really young age this was a piece that he did when he was in his early 20s this is the uh the pieta and this is in st peter's basilica in the vatican city um this one here was created in 1499 and it's a really amazing sculpture and one of the things that he does that always amazed me about this piece here is first of all he would study the human body so he would have had a model pose for him and he would have studied that body and he takes marble and he creates a sculpture with marble that takes the material of marble and turns it into fabric turns it into skin i love this part here so the pieta is after jesus dies he's held for a moment by his mother the virgin mary before he's buried and so she's holding this lifeless body and look at how his skin under his armpit gets pushed up there as she kind of holds him you don't make that up you have to really study that so again this never would have happened in the middle ages but of course it happened in the classical period where they would have studied the human body in creating these sculptures and so the middle ages wouldn't think of sacrilegious if you looked at someone when sculpting jesus because you would compare that person to jesus but not anymore there's the renaissance has a pride of the human body a couple interesting little side stories about this sculpture it was made in 1499 when throughout europe there was a whole bunch of celebrations and big events happening because of the end of the century at the end of a century usually there's a lot of celebration there's a lot of fear i don't know if many of you were alive when we went into the 2000s but y2k was a big deal where everyone thought the computers were going to go back to zero and everything was going to shut down people were building bomb shelters and all these things but it didn't happen the computers just flipped over and everything was fine but during this time going from the 1400s and the 1500s they had a lot of festivals and in this case here saint peter's basilica they had artists come in and create the art pieces for the church live so you could go and watch michelangelo make this sculpture which would have been absolutely amazing and so this piece here has actually been protested a lot and people have gone in at it with pickaxes and hammers and tried to destroy this one guy in the 1970s came in with a machine gun and tried to shoot this thing but it's made out of stone so the bullets were just kind of but it has been damaged by people trying to destroy this unfortunately now it's behind bulletproof glass and so you can't get close to it so one of the reasons why people are so angry at this piece is michelangelo was sculpting this thing in the day and people came by and they're watching him sculpt and two gentlemen are standing in front of him and one of them says to the other one who is that who's that artist there uh and the other guy says oh that's so and so from such and such not michelangelo de bornardi and so michelangelo got all offended how do you not know who i am and so he went into this sculpture in the middle of the night and he carves his name across this band across the shirt of the virgin mary well the band happens to go right across the bosom of the virgin mary so he signed the virgin mary's breasts which would have been extremely sacrilegious and it's actually the only sculpture he's ever signed and so people have been angry about that that you can't sign the virgin mary's chest and people are trying to destroy it another reason why people get angry at this is michelangelo has depicted the virgin mary about the same age as jesus if not a little bit younger and so people are saying that michelangelo is saying that stories from the christian bible are just that they're stories and they're made up and so they they really get angry at this and they want to destroy it there's some crazy people out there the piece that michelangelo was most known for of course is the ceiling of the sistine chapel which is in the vatican city which is in rome i don't know if you understand what the vatican city is vatican city is its own country okay it's not a city in rome vatican city is its own country it just happens to be surrounded by rome it's actually a country in the middle of rome and the sistine chapel was built from 1473 to 1480 and they built the sistine chapel they had five different artists come and do fresco paintings in all of the walls and then they wanted someone to paint the ceiling and no one wanted the commission okay first of all the ceiling is 70 feet up in the air it's 44 feet wide and 128 feet long no one wanted that commission no one wanted to touch it because it would have been extremely difficult to get yourself 70 feet in the air to paint something and make it look realistic from 70 feet below and that huge expanse would have taken people a lifetime and no one wanted to do it it is rumored that rafael went to the pope and said hey you should have michelangelo paint the ceiling he'd be great at it and the pope came back and said michelangelo isn't he a sculptor and raphael said no i've seen his paintings he's amazing you should have him do it and the reason raphael wanted michelangelo to do it is because he thought that it would take michelangelo a lifetime to complete so michelangelo would only have one commission for the rest of his life and that would open up more commissions for raphael so the pope goes to michelangelo and says hey congratulations you get the ceiling of the sistine chapel and michelangelo says no way i don't want it i ain't touching the thing and he said no michelangelo said i ain't gonna do it so the pope came back to michelangelo again and said look i'll make you an offer you either do the sealing of the sistine chapel or you wear cement shoes and go swimming in the mediterranean he basically threatened him that you're going to do the sealing of the sistine chapel and so michelangelo painted the ceiling of the sistine chapel and amazingly enough he completed the painting in only four years and that's what's so amazing about this painting that people call the greatest painting ever created because first of all it's a fresco painting right meaning that it is pigment on wet plaster where you have to fresco a part of the ceiling finish the painting very quickly then fresco another part and it's 70 feet in the air and he did it in only four years which is absolutely remarkable now there's a couple different stories of how much help he had in completing this most people believe the third story the first story is he had help from beginning to end he had assistance that would help him uh plaster and help him paint um the second story is that he did the whole thing from beginning to end on his own and did it himself the third story with most people believe is that he started off with assistance and he didn't get along with the assistants they got so mad at him he got so mad at them that he ended up kicking everyone out and completing the project on his own most people believe that story uh and if you understand the mental state of michelangelo that's probably more true we talked about the mental state of um van gogh well michelangelo makes van gogh look like i don't know a high school counselor or something michelangelo was crazy to say the least he also would start a project and he couldn't think eat do anything else while he was working on those projects so for those four years rarely would he eat uh he didn't bathe very often when he got stuck doing something there are stories of the smell of this man that a lot of people couldn't be around um he actually uh there's a story that his boots that were made out of leather actually fused themselves to his skin because he'd wear them for months to a year and he would have to cut the boots off his feet and so there's a lot of stories about not only the temperament of michelangelo but also his hygiene but anyway he finishes the project in only four years and it's absolutely remarkable so one of the things that he did to deal with this huge expansive space is he broke it into sections and you can see these sections of these triangles these sections of these rectangles and he broke it down so that he could work on one at a time plaster do the painting then move on to a next section and it breaking it down it's not like one giant long piece that gets confusing he almost put it together like a little puzzle here let me show you this really cool website make it smaller so you can see it so this is a really cool virtual website for the the sistine chapel it's kind of cool you can walk in this is how you've ever been there you go in it's usually a lot more crowded than this and then you go into the center and then everyone looks up and this is what you see when you look up so one of the things that is so amazing about the ceiling that he created is he breaks up the ceiling i went too far how do i go back can i go like this so he created the ceiling using this architecture to break up his space well what's so amazing about it is that's not architecture all of this is trump loy okay trump loy remember to fool the eye that's all painted and what i find so amazing when this bird i've seen this thing live and when you're 70 feet below you look up and it looks like you're looking at sculpture but even when you zoom in with this virtual reality doesn't that still look like sculpture that's all on a flat ceiling isn't that amazing so the ceiling is domed let me see if i can maneuver this thing so here's a wall that goes to the ceiling so the ceiling starts here and it's kind of domed it's domed as it goes across yeah let's see these things are so hard to manipulate sorry so from here it's domed across here but it's all flat it's all a flat wall and he's created this tromboy that looks like sculpture which is absolutely remarkable and so the subject matter that he chose for his ceiling is a combination of christian theology and greek mythology the christian theology is the story of the old testament uh it's the here's god creating the heavens and the earth and then he creates man which is one of the most famous scenes and then he got adam and eve and their expulsion from the garden of eden and then all kinds of crazy things happen here on earth and then these little figures here these little gold figures these are called ignuti and also on the sculpture these little nudity these come from the classical period these are like um the little idealized nude boys that we looked at from the greeks these here are prophetic women from the classical period that supposedly saw the coming of jesus in the christian bible so that's a way he's able to combine both greek mythology and christian theology there all right so let's go back here and so here's the sybils that surround the ceiling of the sistine chapel those are the prophetic women uh who are from the classical period um but they supposedly prophesize the birth of christ and that's a way where he's able to combine both greek mythology and christian theology together you know i had a student once that asked me a great question they say you know why do you call it christian theology and greek mythology that one's a myth and and one's the study of a religion and i it's not me calling it it's what they would say during that time period because christianity was obviously the rule of thought during that time to where the classical period they thought gods and stuff like that were were miss and so here's the center panel uh this is called the creation of adam this is the most famous one that i'm sure you've seen at some point this is god who's creating man who the first man according to the christian bible was adam and the christians believe that man is kind of a combination of a body and a soul and so this is the body of adam on earth without its soul and god's coming and we're to imagine when the fingers touch all these sparks in his body gets his soul and he becomes alive the first human ever created one of the things i love about this piece in particular is god comes down to earth with the help of all of these angels and these angels are basically carrying god down to earth with i would assume god could fly but i guess not but these angels who can fly they carry them down and it's one way for michelangelo to show sort of the power of the human body michelangelo loved showing muscular figures and specifically muscular men uh michelangelo was a known homosexual and he didn't really um have much respect for the female form one of the critiques he has is even when he paints the female form they look like men because he was studying male forms because he had a passion for the male body and not the female body