Michelangelo

  A Coming of Age

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 Ghirlindaio 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 shuttered 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.