Just a word of encouragement
Jon Down
Late in life, the Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo Buonarotti
(1475-1564) complained that he had never had one day to himself. The
pressures he and others placed on him turned his creative passion into what
he called his "sweet chamber in hell."
Michelangelo's artistic talent was welcomed neither by his father, who
equated sculpting with lowly stonecutting and beat him for bringing shame on
the family, nor by his less-talented peers. Legend has it that
Michelangelo's rivals urged Pope Julius II to force Michelangelo into
painting the 10,000-square-foot ceiling of the Vatican's Sistine Chapel
because they knew he was primarily a sculptor and would certainly fail at
such an ambitious project.
When the pope ordered the 33-year-old sculptor to paint the chapel ceiling
in 1508, Michelangelo himself reacted with trepidation--the ceiling was not
only large but, because it was vaulted, would distort images and therefore
complicate matters by requiring use of the technique known as
foreshortening. "The place is wrong, and no painter I," he protested, but
the pope would not allow him to decline.
For the next four and a half years, Michelangelo toiled on scaffolding 80
feet in the air, in a cramped space that was freezing in winter and blazing
in summer. As he lay on his back, dripping paint burned his eyes and
irritated his skin, and his prolonged contortions almost permanently
dislocated his head and neck. To make matters worse, Pope Julius was
continually complaining about his progress, sometimes refusing to pay him
and, on one occasion, beating him with a cane.
Yet in the end, Michelangelo pleased the pope and stunned his critics with
more than 300 painted figures, some three to four times larger than life. As
the German writer Goethe later said, "Until you have seen the Sistine
Chapel, you can have no adequate conception of what man is capable of
accomplishing." Especially a man working under the conditions faced by
Michelangelo.
Worth a try, eh?
Jon
--
Posted from blue.georgian.net [204.101.160.2]
via Mailgate.ORG Server - http://www.Mailgate.ORG