More about Michelangelo and the Pope

Julie Z asked me how Ross King knew that Michelangelo used a scaffold.  I scoured the book and came up with an answer:  M wrote a poem about it, illustrated with a sketch of him painting the ceiling, reaching his arms above his head and bending backwards like Ginger Rogers dancing with Fred Astaire--okay, not leaning that much, but definitely leaning, and complaining about it.  As he seemed to complain about everything, especially his rotten family, a bunch of do-nothing brothers who just lounged around his father's house, enlarging their carbon footprints.

Now I am reading about Robert E Lee, a biography by Charles Bracelen Flood.  It's almost a hagiography.  Apparently Lee had some quality that led other men to like him, look up to him, and follow him, even unto death.  He was offered the command of Union forces, but turned it down, unwilling to fight against his native state, Virginia.

Apparently he had something that did not outlast his life.  Call it charisma.  I remember how people worshipped Roosevelt when I was a tot.  Nowadays he is receding into history, but Churchill said that meeting him was exhilarating, like your first taste of champagne. 

Update:  Apparently leaning back to paint had little or no ill effect on Michelangelo, who died at 89.

What to do when it snows

My default position on occasions like this: Open a book; read the whole thing; put it down; open another. Rinse and repeat. If I followed my natural inclination I would sit and read all day. But that is a good way to get nuts. After a while I start to think I am a fictional character, and look behind me to see if I have cast a shadow.

So I exercise, take a walk, watch a movie, cook something, eat something, clean something, call someone, do laundry. Or blog, perhaps about something I am reading. I am now reading about Michelangelo and how he came to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It is called "Michelangelo and the Pope's ceiling," by Ross King. I bought the book at the Good Will store, a place where you never know what books you will find.

He was first hired to design a tomb for the Pope, Julius II. Julius was not one of those namby pamby popes such as we have today, always going on about charity, greed, yada, yada, and other things he knows little or nothing about. Julius was a patron of the arts with a bad temper. A really bad temper, so bad that he used to beat up the people around him, like a schoolboy. He beat up his servants when they displeased him, and sometimes beat up anyone he felt like beating up. He also hired soldiers to beat up other nations. The Venetian Ambassador to the Vatican, on his deathbed, said that one of the reasons he didn't mind dying was that when dead he would not have to cope with Julius, patron of the arts as he might be.

Anyway, I hate to disappoint anyone who has visions of Michelangelo lying on his back while painting the aforementioned ceiling. He had a scaffold built and he and his subordinates stood on a platform to paint. It was tough enough as it was. The ceiling had to be painted while it was wet.