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A T the time of the Renaissance, young girls used to wear golden garlands or wreaths around their hair, as girls nowadays wear bracelets round their wrists or rings on their fingers. One goldsmith was so famous for the garlands he made that he was called Ghirlandajo (Gear-lan-dah’yo),which means a maker of garlands. Ghirlandajo gave up making garlands and began to paint pictures instead. He made many very fine pictures, but the chief thing he made was an artist, Michelangelo (Mike-el-an’je-lo). Michelangelo studied with Ghirlandajo for three years, and the teacher paid the pupil, instead of charging for his teaching!
Ghirlandajo was probably a good teacher of painting,but young Michelangelo liked making statues better than painting pictures. So he left Ghirlandajo’s workshop and began to study sculpture.
Now, Michelangelo was not a very easy person to get along with. He didn’t mind saying what he thought, even if it hurt other people’s feelings. One day he said he thought another young sculptor’s statue wasn’t much good. This probably was true, but the other young sculptor got very angry and hit Michelangelo on the nose. He punched him so hard that the nose was broken. All the rest of his life Michelangelo had an ugly crooked nose.
Michelangelo soon became famous as a sculptor — a man who makes statues or sculpture. He moved from the city of Florence to Rome, and there he worked for the Pope, who liked Michelangelo’s work so much that he didn’t want him to make statues for any one else.
This Pope wanted to have pictures painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. The Sistine is a chapel in the Vatican, the palace of the Popes. It has a very high curved ceiling. The Pope asked Michelangelo to paint the pictures on the ceiling, but the artist said that he was a sculptor and didn’t at all want to paint. Then some enemies of his spread around the story that be didn’t want to do it because he wasn’t good enough at painting and was afraid to try. This made Michelangelo angry. He made up his mind he would show that he could do the work as well as any painter in the world.
First of all, he had to have a scaffolding built in the chapel.The scaffolding was a wooden framework with boards across the top near the ceiling so that Michelangelo could climb up on the boards and paint.
If you stop to think a moment, you will see how hard it must have been to paint pictures on a ceiling. The painter had to lie on his back on the scaffolding. He had to be so close to the ceiling that he could see only the part right above him, unless he climbed down the ladder and looked up. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is very large. The pictures on it had to be large so people could see them plainly from the floor down below. How would you like to draw the head of a man when you could not see where his feet were to be? Even if you were a good painter, that would be hard to do. And if Michelangelo put too much paint on his brush the paint would drip down all over him. No wonder he didn’t want to do the job!
But once he had started, nothing could stop him. At first he had some other artists to help him, but he found the helpers couldn’t do the work just as he wanted it, so he sent them away and kept on all by himself.
It took him four and a half years to finish the ceiling,and that was really a very short time when you think of the work that had to be done! The Pope kept telling him to hurry and Michelangelo even moved his bed into the chapel so he would be able to spend more time painting.
NO.12-1 CREATION OF MAN MICHELANGELO
The Pope also kept telling him how the pictures should be done. Michelangelo didn’t like this, because he felt he knew more about such things than the Pope did. So one day when the Pope was standing on the floor calling up advice to the painter, Michelangelo let a hammer drop from the scaffolding. He was careful to let it fall quite near the Pope — near enough to scare him. After that the Pope stayed out of the chapel while Michelangelo was painting!
Finally, the ceiling was almost finished. Michelangelo wanted to add some touches of gold paint, but the Pope was so anxious to have the chapel opened that the artist had the scaffolding taken down before the gold was put on.
Then people came from all over Rome to see what the famous sculptor had done as a painter. What they saw was a painting of Bible pictures. Around the edges of the ceiling were huge figures of prophets who had foretold the coming of Christ. Down the middle of the ceiling were shown pictures of the Old Testament stories — The Six Days of Creation, Noah’s Ark and the Flood, and others. The pictures were drawn so well that people were astonished.
The men and women painted on the ceiling look strong and solid. They look like statues, which of course are the shape of real people all around, and not just flat pictures. So we call Michelangelo’s paintings sculpturesque or like sculpture.
In this photograph you see a small part of the ceiling. It shows the Creation of Man. Notice what great shoulders and muscles Adam has.
Almost thirty years after the ceiling was painted,Michelangelo was asked to paint a picture on the wall over the altar at one end of the Sistine Chapel. The wall was already covered with a painting by Perugino which had to be destroyed. Michelangelo’s painting that took the place of Perugino’s is called “The Last Judgment.” It is one of the most famous pictures ever painted, though it is not so great as the six ceiling pictures. It is crowded with the figures of men and women rising from the dead on Judgment Day.
Michelangelo painted very few other pictures. The only small finished painting that we are sure was done by him is a tondo of the Holy Family. It shows the Madonna on her knees, holding over her shoulder her little Son so that Joseph can see Him. The picture shows how this artist liked to paint people in strange positions.
NO.12-2 FAMILY
Michelangelo lived to be a very old man. As he grew older he seemed to grow crosser and harder to get along with than ever. But though he was a cranky old fellow, every one respected him and admired him as one of the greatest artists in the history of the world. In the sculpture part of this book I’ll tell you more about him.