Saturday Night at the Movies: Life Without the Sistine Chapel

Is a World with Ritalin a World without Art?

The more history you read, the more terrible students you run into! Perhaps this is why so little real history is taught in schools anymore - it may be too harmful to the morale of teachers today to contemplate that the worst students of the past were the ones who ended up all too often becoming our greatest figures.

This week I learned about another such failed scholastic candidate. In keeping with my recent praise for the apprenticeship model being brought back by some alternative schools, I thought he would be a fitting candidate for our movie of the week.

My wife is reading an art history book and, having had to live through far too many of my rants about the evils of mass educational conformity, sent me this screenshot:

A gifted young artist, with little interest in his other studies, apprenticed to a master at age thirteen. Do you know what would happen to such a boy today? I do not speak hypothetically, I have seen this with my own eyes. Take a teenager who has a unique gift in one area - say, art, or carpentry, or literature - and do you know what happens in our factory educational model? Spoiler alert: being apprenticed early on to a leader in their field and growing into a life-changing genius is not on the list. Far more likely, they get in trouble for not paying attention during math class and get sent to the pediatrician to be drugged into conformity. Do you think the mind-altering drugs the child is prescribed to stop fidgeting in social studies might have some negative effect on her artistic creativity? Apparently nobody cares, because the kid is getting drugged regardless.

Ok, I will stop ranting - this is a weekend movie post, not my weekday soapbox.

The Agony and the Ecstasy, a dramatization of Michelangelo’s clash with Pope Julius II during the painting of the Sistine Chapel, is not a bad movie, though it could be better. It is certainly interesting and worth your time.

My favorite part is the opening, something I’ve never seen before: the movie starts with a straightforward 10 minute or so documentary about Michelangelo’s sculpted masterpieces, with a voice-over explaining to the audience the finer points of his genius. For a 1960s audience with no internet access, I can bet that the chance to see David, Moses, and the Pieta in full living color was worth the price of admission alone.

The movie then transitions from documentary to film, and our story begins. The director, the legendary Sir Carol Reed of The Third Man fame, seems a little out of his element. Julius II was known as the Warrior Pope, so there is a sweeping battlefield element to the story, with canons and extras and warring armies, and I think Reed is a lot more comfortable with a smaller canvas, such as in my favorite picture of his, The Fallen Idol (do click on that, it will take you to Prof Esolen’s essay on that masterpiece).

The plot centers around the tumultuous relationship between Charlton Heston’s Michelangelo and Rex Harrison’s Pope. Rex Harrison is as good as it gets in cinema - do not miss him in My Fair Lady - and he’s fantastic here. As for Heston, well, he must have had a really good agent, because he got to star in such fantastic movies, he got to be Moses, Ben-Hur, and Michelangelo, and yet every time I watch him I can’t help but think, “Man, Burt Lancaster would have been so much better in this.”

The script has some good lines but could have been better - someone like Robert Bolt, who wrote A Man for All Seasons, would have been perfect for this.

That’s a lot of caveats for my movie pick! Despite them all, I do recommend it. The story of how Michelangelo painted that ceiling on his own and almost died in the process is simply one that is worth telling and worth watching. If you’re a homeschooling family, it’s a great movie to watch with the kids during an art unit. No matter who you are, you will never see The Creation of Adam the same way again.

I hope y’all like it, and have a wonderful weekend!