Rating: 
Summary: An Italian Renaissance Masterpiece
Review: If you are a fan of Michelangelo or the Italian Renaissance in general, this book is a must read. It is not an overly exciting, page-turning suspense thriller, but it is very informative, interesting, and dramatic. As in "Brunelleschi's Dome," Ross King's expertise comes through clearly in a logical and well-organized manner. Michelangelo's progress on the masterpiece is skillfully interwoven with the exploits of the arrogant warrior-pope Julius II, the artist's relationship with his archrival and antithesis Raphael, and anecdotes of other historical figures including Savanorola, Erasmus, Martin Luther, and Machiavelli. The most interesting parts of the book dealt with Michelangelo's cantankerous and miserly behavior and the debunking of several commonly held myths. The book could have been improved with the inclusion of more color images, but it did not detract from the reading experience.
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Summary: Have any interest in Michelangelo and/or the Sistine Chapel?
Review: If you do, you will love this book. I read a good part of it while in Italy on vacation and marveled at the richness and detail Ross King uses to illustrate the people, politics, daily grind, and so much more of the early sixteenth-century in Italy. The ceiling of Sistine Chapel was painted in four years, 1508-1512, and King puts you on the scaffolding right beside Michelangelo as he works, whines, fusses, and demonstrates pure genius. I loved King's book, Brunelleschi's Dome, for many of the same reasons. The author has a background in academics and has done his research to produce an "in your face" accounting of Michelangelo and his famous ceiling. This is a terrific read and lots of fun. I hated to finish!
Rating: 
Summary: What brought about Michelangelo's breakthough?
Review: If you enjoy Renaissance History, Art History, and/or Religious History, you will enjoy this book. It combines all three into a compelling story about Michelangelo's breakthrough as one of, if not the, world's the greatest artist(s). The setting is Rome in the reign of Pope Julius II - the war Pope, and megalomaniac.
Michelangelo's breakthough as an artist is deeply intertwined with the Julius II. The Pope's desire to bring Italy back under the Vatican's control, his focus on bringing honor to himself through the arts, and his penny pinching ways are all key elements in Michelangelo's journey to greatness.
While the book covers all of Michelangelo's life, the focus is on the four years it took to paint the Sistine Chapel vault. Author Ross King includes stories of Michelangelo's family, disputed loves, contemporaries (Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and others), and the intricacies of sculpting, oil painting, and frescoing. As an oil painter myself, I found these details of great interest, as I take for granted how much easier it is today to get the right materials than 500 years ago.
One takeaway from this book is why the young Martin Luther, a priest, was so distraught after his stay in Rome. The role of the Church as an extension of Christ's life, and as a light for all, was subverted by greed, power, and, while not covered here, lust. This period contributed mightily to the Protestant Reformation which followed shortly after this period.
Those who read "The Agony and the Ectasy" will be disappointed to find that much in that book was not fact. King, based on more recent evidence, has re-written the story of this great artist making it the most up-to-date biography for this period in his life. This is a book rich with history, and is not a quick read. If you are one to listen to books on tape/CD while you workout, as I do, this is a perfect way to stretch your mind as you stretch your muscles. Alan Sklar does an excellent job narrating.
Rating:
Summary: Un buon libro di facile lettura
Review: Il papa e il suo pittore conduce il lettore lungo i quattro anni che videro Michelangelo affrescare la volta della Cappella sistina. L'incarico gli fu affidato nel 1508 da Giulio II, nonostante l'artista avesse allora poca esperienza con l'affresco e si considerasse uno scultore. Il libro di Ross King racconta del vecchio papa guerriero Giulio II, che non esitava a prendere a pugni i subordinati ed era abituato a piegare il mondo al suo volere, e del suo rapporto con il lamentoso Michelangelo, incline a vedere ovunque intrighi e complotti a suo danno. Negli stessi anni, Raffaello - giovane, bello, affascinante, uomo di mondo - affrescava gli appartamenti vaticani. E' un libro gradevole e ben scritto che sfata un po' di miti sulla creazione del celebre affresco: soprattutto quello secondo cui l'intera volta sarebbe stata dipinta da un solitario Michelangelo disteso a pancia in su un improbabile impalcatura che partiva da terra, come appare nel film Il tormento e l'estasi con Charlton Eston.
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Summary: "I live wearied by stupendous labors...a thousand anxieties"
Review: In his masterful, well researched portrayal of Michelangelo's four-year (1508-1512) effort to fill the 12,000 square foot, vaulted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with new frescoes for Pope Julius II, Ross King examines and places in context the known details of Michelangelo's life, the images he includes in the frescoes, and his relationship with Pope Julius II, called the "terrifying Pope." Michelangelo had tried to avoid this commission. He was a sculptor, not a painter, and Pope Julius II had angered him by postponing his commission to build the Pope's tomb after Michelangelo had bought all the marble. Unpracticed in the difficult technique of fresco, he accepted the commission reluctantly. Illustrating stories from Genesis in the brightest and most costly pigments available, he created powerful visions of a terrifying and vengeful God in twelve panels, which depict stories of crime and punishment, prophets crying in the wilderness, and doomed sinners facing hanging, beheading, flood, and plague. Halfway through his commission, Michelangelo decided that his earliest, most tumultuous panels were too "busy," with too many figures painted too small, and he changed his style significantly. Beginning with the famous Creation of Adam, he painted simpler, more powerful designs with larger figures, dramatically foreshortening and contorting them. God, who appears fully robed in classical attire in the early panels, becomes far more vigorous, muscular, and "human" in the later panels, appearing with his chest bare, his poses contorted and foreshortened. Eventually, he appears to "tumble down" toward the viewer from the ceiling. Full of fascinating, memorable details, King's text tells how Michelangelo constructed the scaffold for the fresco (which did not require him to lie on his back), how his first panel was ruined by the build-up of salts and efflorescence and six weeks' labor had to be laboriously chipped away, how a child in one panel is "making the fig"" (an obscene gesture), and how the fingers of God and Adam at the Creation are not the work of Michelangelo or of his assistants but complete restorations. A helpful "map" of the ceiling allows the reader to locate particular details, though the colored pictures of the ceiling itself, reproduced almost in its entirety, are extremely small. When the ceiling was completed in 1512, the world was dumbstruck, according to Vasari, and Michelangelo's figures were said to surpass those of the ancient Greeks. Never before had the human form been used with such "astonishing invention and aplomb...or with the brute force of Michelangelo's naked titans." Writing with enthusiasm and insight, in addition to careful scholarship, King tells the intriguing human story of this artwork, which is as fresh and relevant today as it was when it was painted almost six hundred years ago. Mary Whipple
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Summary: LOTS OF INTERESTING, LITTLE-KNOWN FACTS
Review: Just when I had begun to despair about the quality of historical books -- "The Twelve Dark 'n' Bloody Secrets of the Templars" or "The Unknown Myseries of the Ghosts of Notre Dame", things like that -- along comes King's book on Michelangelo. I'd read King's book about Bruneleschi and, while I liked it, it didn't have the drive and sheer volume of information this one does (one sensed the presence of a ton of filler to pad out the enemic cathedral dome plot). Never fear: if you are interested in the Italian Renaissance and some of the personalities who helped shape and direct it, this is for you. While the focus stays on Michelangelo's task of frescoing the Sistine Chapel ceiling, a huge cast of other characters and events are drawn together; as a result, an entire epoch unfolds. There's nary a boring page and many are filled with dozens of facts I'd not known before (how a day on the scaffold with the artist would have gone, or the intricate machinations present on all levels of the Renaissance Vatican, or that the famous finger of Adam, as he reaches out to God, is not Michelangelo's -- fallen plaster ruined it and at least one or two later artists have filled it in, so we have no original trace of what is perhaps the most famous hand in art, to name a few). You can't go wrong with this book -- I had to make myself put it down so I could go to sleep -- it would have been easy and wonderful to read it all in one rich sitting. Buy this book!
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Summary: A Sixteenth Century Soap Opera
Review: Michelangelo & the Pope's Ceiling by Ross King tells the story of four years, 1508-1512, in the life of three larger than life personalities: Michelangelo, Pope Julius II, and Raphael. Mr. King's latest nonfiction historical "thriller" is, however, more than a story of the four years that Michelangelo spent laboring over the twelve thousand square feet of the vast ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In Mr. King's able hands it becomes an early 16th century soap opera, starring Michelangelo, Pope Julius II, and Raphael, and featuring all the intrigue, passion, violence, and pettiness of a Sopranos' episode. What's so astonishing is that all that is told actually happened -- it's history.
Ross King's gift is his ability to bring us, his readers, back through the maze of time and lead us to an understanding of all that coalesced -- politically, socially, and artistically -- to create great art, great history and, for us, great reading.
According to King:
"Pope Julius II was not a man one wished to offend.... A sturdily built sixty-three-year old with snow-white hair and a ruddy face, he was known as il papa terrible , the 'dreadful' or 'terrifying' pope.... His violent rages, in which he punched underlings or thrashed them with his stick were legendary.... In body and soul he had the nature of a giant. Everything about him is on a magnified scale, both his undertakings and passions."
Michelangelo and Raphael as portrayed by King:
"Almost as renowned for his moody temper and aloof, suspicious nature as he was for his amazing skill with the hammer and chisel, Michelangelo could be arrogant, insolent, and impulsive....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....Raphael's appealing personality were accompanied by 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."
The stories of these three men during this extraordinary four year period and the art they produced is the story embodied in Michelangelo & the Pope's Ceiling. The confrontations between Julius II and Michelangelo are legendary. "The major problem seems to have been that Michelangelo and Julius were remarkably alike in temperament. Michelangelo was one of the few people in Rome who refused to cringe before Julius."
For almost the entire four years Michelangelo was shadowed by the brilliant young painter Raphael, who was working in fresco on the neighboring Papal apartments. This rivalry the Pope seemed to enjoy and encourage. To help us better understand the friction between these two great artists King introduces us to Edmund Burke's treatise on the sublime and the beautiful:
"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. For the people of Rome in 1511, Raphael was beautiful but Michelangelo sublime."
For me, reading a book like Michelangelo & the Pope's Ceiling is the way to read history. Mr. King transported me back to those four years during which Michelangelo and Raphael created art both beautiful and sublime. I was there with and among the players, engrossed in the anecdotes King skillfully wove into his narrative. This is history -- up close and personal -- and yet far, far away from the pain, anguish, anger and turmoil that pervaded so much of the lives of Michelangelo, Pope Julius II, and Raphael. As I read, I learned, I felt, and I understood. Isn't that what reading is all about? I certainly could not ask for anything more.
Rating:
Summary: Master and Mastery
Review: MICHELANGELO AND THE POPE'S CEILING is an engaging book about the completion of one of the world's most splendid work(s) of art. The Sistine Chapel contains many artistic masterpieces, yet its history is as fascinating. The artist's frescoes reveal as much about his character as they do the subject matter. A major challenge (Michelangelo considered himself a sculptor, before a painter), the ceiling represents not only the artist's work, but his development as an artist. The drama of his own development unfolds in the tapestry of his relationship with the powerful Pope Julius II, a worldly, mercurial, "Il Papa Terrible." Ross King is the author of several other fine books including as BRUNELLESCHI'S DOME: HOW A RENAISSANCE GENIUS REINVENTED ARCHITECTURE, an esoteric, yet engaging account of the design for the dome of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence (considered one of the great achievements of the Renaissance). He blends a craftsmanlike approach to research with a narrative as engaging as any first-rate novel. He paints a vivid picture of two major world personalities: that of the temperamental artist as well as the worldly, militaristic pontiff. The book provides a splendid historical account of the project, yet also offers a detailed perspective upon the Catholic Church of the time as well as Italian culture and society as well. The only shortcoming of the book (in my opinion) is that there were too few photographs of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. One needs a magnifying glass to examine and admire the ceiling pictures. However, this is a minor shortcoming and it spurred me to delve further into the artwork of the chapel. One notable publication is MICHELANGELO: THE FRESCOES OF THE SISTINE CHAPEL by Marcia Hall and Takashi Okamura (photographer) which provides more than 150 full color photographs, including specific close-up detail. Another fine work is MICHELANGELO: THE VATICAN FRESCOES by Pierluigi De Vecchi, Gianluigi Colalucci (Contributor). This particular volume, while rather pricy, thoroughly documents the restoration efforts, offering 250+ photographs of the frescoes before and after the restoration. That being said, this particular text is a fine example historical writing from an author who can tell a compelling story.
Rating: 
Summary: Pardon me while I yawn
Review: Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling presents the saga of the world's most famous artist and what is arguably his most famous work. Along the way, King debunks many of the myths that have surrounded this masterpiece and its creation. King, however, depicts Michelangelo himself as wooden and aloof, with only a fragile connection to the rest of humanity. Perhaps the book should have been entitled Michelangelo and Raphael in Rome, because King brings his rival to life in a way sadly lacking in his treatment of Michelangelo himself. Barely 5 lines are devoted to the question of his lifestyle and romantic attachments, for example. I agree with reviewers who complained about the absence of illustrations. On the positive side, King does examine available records and factually describe Michelangelo's reluctance to undertake the chapel ceiling and the obstacles he was forced to circumvent over the long years between its commencement and completion. Unfortunately, this reads more like a textbook than literature, I'm afraid.
Rating:
Summary: Well done but not a page turner
Review: Mr. King has done a very well researched book that really goes into great detail regarding the history of the Vatican and of Italy at the time Michelangelo worked on the Sistine Chapel. Unfortunatley, I found this detail to be distracting at times to the main thrust of the story: Michelangelo and his work. This is a scholarly work that will be more interesting to historians who are interested in this particular period than those, like myself, who were looking for something a little closer to a historical novel.
A side note: It will be very helpful to the reader to have a book that shows each work in the Sistine Chapel in some detail. King's book discusses many of the works at length, but the details are difficult to appreciate without seeing the actual work. The hardcover edition has only a few pages of color illustrations in one section.
Nevertheless, this work is well done and very interesting.
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