Michelangelo’s alchemy

… and a poem by the Master

When I returned to Florence last week from my stay in the state of Florida, my Florentine friends questioned me in alarming disbelief regarding the sixth grade teacher who had been fired due to some “parents” (we’re talking about people raising children) complaining that the teacher  had shown pornography in class: the porn show referred to Michelangelo’s David for an art history lesson. 

I can’t help but think this international news story has yet again revealed the mentality of those few who may be internally perverted themselves. Perhaps the puritanical upbringing of those frustrated anglican minds are what  feed the roots of white supremacy in fundamentalist America - repressed and obsessed - and can only  lead to  a superficial vision of what a masterpiece of Renaissance art symbolizes for  human history. 

Like millions of others, let’s  take a stroll in the Academia in Florence. Our eyes are pulled towards the end of the gallery’s entrance where Michelangelo’s most famous sculpture, the David, stands under the gallery’s dome. The sculpture’s immensity and energy inevitably mesmerizes us, but then we stop, and our attention is deviated to the right and left of the wide corridor. There, standing on both sides of us, are the huge blocks of marble where  Michelangelo’s Prisoners  are  busting their way out of their stone confines with incredible force.  His Prisoners, or Slaves, although incomplete, already reveal  Michelangelo’s vision and the everlasting  powerful alchemy he possesses that can  turn stone into human flesh. 

Here’s a poem by Michelangelo Buonarroti himself, poet and sculptor - respectively - because without the poetry within, he could never have depicted the depth of his art that has profoundly touched so many. I am sharing and keeping in mind Michelangelo’s own words, how he would have reacted to  that sad story coming from  the other side of the Atlantic from those people whose “unsound eyes can't move from the mortal to the divine”:  

Poem 164 (ca. 1541-44)

Michelangelo Buonarroti

As a trustworthy model for my vocation,
at birth I was given the ideal of beauty,
which is the lamp and mirror of both my arts.
If any think otherwise, that opinion is wrong:
for this alone can raise the eye to that height
which I am preparing here to paint and sculpt.
Even though rash and foolish minds derive
beauty (which moves every sound mind
and carries it to heaven) from the senses,
unsound eyes cannot move from the mortal to the divine,
and in fact are fixed forever in that place
from which to rise without grace is a vain thought.

(Poem from Michelangelo, Selected Poems - Columbia University. https://arthum.college.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/PDFs/arthum_michel_reader.pdf.)