Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling Quotes

“The word nepotism comes, in fact, from nipote, Italian for nephew.”
― Ross King, Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

“None of Raphael’s individual figures, no matter how expertly integrated into his graceful ensembles, came close to the brute visual force of Michelangelo’s naked titans.”
― Ross King, Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

“Some four years and four weeks after Michelangelo had begun his fresco, the time had come for him to exhibit it in its entirety.”
― Ross King, Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

“Michelangelo may have been desperate to finish the fresco, but his artistic ambitions remained gloriously uncompromised.”
― Ross King, Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

“For Burke, those things we call beautiful have the properties of smoothness, delicacy, softness of color, and elegance of movement. The sublime, on the other hand, comprehends the vast, the obscure, the powerful, the rugged, the difficult—attributes which produce in the spectator a kind of astonished wonder and even terror.8 For the people of Rome in 1511, Raphael was beautiful but Michelangelo sublime.”
― Ross King, Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

“The style in which libraries were decorated had been standard since the Middle Ages. Raphael would have been familiar with the scheme from, among other examples, Federigo da Montefeltro’s library in Urbino. Each of the four subjects into which the books were divided—theology, philosophy, justice, and medicine—were represented by an allegorical female figure on the wall or ceiling. The painter usually also added portraits of men and women who had won acclaim in these particular fields.”
― Ross King, Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

“The room assigned to Raphael and Sodoma was a few steps away from Julius’s bedroom. Later in the sixteenth century, after seeing use as the seat of the papal tribunal known as the Signatura Graziae et Iustitiae, the room came to be called the Stanza della Segnatura. Julius intended to use it, however, as his private library.9 He was no bookworm, but even so he had managed to amass a respectable collection of 220 volumes. Known rather grandly as the Bibliotheca Iulia, these treasures were in the care of the learned humanist scholar Tommaso Inghirami, who also oversaw the much larger holdings of the Vatican Library.10”
― Ross King, Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

“Condivi admits that Michelangelo won himself a reputation, as a young man, for being bizzarro e fantastico because he “withdrew from the company of men.”
― Ross King, Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

“Added to Raphael’s appealing personality were his good looks: a long neck, oval face, large eyes, and olive skin—handsome, delicate features that further made him the antithesis of the flat-nosed, jug-eared Michelangelo.5”
― Ross King, Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

“If Michelangelo was slovenly and, at times, melancholy and antisocial, Raphael was, by contrast, the perfect gentleman. Contemporaries fell over themselves to praise his polite manner, his gentle disposition, his generosity toward others.”
― Ross King, Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling