Michelangelo

Thanks to a discovery by an Orange Coast College art professor, California has a connection to Michelangelo. Victor Gabriel Casados, art department chairman at the community college in Costa Mesa, solved a 450-year riddle about a squiggle on a Michelangelo drawing last summer in London. That discovery was formally acknowledged in November by the British Museum in London, which has the original drawing. "I wasn't looking at it to solve a puzzle," Casados said Friday.

The agony of Michelangelo lying painfully on a rickety scaffolding 65 feet above the marble floor to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel has been celebrated for generations by poets, novelists and, more recently, the actor Charlton Heston. And the murky gray of the great artist's complex masterpiece led art scholars for at least two centuries to describe Michelangelo as a sculptor with a low regard for color. So much for poets, novelists and scholars--and Charlton Heston.

To tourists in Florence, Italy, Michelangelo's marble sculpture of the lad who slew Goliath is a must-see attraction at the Galleria dell'Accademia. More than a million people visit it every year. To art historians, "David" is a seminal masterpiece -- the first of Michelangelo's surviving depictions of heroic male nudes that encapsulate physical power in breathtakingly beautiful form.

Clambering down the scaffolding along the backside of Michelangelo's "David," a visitor can see the flaws up close: the purplish blemish, the yellowish stain, the small cracks. "David's" perfect buttocks, it seems, are less so than once thought. The icon of Renaissance male beauty has just had his first bath in 130 years, a meticulous, yearlong endeavor that stirred the age-old debate over how -- and whether -- to restore classic works of art.

Michelangelo, who painted the ceiling of the Vatican's Sistine Chapel and designed the dome of St. Peter's Basilica, passed himself off as poor but was actually too miserly to show his huge wealth, a U.S. art historian says. "He was a funny sort of man, somewhat paranoid and somewhat dishonest, who didn't want it to be known he was fabulously rich," Rab Hatfield, a professor at the Florence branch of Syracuse University, said in an interview Monday.

A 450-year-old receipt has provided proof that Michelangelo kept a private room in St. Peter's Basilica while working as the pope's chief architect, Vatican experts said. While going through archives for an exhibit on the basilica's 500th anniversary last year, researchers came across an entry for a key to a chest "in the room in St. Peter's where Master Michelangelo retires."

A work of art may be priceless -- but it was the price offered for a Michelangelo drawing that kept it from being sold at a Christie's auction this week. The Renaissance master's "Study of a Male Torso" was on the block at an estimated worth of $4 million. When the hammer came down, the highest bid was $3.2 million, not quite meeting the confidential reserve price, Christie's said.

Robert Snyder's "Michelagniolo: Self-Portrait" (the Westside Pavilion, and being advertised as "Michelangelo: Self-Portrait"), which had a special County Museum of Art screening last December, is even more enthralling the second time around. There's such an abundance of soaring words and images in this eloquent 85-minute documentary that they could be studied and absorbed for a lifetime. After all, Michelangelo, who signed himself Michelagniolo, a Tuscan variation of his name, is a giant of Western civilization, and Snyder and his astute cinematographer Umberto Galeassi provide us with unique, comprehensive perspectives on such works of sculpture as the Pieta, Moses, David, and the Medici tomb in Florence, such monumental frescoes as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel--photographed, incidentally, before the controversial restoration was begun--and that of the Last Judgment over the altar in the same chapel, as well as such majestic structures as the Capitoline overlooking Rome and St. Peter's itself.

A new exhibition in London gives audiences a chance to see the creative process behind such Renaissance masterpieces as the ceiling of the Vatican's Sistine Chapel and the interior of the Medici Chapel in Florence. Michelangelo would not have approved. The British Museum is billing "Michelangelo Drawings: Closer to the Master" as a show of "works that Michelangelo, the perfectionist, wouldn't have wanted anyone to see."

While in Los Angeles, Pope John Paul II met with the high priests of the news and entertainment business. He told them that they can be a "force for great good or great evil" and that they "are the stewards and administrators of an immense spiritual power." The Holy Father now has an opportunity to demonstrate his own stewardship on an urgent matter right under the Vatican's roof.