MICHELANGELO

From the Providence Journal October 29, 2006:

"Opera Providence will be headed for the Providence Performing Arts Center for the premiere of local composer Enrico Garzilli’s Michelangelo, a sort of amalgam of grand opera and Broadway, said De Crescenzo. That will feature projections of the artist’s work and an orchestra of 23 musicians from the Rhode Island Philharmonic."

MICHELANGELO
A Musical Play by Enrico Garzilli

The musical play, Michelangelo, is a coming of age story. It follows the life of the great Renaissance artist from his youth to his magnificent triumph, the painting of the Sistine Ceiling. Like so many great artists, Michelangelo faced seemingly insurmountable challenges and obstacles. The first obstacle was from his father who wanted Michelangelo to be a banker or, at the least, an accountant. It was very difficult for Michelangelo to convince his father that sculpting was a respectable profession. After all, his father argues, “no one in our family has worked with his hands for ages.” His father, finally, gives in and allows him to study painting with Ghirlandaio and also with the sculptor, Bertoldo. Bertoldo was one of the tutors for the children of Lorenzo de’Medici, who was one of the most important patrons of art in the Renaissance. Lorenzo welcomed Michelangelo into his home where he was tutored by some of greatest minds of the age.

The next great obstacle in Michelangelo’s young life came from the fire and brimstone preacher, Savonarola, who bellowed that art leads people away from God and, therefore, should be burned or destroyed. Again, Michelangelo was faced with his father’s question, “is art a worthy profession?” Even late in his life, Michelangelo shuddered at the remembered voice of the preacher, proclaiming that artists were doomed to the eternal flames of hell. Michelangelo was so convinced that an artist was only imitating God, the Creator, in exercising his creativity that he went on at a very young age, his early twenties to be exact, to sculpt the magnificent Pieta. This was followed by David in his mid twenties and finally, the Sistine Ceiling. the masterpiece that ends the musical play.

Though the Sistine Ceiling was indeed a triumph for Michelangelo, and the world for that matter, the painting of it started out as a crisis for Michelangelo. The Pope, Julius the Second, who commissioned the Ceiling, had originally asked Michelangelo to sculpt his tomb. Michelangelo worked tirelessly on the tomb and was heartbroken when the Pope told him to stop. Decorating the Sistine Ceiling, as Julius called the commission, seemed to be busy work for the artist. Of course, Michelangelo turned the project into something that far transcends decoration into one of the greatest accomplishments of the Renaissance, or of any age.

Michelangelo viewed the sculptor as a liberator who takes away the stony curtain, hiding the essence of the marble’s soul. To be sure, Michelangelo is, indeed, a great liberator, who continues enabling us to find the heart of beauty often hidden in a chaotic world.

A NOTE ON THE RENAISSANCE

The beginnings of the fifteenth century Renaissance, which occurred in Florence, are largely attributed to its ruling family, the Medici. Their wealth, which was based primarily on banking, contributed greatly to the formation of a new culture. They helped make Florence one of the most important cultural and commercial centers in Europe. Cosimo de’ Medici and his family, all very educated, became extraordinary patrons of the arts. They encouraged and supported scholarship and art with their substantial finances. The scholars that surrounded them looked back to the civilization of Greece and Rome with terrific passion. They read and spoke Latin and Greek. Some, like Pico, a Platonic scholar and tutor of Michelangelo, even learned Arabic. Pico’s teacher, Ficino, was commissioned to translate all of Plato by Cosimo de' Medici, Lorenzo’s grandfather. Lorenzo carried on his grandfather’s passion by supporting Michelangelo as a young man, even inviting him into the Medici Palace to live and be tutored with his children. And, of course, their contributions were further spread by the invention of the printing press (1450).

The Renaissance, as we have come to define that period, signifies a “rebirth”. Though the popularization of that term is rather recent, scholars of the period viewed themselves as achieving a new consciousness in the definition of the human person. All of this learning was very important in the formation of who and what Michelangelo became. “Virtue”, “fame” and “glory” became key words, indicating the paramount importance of the human person. The infinite possibilities of creative achievement are extolled. The chief tone became one of unbridled optimism. In the preceding centuries, the human person looked primarily to a life beyond this one, and the emphasis placed on a final transcendent judgement. It is not that this final judgment is totally forgotten in the Renaissance, note Michelangelo’s fresco of the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, but pushed to the side and human activity concentrated itself on this life. The assumption became clear: there are things highly worth doing within a temporal pattern. This emphasis on the human person contributed to a humanism that highly valued creativity and achievement. A list of some of the artists of the period besides Michelangelo is truly extraordinary: Massaccio, Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Leonardo, Titian, Botticelli, etc.

This humanistic emphasis on terrestrial achievement, however, has some less than positive implications. Savonarola saw this from a religious point of view. Machiavelli saw it from quite another angle. The Prince, for instance, gives a view of the human person that is hardly optimistic. His observation that man is evil is not so much a conclusion about humanity but a premise. This epistemological view is not that of a moral philosopher, however, but that of a practical politician whose craft is made up of deceit, treachery and betrayal. The greatness of Michelangelo is that he is capable of embracing both views with extraordinary empathy. If he captures man’s fall from grace in the Last Judgement, he also captures man as the “imago Dei”, the image of God. In the very same Chapel we have both. Perhaps we might say that in the very same Chapel one man captures the entire essence of the Renaissance.