Michelangelo and Sebastiano review – of gods and men

National Gallery, London
Placing Michelangelo’s work alongside that of his plodding friend highlights the artist’s astounding and visionary creativity

Halfway through the National Gallery’s exhibition about artistic friendship you can read a letter from Sebastiano del Piombo (1485-1547) to Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) in which he describes a conversation with Pope Leo X. The pope was nice about Michelangelo’s incomparable talent, he says, but less so about his forbidding personality. “But he is terribile, as you see,” complained Leo: “one cannot deal with him.”

Pope Leo X’s word for Michelangelo has echoed down the centuries not just as a characterisation of the man but his art. Terribile means “terrible” in the sense of awe-inspiring, sublime, daunting. The triumph of this exhibition is to make you feel, with mounting astonishment and wonder, the true terribilità of Michelangelo’s art – its transcendental mystery and sublime power.

This is the closest any art gallery can get to recreating the thrill of standing in the Sistine Chapel

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