Imagine what an ego boost that must have been, right? Walking around, oh, divino, how are you, divino, right? And Michelangelo was fully aware of his notoriety at the time. And exploited it to the last drop, right? Now, of course, what made Big Mike famous? And I think it's safe to say, to a certain extent, in his own day, what made him famous was, of course, his artistic ability. The prodigy, again, this idea that from a very young age, Beethoven, or was it Mozart, excuse me, writing symphonies at the age of five. Well, Michelangelo carving something like this at the age of 23. I always refer to this as his first number one hit, right? This is what made Michelangelo famous. Now, I want you to realize that this concept of the hater that we use today, you know, these haters, oh, those haters, they just try to drag you down. Well, haters existed at the end of the 15th century as well. And I always imagine the haters looking at Michelangelo's statue of the Pietà saying, okay, yeah, this kid really knocked it out of the park this time, but let's see what he does next. And Michelangelo follows up the Pietà with this little number, right? By the time he had turned 30, Michelangelo had carved two of the greatest statues of all time, and either could be considered the greatest of all time by the time he turned 30 years of age. So some would say, of course, that his notoriety was well-deserved, right? By the time he turned 40, we have to throw the Sistine Chapel into the mix as well. That is extraordinary. I mean, then we get into these sort of, you know, today they're doing it with, my son's a soccer maniac. I enjoy the sport as well, but it's, they're comparing, you know, the older Messi against the younger M. Bob Payne. If we look at the statistics, he scored more goals by the time he was 20 than this guy did. I mean, it's essentially what we're doing now, that by the time Michelangelo turned 40, who can keep up with this guy? I mean, who could possibly produce art to this quantity and quality at the same level as Michelangelo could? So, of course, all of us know a lot about Michelangelo, right? And how many of you are under the impression that when Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling, that he was on his back when he painted it? Let's see some hands. Yeah, I know you're all, yeah, because you know it's a trick question. I wasn't, I don't know, I know. Why do we all think, or why, at least at some point, did we all think that he was lying on his back? And the answer is very simply, because of a novel published in 1961. Now, folks, this is a great book. You will not hear me taking jabs at Irving Stone. He did a lot of research to write this. It's just that a lot of the information that he has has been kind of superseded by the scholarship which has occurred since then. We found out so much more about Michelangelo from primary documentary and archival sources that a lot of what he said was just flat out wrong. Add to that, of course, the historical context in which it was written. So Michelangelo had to be portrayed in a certain way, of course, so as not to get the censors in an uproar. And in this book, it is indeed Irving Stone who says that Michelangelo was lying on his back when he painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling. So it becomes, you know, what Bonnie was saying before about the Isaacson biography. You know, so many people read that book and that was an incredibly well-researched book. I'm not gonna criticize it either. But, oh, well, you know, he says this. He says, so it must be true. And if Stone said that he was on his back, then it must be true. To reinforce this myth, we, of course, need to go to Hollywood, right? And then I think it was 63 or whatever it was that Hollywood got their hands on the book. Charlton Heston as Michelangelo, Rex Harrison as Pope Julius II, and, of course, all those people who didn't read the book watched the movie, even though it was a big blockbuster or a box office flop. And, of course, there's Chuck up on the scaffolding, looking down, hurling two by fours at the Pope as Irving Stone would have us believe. And in the movie, well, there he was. He was on his back. And, you know, if that's the way Hollywood says it happened, damn it, it must have happened this way as well. Notwithstanding the fact, although this was discovered after, that Michelangelo actually left us proof and information as to his posture when he painted the Sistine Ceiling and it was not lying down. This is actually a sonnet written by Michelangelo. So if you've ever wondered what his handwriting looked like, echo, there it is. And it's pretty neat. I mean, this is very easy stuff to read. My expertise is in 15th century archival documentation. That's murder. I mean, that is just chicken scratch that you're trying to decipher this. If you know Italian, you know, io già fatto. This is a weird abbreviation. That's a U and that means that there's an N missing. Un gozzo. I've already made a goiter in questo stato, in this state. He goes on and on in true, oh me, oh my whining fashion about the physical demands. But more importantly, look at the little corner down here of the drawing where he shows us that he was actually standing up and painting the ceiling. So visual proof that he was not lying down, but if that's the way Hollywood showed it, then it must be true. Notwithstanding the fact that in the 1980s when they restored the Sistine Chapel ceiling and in fact reconstructed the scaffolding to what they thought was an exact replica of Michelangelo's own, there's just no way you'd be able to lie down. You had to stand, sometimes on ladders actually, to actually reach the ceiling. Pardon the grainy quality of the photo, but it is an old photograph that you're looking at there. And so Michelangelo, I'd say an artist who was as famous in his own day as he is today. I want you to realize that. So it's not as if he somehow, because of half billion dollar paintings or what have you, of all the artists that I'm talking about, with the exception of the next, I'd say that Michelangelo was probably as famous while he was alive as he is in our own contemporary world. And to the point where, again, he would exploit it, right? That celebrity status. So that when he was commissioned at the age of 51, to paint, I'm sorry, 61, to paint the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel. Now how many of you have seen The Last Judgment in person? It's a pretty impressive painting, yes? But what few people realize is that originally a majority of the holy figures painted on what is the most important wall in the Catholic world. I just want to be clear about this. Because up until fairly recently, the Pope would say Mass daily, directly in front of this wall. A majority of the figures that Michelangelo painted up there were entirely nude. Now let's just remember Adam and Eve, right? And the whole consciousness of nudity thing. And to the point where Michelangelo was criticized in his own day for the inappropriateness of this, right? There was a papal master of ceremonies who said it was more appropriate for a bath or for a brothel than it was for the Pope's private chapel. And Michelangelo retorted by immortalizing the guy as Minos down here in hell. And this is not how we discovered it later on. No, we knew. This was a contemporary portrait of the Secretary of State of the Vatican, right? In hell, and there's a big snake taking a big chunk out of his private parts and what have you as well. And the best part about this is that this guy, his name was Biagio da Cesena. And again, this is not legend or urban legend. This is fact. He went to Pope Paul III and filed a formal complaint saying, Papa, okay, the fun's over now. Please ask Michelangelo to remove my face. And Pope Paul III's comment to his master of ceremonies was supposedly chuckling while he said it. Look, if Michelangelo had painted you up in heaven, maybe I could have pulled some strings. But unfortunately, I have no pull down in hell. So yeah, we'll have to leave it there. I mean, think about the audacity of Michelangelo to actually do this and get away with it. And then of course, not surprisingly, the timing was not coincidence. One year after Michelangelo, this is a schematic drawing of all of the Photoshopping that was done. In other words, all the red is strategic placement of illusionistic fabric. So today, I mean, look at that weird little G-string apparatus that Adam has on. Peter has that little piece of cloth conveniently covering his genitalia. Look at the schematic. It wasn't there before. They Photoshopped this, but only after Michelangelo died because they didn't want to offend him. I mean, that's the kind of status that he actually had. And in fact, those of you, some of you were with me for our Amalfi Coast Copy in Naples program. Last year, we made it a point to look at this painting by Venusti. So he actually did a small copy of the Last Judgment and what it looked like before all of the Photoshopping was done. And you can see all of these saints in their nudity. So you know how certain people do controversial things and they get literally chased out of the business. You never hear from them again because they become pariahs or what have you. But then there are other guys, the more controversial they are, the more successful they are. And that, I think, has to do with the degree of celebrity status. You know, the all publicity, or is it all publicity? Isn't good publicity, right? That kind of idea. Well, Michelangelo was over the tipping point. And he knew that regardless of what he did, whether it be sacrilegious, obscene, blasphemous, or what have you, he would get away with it. And other artists at the same time simply would not. But I think, in fact, to this point, where he creates his own funerary monument here, which is just recently cleaned, by the way, if any of you go in Florence at the time, and he puts himself, that's his face. And the only reason an artist would put his face in a work of art is because the artist presumed that people would recognize it. There's no other point. You follow? So the idea that by the age of 75, which was when the sculpture was done, clearly Michelangelo knew, of course, that people would recognize him, which is why he includes his face in his pieta, his funerary statue, right? Now, his namesake is an artist that I think most of you have heard of as well. And as I was saying earlier, I think this is the guy where life and art become blurred. In other words, it is, I think, fairly safe to say that we can consider Michelangelo Medici, better known as Caravaggio, as a clinical sociopath. This guy had severe issues, everyone, okay? A majority of what we know about this guy, we know from his rap sheet. He was constantly in trouble with the law, from assault, to libel, to murder. He actually kills him. I mean, some of the instances, when he's in a restaurant, I was talking about artichokes with you a few moments ago. He orders artichokes, which is a Roman specialty, 400 years later. And he asked the waiter, he's looking at the menu, you can almost imagine, it's like, so are these artichokes fried or are they steamed? And the waiter, probably a millennial, you know how millennials, that kind of flippant attitude, like how the hell am I supposed to know, man? So I felt like this sometimes, and I'd never done what he did. He picks up the plate and hurls it at the face of the waiter, a plate full of artichokes, and, of course, is arrested for it. He's delinquent on his rent, and he has to leave Rome because he got into a fight and he was afraid he was gonna go to jail, so he went to Jennifer for a while. When he comes back, his landlord had locked him out of his apartment. So Caravaggio goes to her house and starts throwing rocks through his windows. He is romantically involved with a prostitute and then assaults one of her clients. Probably not a good idea to get romantically involved with a prostitute. You're gonna have a problem with her, and is arrested again. I mean, it's just one thing after another, but he was, and he's described by the victim of his libel, the man he actually criticized publicly, one of his biographers, ironically, as the most important painter in Rome around the year 1600. Okay, and that's a big deal. There's some pretty big fish running around. And Caravaggio, do we think he's as wacky as he was because his art is that wacky, or is his art wacky because he was? So a painting like this, which I think most people recognize, is actually a self-portrait. That's him as Medusa. He's using a convex mirror, and we can actually pretty much, with a computer today, figure out how that convex surface distorted, stretched his facial features. But if we bring it back to normal, it is a self-portrait of Caravaggio. You know, and it's not just the head of Medusa. It's the head of Medusa at the moment that it was separated from the body and the blood gushing into Quentin Tarantino. You know, fashion coming down, that look of horror on its face. This guy came out of left field. Artists had never seen anything like him in terms of its graphic realism. Or in this celebrated painting, this was his kind of coming out painting because it was the first to be put in a public space, which was a chapel in a very popular church in Rome. It depicts the martyrdom of the evangelist and apostle Saint Matthew. You can see him getting it right here. Okay, now there's a famous line. One of the Martin Scorsese movies, I can't remember if it was Goodfellas or Casino, talking about someone who was just so nasty and evil that he was the kind of guy who rooted for the bad guy in the movie. Well, Caravaggio not only rooted for the bad guy in the movie, who's the man who ordered the assassination of Saint Matthew, he actually depicts himself as the bad guy in the movie. And so that face that you see leaning in in the context of the story is the king of Ethiopia who ordered the assassination of Saint Matthew. But the face is a self-portrait of Caravaggio. And so this nefarious, sinister character, the order of the deaths of biblical figures. Another of Caravaggio's incredibly moving paintings is, of course, his Betrayal of Christ, today located in Dublin, recently discovered painting as well. And his signature, his style is so recognizable. It's like up in your face, right? Primo piano, close-up stuff. He reduces it down to fewer figures. You know, none of that background landscape stuff that artists were wasting their time on. And you can see the power of figures and the drama and the theatrical lighting as well. And look at that lantern, right? So if you're trying to figure out from which direction the light is coming, stop, because it's coming from multiple directions at one time. But it's interesting that the only thing the lantern lights up is the face of this guy, and the face of that guy is the face of Caravaggio. He puts himself there in the scene, holding up, trying to get a glimpse of the betrayal, of the most sinister moment of the whole story, when Jesus is, you know, one of his closest friends, ends up becoming his most important betrayer and traitor as well. But I think perhaps that the most telling representation of Caravaggio, this painting was his act of contrition. You know how sometimes we listen to songs, we'll watch a movie, and we'll kind of come out with a personal interpret, in other words, that the director made that movie because, I remember, it was one of the Rocky movies, appropriately, where Stallone said that, and the one he'd made, I think it was Rocky V, he didn't feel like he really gave the fans what they deserved, so he decided to make another, you know, so that we kind of, we eat that stuff, we believe it or what have you. And so Caravaggio, who was on the run for murder, and in fact, his sentence was not just death, but death by beheading, and the official decree was that if anyone caught Caravaggio before the papal authorities caught up with him, they could legally enact the punishment. Feel free to behead him if you come across Caravaggio, what have you. And speaking of beheadings, this was the painting that he was sending to the Pope as an act of self-contrition, technically, because it's a double self-portrait, Caravaggio was a young man. When he killed the gentleman in 1606, Caravaggio was 29, 33 years old. No, 35 years old, excuse me, he was 35. Clearly, this is not a 35-year-old, this is a younger Caravaggio, but this is the 35-year-old Caravaggio. He actually paints his own face as the disembodied head of Goliath. And the message that he's delivering to the Pope is, look, I've cut off that head. That's not me anymore. Yeah, this is the me that you knew, but this is the new me now, the me who's presenting that wild, that reckless, that violent sort of figure to you instead. And the more he got in trouble, the more controversial he was, the more violent he was, the more popular Caravaggio actually became. And so no publicity is bad publicity, as the expression goes. And I think Caravaggio was very much aware of that, but unfortunately for him, his career would come to an abrupt and early end in 1610, when he died under mysterious circumstances at the age of 39. Now, some of you may remember back in 2010, which was the fourth centennial of his death, National Geographic claimed to have rediscovered his bones down in Porto Eticole, which is the place where he supposedly passed away or what have you. When I just found it astounding because it's, okay, well, it's Caravaggio. I don't know if you've picked up on this, but all these anniversary years. So 2020 was the 500th anniversary of the death of Raphael. And there's the big show that started before COVID, but then continued after. 2010 was the anniversary of the death of Caravaggio. 2019 was the anniversary of the death of, so we need to do stuff, right? To then, oh, we need to celebrate what have you. And that was the year that they actually resurrected poor Caravaggio because we're so desperate to learn more. You know, it's like today. And in fact, this is ultimately everyone, most of us are just mortal human beings, okay? And these guys, they kind of tasted the divine. You know, and we as mortals wanna know what that feels like. So that's why we pick up that damn National Enquirer every time we're at the supermarket. That's why we're always looking at the cover of those tabloid magazines or going on social media to find out whether Prince whoever's, you know, doing this or what have you sort of thing. Because ultimately it makes the mortal feel a little immortal. And ultimately brings us a little bit closer to that sort of notion of divinity that Vasari actually talked about in his book. And ultimately the art is all these guys have left behind for us to become a bit closer to it all. So with that, folks, thank you very much. It was great to see all of you. Thank you.