Word: michelangelos
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...most people today automobiles, jetplanes and the Golden Gate Bridge spontaneously evoke "It's beautiful!" Responses to Michelangelo's Pieta or Degas monotypes are more self-conscious...
Eliot spent several hours a day for six weeks atop the tower within touching distance of the ceiling, contemplating the frescoes as Michelangelo himself saw them in his four years of labor...
...ceiling seems to tent us in, and there is a vast rush of images, a crystalline turbulence. The clarity of colors is the first surprise. From the floor, the figures overhead look like painted sculpture. Up here you find transparency, veils of atmosphere, light-filled shadows. Perhaps Michelangelo felt that opaque colors would be out of place in a world of legend, myth and mystery...
...Throughout the vast expanse of the ceiling, Michelangelo presents mutually exclusive themes or moments or levels of meaning as simultaneous images. He deliberately interweaves human, titanic, planetary and angelic, and even divine motifs. When you lie atop the tower day after day, his figures seem to be moving and communicating in a thousand ways. At times, the mere glance of a painted eye, an unexpected highlight, or the crook of a finger clues you in to some new turning of the artist's labyrinthine mind. The bonds between his figures are abstract, of course, but no less real...
...most astonishing things about the ceiling near at hand is the unfailing precision of its forms, both large and small. Michelangelo has caused each painted figure to exist in full, down to the subtlest wrinkle of a foot sole or the snug arc of a toenail. These refinements, needless to say, are quite invisible from down below. Why did the artist bother? In one of his sonnets, he exclaims, 'My soul can find no stair on which to climb to heaven, unless it be earth's loveliness...