When Callista served as Ambassador to the Holy See, Newt spent three and half years in Rome as her “trailing spouse” and was taken with Rome’s history, art, cuisine, and people. Newt talks with his friend, the art historian Liz Lev, about living full-time in Rome, teaching, providing tours, and discussing the art of the Sistine Chapel. She teaches at Duquesne University’s Italian campus as well as the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas.
On this episode of Newts World. As many of you know, I spent three and a half years living in Rome while Callista served as ambassador to the Holy See. In our time there, we met so many fascinating people, some of whom were American expatriots who now live in Rome full time. My guest today is somebody who had introduced us to Rome many years ago, a very close personal friend and a brilliant person. Elizabeth Love, or Liz as we call her. She is someone we got to know long before we got to Rome. Officially, she's an art historian. She has an amazing ted talk on the Sistine Chapel. She's been working as a guide in Rome for over twenty years and I recommend her very highly. And she teaches at Duquanne University's Italian campus as well as the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas. She is just a remarkable teacher who is great fun, has great energy, has a ton of ideas, and she's currently teaching a course on the Sistine Chapel. And when she told me that, I begged her to join us for this conversation to talk about our mutual love of Rome. It's our history, cuisine and people and encourage all of our listeners. If you haven't been to Rome, add it to your bucket list. It is an unbelievable city. Liz, welcome and thank you for joining me on news World.
Thank you so much for having me and for inviting me to talk about my favorite subject.
Well and as I understand that you are on a tour today.
Yes, I was.
What is that like? You must have occasional stories about the tours that you lead.
I think after twenty years of tours, I think these stories of touring are what you might describe as legion. Today I was taking around a group of priests. There are very few things as fun as taking around a group of priests because it allows us to talk about the secondary and the tertiary levels of understanding. So instead of having to stop and explain there's a guy named Jesus, instead we can really start playing around with deeper meanings and what things might mean and how we could maybe have different prisms of how to look at the Sistine Chapel. So that was a very lovely experience. But then being the person to take a young person to the Sistine Chapel for the very first time, is another. It's an extraordinary honor and privilege because it's that moment, that really rare and special moment of seeing eyes open as they look at this work of art and it speaks to them. So there are so many wonderful things that have happened in my really fun job. It's just a wealth of happy memories.
So you've got a degrief in the University of Chicago, then came to Bologna do graduate work there, and I gather you fell in love with Italy and couldn't leave.
Yes, they'll know with Italy, It's true.
I always loved Europe and I loved France, and then later in Italy I think sort of swept me off my feet. So I was always very interested in Europe. It just goes back to reading a lot of European based novels when I was young. But the real seduction for me for Italy was the way that I was taught to study art in the graduate program at the University of Bologna, which was very different from the graduate program at University of Chicago. The University of Chicago had a very formal analysis, which means that everything in how the work presents itself visually is what we talk about. So we're kind of dissecting where the idea for a certain figure, a composition, a use of color comes from. Whereas the School of Bologna was very interested in what wine people would call the terroire of a work of art, So what is the soil that produces it, what are people reading, what are people thinking about, what is happening in the societie, and that that will produce a work of art that is unique to the place where it's found. And that particular methodology when eventually I came to Rome and started doing tours and began to think in terms of, okay, what is the soil of the Cistine Chapel, to begin to realize how rich that soil was. It gave me the possibility of seeing the Sistine Chapel in a way that I was never able to see it to the purely formal approach of the University of Chicago, and that eye opening experience kind of like a drug. I really I wanted to be here where this way of thinking about art was something that would not be looked down upon by academia, but was actually considered a very serious strain of academic approach.
As I understand it, when you came down to finishing your thesis, which was on the Church of San Giovanni and Petronio in Rome, suddenly you realized you had to live in Rome, that you couldn't be you if you weren't in Rome.
Explain that, I quote that line of Queen Christina of Sweden, it couldn't live another day if I didn't live it in Rome, which is funny because my first impression of Rome when I first went to Bologna back in nineteen eighty seven or so, I came to Rome and I thought it was a filthy, dirty, horrible city. And I remember getting on the train to go back to Bologna and saying, Oh, good heavens, I hope I never have to go back to that place. But then after I returned and my thesis topic brought me back to Rome and came down frequently to use the libraries and the archives, and the amazing feeling if I'd be reading something in the archive and then I would think, hey, I could just walk down the street and go see it. And this immediacy, that sense of being so much closer to the time and the age and the era and the people who produced these works of art. Again, it was addictive. I wanted to be here where I can read about Bernini and then two minutes later I can go see him. I can see Caravajo's work and Karachi's work, and I can see their teams and their rivalries around the city. You can't substitute it elsewhere. It's something about on site study really is an advantage.
I have to say, as a historian who was deeply interested in Imperial Rome. Every time I walk the street so I have this chilling feeling of being a part of history in a way that I can't think of any other city that quite has that density of historic experience.
I agree with you entirely.
It's part of history and the way history seems to flow through you. So you are part of this huge stream of history. It goes back to this origin of this city. It goes beyond me and what will happen in the future, and it's being part of this very intense and alive current of something that grows and continues, and it gives you a real sense of belonging, which is a unique, very very beautiful feeling.
So many of our listeners may get excited by this and decide to go to Rome. In your judgment, what are the top two or three things they should absolutely make sure that they see or do well.
I think if you're coming to Rome for the first time, you really must see the ancient city. You must see the remains of the ancient city.
A lot of.
Things make sense to you. The way that the Romans organized this ancient city with their religious access, their socioeconomic access. The way the city changed is these different forms of government changed. The haunting image of the Colisseum. The sheer size people can describe it to you. But when you're standing outside the Colosseum, which is two thousand years old, and you just see how big and monumental it is, and you think about a people who built to leave their mark on eternity. It's an essential part of understanding Rome. And from there you see the shift into the world of the Vatican or Saint Peter's and the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican muse But it's amazing how that world that Roman Empire will morph. It will eventually the Renaissance will pick up those fallen pieces of the Roman Empire and create their own monumentality, which you see in Saint Peter's Basilica, which is a unique, absolutely amazing church. Annexed to it is this chapel, this repository of some of the greatest painting the world has ever seen in the Sistine Chapel, and then annexed to that are the papal apartments painted by Raphael. It really is almost too much if you're giving me three sites. The third is my favorite place to go when you just want to calm down, just like the cardinals did once upon a time, they would head out onto the Pinchin Hill to visit the beautiful villa of Chiapioni Borghese, and they're in that gallery with the sculptures of Bernini and the paintings of Raphael and.
Caravaggo and Titian.
That is a place of osio, of leisure, of joyful relaxation.
Well, and I have to throw in from my more childish side. It also has a really fine zoo right down the street from the Borghese. The Borghesi, to me is one of the most astonishingly beautiful collections in the world. Obviously, the Vatican Museum is massively bigger and has stunning things, but the Brighese has a kind of delicate beauty to it that I find endlessly appealing.
It also is beautiful because of its reflection of basically it's one person's taste. That maybe the building itself has changed slightly in the eighteenth century, but the amassing of the original works is the reflection of one man who had the vision and had.
The power to do this.
And Cardinalship you one Borghese's taste in his sensitivity to art, heralds this brand new period, which is the age of the Baroque. So you see through the work of a patron, through these genius artists, in this creation of a whole new style happening in one space. It's like being in the ultimate laboratory of art.
You're standing in the Borghese.
Well. Now, twenty eighteen, you wrote a book which you allowed me to take an early look at, which I found absolutely fascinating, entitled How Catholic Art Saved the Faith, And I think this is a really useful kind of entry point to get to talking about the Sistine Chapel, but talk for a couple of minutes about how the Church consciously built a strategy of appealing to people through art.
Thank you very much, by the way, for the nice things you said about my book.
Very encouraging.
And the book itself is the fruit of two things. What is my doctoral thesis. The thrust of it was a discussion of to Reformation art. The other part is the fruit of teaching a class of Baroque art at Ducane University for twenty years and trying to explain to these students what holds these works together.
And this body of work.
That is basically produced between fifteen seventy and let's say sixteen fifty sixteen sixty, this body of work is a very interesting collaboration between the Church in various forms, whether it's confraternity, popes, cardinals, bishops, the church forming and patronizing artists so that artists will produce works of art that will help address issues that the Church is facing in this particular period. So it's a very very rich period in the sense that artists are being offered the possibility to really proclaim great truths, great things.
Through their art.
And so we see people like Caravajo who are participating in the idea of cooperating with Salvation when he produces the amazing acts of mercy in Naples, or artists like Bernini who shows us images of the art of dying well. And so in these different categories and chunes that the Catholic Church finds itself trying to defend and explain its faith. It understands that art is one of the most potent vehicles for helping people or to persuade people, and it recruits these great artists, forms them, and then unleashes them into the world to leave us this amazing body of art, which is this counter reformation into the Baroque.
It's very striking the sheer genius of that period in terms of art. I've always wondered how it came together that you had that handful of people who still today five hundred years later, tower above us and inspire us, and achieved an ability to evoke the world. And what's in many ways a romantic kind of way, that people before them came close but didn't get there, and people after them came close but didn't get there. Why do you think you had this intersection with that many extraordinary artists.
I think the circumstances of creating a very desirable prize in the world of art is what drew so many talents, allowing patrons, allowing the public to really sift through and allow the greats to rise to the top. If you just have a couple of people dabbling in art because it's something that they feel called to do, but there's no real incentive to really give your all to art, to live and die for art, it's a lot harder that you're going to find these geniuses coming to the fore. But given the fact that the place where you could achieve fame, you could achieve status. You could become a voice of authority, and you're not some dauber on a wall, but you become a voice that stands alongside preachers as mute theologians. As Cardinal Palliotti put it, the fact is that that was an opportunity to shine that drew so many talents, and then once those talents were all compressed into the same couple of cities, they had to compete with one another again, producing even greater and greater work. They become more daring, they look for their individual styles. Nobody has time to sit back on their artistic laurels because the next guy's coming right up behind you. And so I think this is kind of the formula for excellence that the late sixteenth early seventeenth century was able to produce, and not to mention the fact that it's such a fabulous time for crossroads of science of discovery. I mean, think of what's happening in this period. The entire world is opening up, so they've circumnavigated the globe, and you have information and peoples and embassies coming in from all over the world for the very first time. A sensitive person like an artist is feeding off this universality that's happening. You have Galileo pointing at tele scope towards the heavens and the human eye can see things that the human eye was never able to see before.
How can that.
Not be exciting and inspiring to an artist, as the artist has offered the possibility to be a kind of telescope to the heavens, I'll show you something you've never seen before. So I think it was a perfect storm that happened in that period.
All of these guys, because it was their passion, they do it their whole lives. I think Michael Angels was in his early eighties when he's designing the dome for Saint Peter's.
Yeah, he's working on the dome in his eighties, dies three weeks shy of his ninetieth birthday working on the dome.
He is extraordinarily broad in his interest, although he's a little bit more limited than da Vinci, who is sort of this autodidact across everything. But seeing the two of them, their level of invention and ingenuity is blowing things away, is extraordinarily different than anything which had gone before. And yet my sense is, at least in the case of michael Angelo, the discoveries looking not only up to the sky but looking back into the past. The discovery of Greek and Roman statues and of various things coming out of the ancient world, had suddenly widened the possibility of thinking about how to perform in a way that would not have been true, say, two hundred years earlier.
Absolutely, the rediscovery of these ancient works, particularly works like the Apollo Belvedere contained in the Vatican Museums, and most famously the ley Akowan, the first century sculpture of the Trojan priests that was discovered or identified by Michelangelo and his friend Juliana Sangallo in fifteen oh six, they are as you might describe game changers. That takes us back to the period of the Renaissance, where the Renaissance starts to dig back in the past and they try to find ways of using the beauty of the past in order to enhance their presence. So in the case of the age of Michelangelo, he's actually coming at the culmination of this period that in many ways begins with people like Thomas Aquinas who successfully capture Aristotle for Christendom, so that people can use the ideas of Aristotle, even though Aristotle is a pagan philosopher. Then the next thing you know, you see the artists borrowing different motifs. Then you see the popes collecting this kind of ancient art and putting artists in front of it.
And then we see the artists.
Building on these ideas and creating whole new compositions using the beauty, the order, the drama, the elegance of the ancient world, so using that sort of formal affection of the ancient world, but the substance becomes completely Christian. And then Michelangelo lives long enough to see that hit its apex and then start to move into this new age where new things are happening, and this period of discovery, in this period of new knowledge, so he actually lives long enough he bridges both great phases of the Renaissance.
And in his case, my impression is he really starts out as a sculptor.
Oh. Absolutely. He was first trained briefly as a painter, his father probably hoping that Michelangelo would just take the normal cursus honorum of artists, meaning that he would be apprenticed to a successful studio, he would become good at his job, the studio head in this case, Domenico Garlando, would lean on him and eventually Michelangelo would take over the studio and he would be a successful businessman. And that was the father's limited aspirations. Michelangelo, who's the only source of Michelangelo's life is Michelangelo, So we always have to take it with a head of a grain of salt. Clearly clearly had very other ideas about what he was destined to be, and so as soon as he saw an opportunity, he left the painting school, probably around age fifteen, and he began training as a sculptor, and within a few years, by the time he was twenty three, he had landed a commission to make the Pieta, which is in Saint Peter's Basilica, and then hard on the heels of the Pieta, he gets the commission for the David. And it's right after David completed in fifteen oh four that he gets called to Rome by Julius the second again to produce a sculptural tomb. Because Michelangelo had focused his attention he was famous as a sculptor, he had produced famous sculptors. So obviously, if Julius the second had invited him to Rome to come and paint a ceiling, Michaelangelo would have said something along the lines of do you not know what I do? Are you talking about? So the invitation was actually to produce what was planned to be an extraordinary tomb, a monument that would have been free standing and would have rivaled the Seven Wonders of the ancient world.
I remember you took chlisten me, and we had this marvelous opportunity to see the Paeta, and the idea that he could have carved that at that age and had it so exquisite. I mean, that could almost be the peak of a normal person's life, and for him it's the beginning. It's just astonishing.
I was just standing in front of the copy of it today in the Vatican Museums, and it came to my mind for the millionth time. It's amazing how perfectly thought out that work is for a twenty three year old, and perfectly thought out in the way the body is going to be rendered. So he's so confident of himself that he takes what is fundamentally a Greco Roman style body.
The body of Jesus.
This work is clearly styled after a statue of a Greco Roman god. But then he adds these touches that come from the observation of a lifeless person, so he takes the paradigm of the Greek immortal God, and then he makes the god lifeless with these very poignant images of a slumped shoulder or these muscles that are slumped in the thigh. In certain sense, the arrogance of being able to say, those ancient people, I have nothing to say to them. I just I am going to take this idea. I'm going to apply my own idea. And then the theological acumen that is implied in that work by the way that Jesus's body is polished so that he becomes Christ the light, the way the body looks like it's going to fall on the altar. It reminds me of that story or the mythological idea that Minerva sprang complete out of the head of Jupiter, so that it's almost like, where did this Michelangelo's art just spring complete out of nowhere? And it isn't really an indication of a man who was clearly destined to do great things. I often say that when you look at the Pieta, you understand why Rome put Michelangelo on a retractable leash at this point, because how far away would you let a guy get who can do that kind of stuff at age twenty three?
And he goes from that, which is a very delicate, very kind of human moment of Mary holding her dead son, and he turns around. He goes back to Florence and builds this gigantic statue of the David, which in many ways is almost the antithesism. It's huge, he's muscled, he's powerful. You can imagine that he of course would have killed Goliath, because why would he be afraid of Goliath? And every time I've gone to the Academia and seen it I've just been startled by how powerful a figure it is and what a stunning comparison it is to the Pata.
Data is an interesting one because, yes, David is a colossal statue. It's seventeen feet tall, it's six tons, It's a statue meant for an exterior position. It's a statue that was made not for a chapel, but it's made for the Republic of Florence. So they're very, very different. And yet there is a very interesting way that the two are united, and they are united through this strange dichotomy. In the work in the Body of Jesus and the Pieta, we see the body that is evidently meant to be that of a Greek god, and yet we see these signs of a lifeless man. In the case of David, we see this colossal, muscle bound, powerful figure. At our first glance is, of course, you look at a seventeen foot tall David and you think Publig was Goliath, Right, what's the problem here? You start to feel sorry for Goliath in this story. So having done that, since the whole point of the David story is that there is no way David could have defeated Goliath. Michelangelo's new problem is how do we show the vulnerability the weakness of David. And he does it in two very interesting ways. One is the strange proportions of the body. So if you put David next to a classical Greek sculpture, let's say the Apollo we were just talking about, David will come across as stranger and stranger, with his excessively long legs, his very big hands, his gigantic head on top of a small neck. All of those proportions are distorted as opposed to the perfect and elegant proportions that you see in a classical sculpture. And by elongating and giving us this strange, awkward series of body parts that David, at the end of the day he was an adolescent boy, he's giving us the potential of David, that seventeen foot man he's going to grow into, but then he hasn't quite grown into it yet, and you have that awkwardness of transformation. The second way Michaelangelo makes David more human is to give us that furrowed brow as he stares off into the distance. David is worried. He looks into the distance with a furrow in his brow, a concern about what's coming. So it's a very very interesting system he used where he gives us monumentality and vulnerability in the same work. And I think that's why David, of all the naked statues that we have all over the place in Italy, that's why David stands out.
So I have this guy now who has had two extraordinary successes as a sculptor. He ends up in Rome, and Julius the second says, Oh, by the way, now it's your turn, because this is what you're teaching. How does it happen?
He says to Michaelangelo, build me this tomb. And Michael Angel starts to work on the tomb, he finds the leaka on. Everything is going amazingly well, and then suddenly the money dries up. And there's Michelangelo who's so convinced he's supposed to be making this tomb that he's literally fronting his own money to keep the job going. And then finally they tell him, listen, we're not.
Going to be making the tomb. Could you paint the.
Twelve apostles in the Sistine Chapel ceiling? And here is the problem. The twelve apostles in the Sistine Chapel ceiling is going to look like every ceiling in Italy traveled from north to south in this country. You walk into a chapel, you look up at the ceiling, and the ceiling is a blue sky with stars, with some evangelists or with some apostles, few figures against a blue sky. Michelangelo cannot afford to do something like that because it will be mistaken for every other ceiling in Italy. It's like you've had two Academy Award winning movies and then they ask you to do a commercial, and so Michelangelo instead comes back to the Pope and that same arrogance, to a certain extent, that same self confidence, which is extraordinary. He goes back to the Pope and he says, yeah, okay, so I'm thinking we could do stories of Genesis and Julius. Rightfully, objects like, no, we can't do stories on the ceiling. If you look at all those famous paintings of the predecessors of the people who taught Michelangelo, like Girlando Balticelli, friend of Michelangelo's, even Leonardo da Vinci, all of them conceive painting in the same way. You make a space, you fill up the space, and that is how painting works. You use perspective, you use depth, you use composition, but you create a space and then you fill it up. If you take a painting with a filled up space and you put it on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which is twenty seven feet off the ground, it will look like a Jackson Pollock painting. And Julius doesn't think it can be tice. I don't want a bunch of figures on the ceiling and no one understands what's happening. And when Michaelangelo shows him the drawings he has planned, when he shows him the idea for the ceiling, Julius realizes he has the one man in the entire world who can paint a scene on a ceiling and make it understandable because he's got a sculptor in front of him and not a painter. And as a skull, Michelangelo has trained to look at a piece of stone and to think reductively. A sculptor takes away, reducing piece after piece after piece, until this single figure tells the story in.
And of itself.
It is the opposite from how a painter thinks where the painter takes the space and fills it. And from that moment Julius says to Michelangelo, what do you want? What can I give you? Please get started. I can't wait. And the rest truly is history. Where we have a watershed in the history of art, a painting on a ceiling that is evidently and obviously created by a man who was thinking in terms of a sculptor architect. So basically Michelangelo, that tomb he had wanted to build so badly. He built it anyway. He built it in paint, and he built it on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
First of all, when you're in the chapel, he look up your eyes bad to have scaffolding to climb up every single day, and then he lays on his back. The technique they're using is very laborious and very time sensored. Can you walk through how they were actually because it's not painting in the sense of oil and putting it on canvas. It's a very very different and I think harder process.
It is a very exacting technique. The fresco painting technique that he used on the ceiling. He had been taught in the studio of Girlindiyo when he was a boy how to do this technique, and perhaps more importantly than the actual physical mixing and application of color, he learned about running the studio that has to produce the fresco. Because fresco is a lime plaster and lime plaster that is applied on the wall, and to be perfectly honest, it's not just one layer. There's three layers that have to be put up on the wall. The final layer will receive the paint while the final layer, a very fine plaster, is on the wall. The painter approaches with a pigment dissolved in water, essentially water color, and paints onto the wet plaster. Hence the term fresco is like fresh paint, and there's a chemical reaction that happens between the lime in the plaster and the water in the water color. It essentially sweats calcium carbonate and it becomes colored stone. There is a six hour window from the application of the plaster to when it will dry, which means for a fresco painter. For Michelangelo in particular, when he got up on that scaffolding, he had to have a very small team, So the idea that he was working alone is flat out. Someone has to be grinding pigment, someone has to be mixing plaster, someone has to be applying the sketches to the ceiling. Someone's got to go get peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
There's got to.
Be a team working, so that six hours is very efficient. He has to know exactly what he's doing. It is not a technique that allows winging it. If you make a mistake and the paint dries, you are going to have to chisel it out. So it was a very very demanding technique, but it does require that he work with a certain amount of speed. So what the painter does to modulate his work is he decides how much space he thinks he can cover in six weeks. And when he first started towards the entrance of the chapel on the scaffolding of his own design, he ended up having to design his own scaffolding because all the other ideas seemed very silly or even dangerous to him. So after he had designed his scaffolding, he gets up on the scaffolding and he starts painting in the side closest to the entrance and exit door above the area where the lay people were gathered. Those images took a very long time to paint, so one of them, which would be the story of Noah's arc the Great Flood, took about six weeks for him to paint. At the end of the three and a half years, he made it over to the area by the altar. He was working so quickly and so efficiently that the opening scene of the Sistine Chapel, the Separation of Light and Dark, he succeeded in painting in one day. He painted actually in different positions. The most famous position we know he painted in was actually standing with his head thrown backwards. And the reason why we know this is because Michaelangelo's dislike of this commission was so great that he vented by writing a poem to a friend of his. And the poem complains about what it's like having his head thrown back and his chest pulled upwards, and he feels like a Lombard cat with the cats grow fat. And he talks about this, and then he did a little caricature on the side, an image of himself painting the ceiling. So sometimes he stood, sometime he sat. There was a little section on the sidewalls where he could sit along the side of the fresco. But no matter what, it was a very physically grueling process which involved a lot of paint dropping onto his face, which he also complained about at length.
How did he envision how big it has to be up there to seem normal when you're twenty seven feet lower to me. That's one of the most amazing things about the Sisteine Chapels, that it all works. And yet you realize he's putting the stuff up here twenty seven feet for me to look at, and when he's doing it, he's right next to us. He must have some ability to imagine all this with a perspective that normal people would not have had.
So what he has is a very interesting group of people who are highly specialized in this kind of work. So michael Angelo worked out a drawing of what he was going to do on the ceiling, and yes, he has to know a exactly the right size. It has to be perfectly measured out, and he brought down a team of Florentine artists, and Florentines were very very good at doing what today we would put into a photocopy machine. And program the photocopy machine have it blow out up to whichever proportion or ratio we wanted. But these Florentines were very good at taking Michelangelo's drawing and breaking them out into actual sized drawings, so that at the end of the day, when he approached each section of the ceiling, he went up with a working cartoon, which means that he would put it up against the wall. He would either take a sharp instrument and punch out the outlines of the drawing and then put up charcoal ust so when he pulled the drawing away there would be a dotted line. Another technique he might use was an incision technique, where he would just cut through the lines and make grooves into the painting itself. There are different ways of doing this. He had these blueprints, if you will, of how each part of the ceiling was supposed to be arranged and where it was supposed to be placed.
So he completes it, it's done, he goes back to being a sculptor, and then in fifteen thirty five he comes back to paint the last Judgment, which is in some ways the most striking single thing in the Sistine Chapel. How did that happen.
It's an amazing thing that both paintings are in the same space because they transmit very very different moods. And the difference between the world that thirty three year old Michelangelo knew when he started painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling and the world of fifty nine year old Michelangelo coming in to paint the Last Judgment was completely different, and in the space of a generation, the world in many ways was unrecognizable to him. The Protestant Reformation had happened in fifteen seventeen, so between these two moments, and in the Protestant reference, the unthinkable event of a church that had been united throughout Europe suddenly breaks in two, three, four five pieces. So first of all, we have the fragmentation.
Of something that he thought was rock solid.
Number two, the recognition that for him personally, that tomb will never be built, that tomb that motivated him to design the Cistine Chapel to work incredibly quickly so he could go back to building the tomb that he thought we would associate his name with it has become a colossal failure. And then the other things that are happening are the rise of the printing press and a new way of transmitting images and transmitting information that is becoming much faster and much more popular. And so he is commissioned in the midst of this period of the Reformation by Pope Paul the Third, the man who will approve the Jesuits, the man who will open the Council of Trent. He asks Michelangelo to come and paint on the altar wall of the Cistine Chapel, and image that is not destined for your everyday, run of the mill lay people. It is an image which is destined to speak to the elite group of the papal corps, who have had the best of the church and are now being reminded of their responsibilities.
I think it's.
Very interesting that the commission for Michaelangelo starts putting up his scaffolding immediately after Henry the eighth sends that letter to Pope Clement the seventh which goes something along the lines of high starting my own church. Love Henry, signed by all the cardinals and bishops of England except for John Fisher. But the fact is the Pope is seeing an exodus on the part of the people who are supposed to be loyal to him, and that painting of the Last Judgment, which Michaelangelo is expected to produce, is meant to be a reminder that it's not the Pope that they're going to have to fool, it's Jesus.
And so the visual.
Language of that work is unlike anything anyone has ever seen before in less judgment images.
Well, and of course nowadays that is the room in which the Church gathers to pick popes.
Absolutely when that makes it the ultimate painting of accountability.
I'm just thinking about that. You're a cardinal, You're sitting there, you're about to vote, and you're looking at judgment and you realize that actually the person that will judge you is God.
Cardinal Powell of Beloved Memory once mentioned what it was like to be in there with that painting looking down on you as you cast the vote of the pope in the urn that goes directly underneath it. And as a matter of fact, if you look at the way the painting is arranged, the painting looks like the tablets of the Ten Commandments, right, so it has this feeling of that ultimate, essential, fundamental tenet of the faith that's looming behind you. It's tilted slightly forward, so it seems like you're about to be completely engulfed in this moment of retribution, moment of accountability, moment of judgment.
My sense has always been, and I say this for all of our listeners who might someday go there, even when it's crowded, if you can go in there and be quiet and let the room talk to you, that it's one of the most extraordinary places on the entire planet. And that is just virtually overwhelming.
I have seen the Cystine Chapel with no one in it, with tons of people in it, with dangerous numbers of people in it. I completely agree with you, Nude. I find the first of all, the artwork of the Sistine Chapel is above my head, or sort of looking upwards at the space of the altar, and so I found that I can just make everything else and disappear and just get involved with the ceiling. I find it much harder to be in the Raphael rooms when it's crowded. I can't look, I can't understand, I can't think I'm aware of the crowd. But the Sistine Chapel has always been a place where I felt that there's a way to literally kind of rise above in my mind, and it is of course also connected to the placement of the works of art, and so it's true, Yes, I agree with you.
Well in a sense if you're a question the Last Judgment may be the most powerful painting over painted, and it's there, and it's overwhelming, and it is God.
I would think so I lately as I take people in there, the thing I say to them now is let it overwhelm you. Don't be afraid to let it overwhelm you, because that's really how you're going to experience it. The painting is intended to be overwhelming. It's disruptive. All the other paintings in the room, the fifteenth century side paintings, the ceiling painting by Michelangelo, everything is compartmentalized, so every single image within the side walls and the ceiling is contained in some sort of pseudo architectural space. But the Last Judgment just abruptly fills the wall with this incredible Lapis Lazuli color. So the order that is all around the rest of the room disappears and you're just consumed by this mesmerizing Lapis blue sky where it looks like the wall has dissolved and something supernatural is happening beyond it. And at the lower part of the painting there's this incredible rustle of movement of bodies, bodies lifting up from the ground, Demons looking like they're trying to make a move out to grab somebody from the crowd in the chapel, people being cast into the depths of hell. But as you move up a little bit, you begin to see that the momentum of the painting is actually a momentum upwards. So from the left hand side, another group of people are drawn upwards, are being lifted upwards, are being helped upwards. And then you find yourself gazing at the upper part of the painting at this Winner's circle of Heaven, and leading into the center is body after body of superheroes. It looks like you're looking at a superhero movie with these immense bodies. John the Baptist to Wait, Locust and Wild Honey, who's flexing like mister Universe. You have Saint Peter, who's looking like the buff ist seventy year old. You're ever going to see these array of saints leading your eye to the center, where you see Jesus like no one's ever seen before, a powerful Jesus, a Jesus who's not yet fully revealed his full strength and his full glory, looking down towards the damned, raising his hand towards the damn, about to unleash what looks like the terrifying justice of the Lord on a sinful people. But then you look slightly to his left and they're literally affixed to his side, nestle to him in a way that has never been done before. There is Mary looking down upon the elect and they make this beautiful compliment to each other. Christ is the picture of justice, Mary is the picture of mercy. And again, if you are willing to brave the painting, if you handle it that it's overwhelming you and you let yourself be drawn up, and you feel that anxiety at being caught up in something that is beyond your control, which is the last judgment. You find yourself drawn to that image of Mary, who leads you right to Christ's side, and this indication that through her you get to him. And there is a consoling voice, a comforting voice, an advocate.
For you in this incredible scene.
It's an amazingly beautiful, powerful work.
Of art, and in a sense that Mary in church, which revolves in the following several centuries, Mary becoming a central figure, Mary being mother of the church, and Mary being the road through which we pray to be saved.
Absolutely, this is a moment where these Maryan themes are very much coming to the fore, and so it shows a Michelangelo who is sitting at the cutting edge of Mary and theology. To put her in that particular position, it's absolutely wildly innovative in its concept, and so it creates this visual complementarity where you have at this sort of center of the scene, you have man and woman together. You have this image of Christ the Savior showing the wounds on his hands for having saved redeemed mankind. But at the same time we have that gentle conduit to him.
She's right by the wound in his side.
From whence the church sprang, we have that gentle conduit of Mary to get to the presence of Christ.
When somebody has now experienced the Sistine Chapel and the way you have described it brilliantly, and they now need to contemplate what they've just experienced, what restaurant do you recommend they go to contemplate it.
What a fabulous ending.
I'd go up the hill to Antiico Arco on the top of the Jeniiculum, which is quiet. That's a nice sort of quiet spot to contemplate.
And I know that you and Thomas have both become certified somelie. So while you're being quiet and contemplating, do you have two or three favorite wines you recommend?
So I think Thomas he would probably recommend a beautiful red burgundy sand Nis, something fabulously complex with a rich bouquet. In order to sort of imbibe all the richness of the Cistine Chapel. I think perhaps I would go in a more of either a white direction, a little bit of a refreshing moment with the wonderful Veramentino, our fabulous Mediterranean in a glass which we produce in the area around Liguria and Sardinia, but actually visiting the Cistine Chapel, visiting the ceiling, the last judgment, one of the most beautiful places in the world. I would never say that Champage aim is out of order, because everything about that space makes us want to celebrate life, beauty in art.
Well, and on that note, I do want to point out to people that I'll hear are you brilliant and fun, but that you'd recently published The Silent Night, a history of Saint Joseph has depicted in art, and that all of your books can be found on Amazon, and we are going to have, of course, on our show page all of that information. Plus we're going to list your website at www dot Elizabeth dashlev dot com so people can be in touch with you and potentially if they're coming to Rome, I think they now know from this that you are a brilliant guide and that they will not just learn a great deal, they'll have a heck of a lot of fun.
Thank you so much.
Thank you to my guest Liz Love. You can learn more about her tours of Rome and books on our show page at newsworld dot com. Newtsworld is produced by Ginglish three sixty and Heart Media. Our executive producer is Guardnsei Sloman, our producers Rebecca Howe, and our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was creative by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team at Gingrich three sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of Newtsworld consigner for my three free weekly columns at gingrich three sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm Newt Gingrich. This is Newtsworld