Quotes from John T. Spike

Repeating instructions is a practical technique, but everything Michelangelo writes has this quality of pouring out his desires in the order they occur to him.

He was managing everything by himself and being pulled in too many directions.

Contracting the construction of a papal masoleum was nothing like being alone with his dreams and drawings, chisel and stone. Instead of working, he was writing letters, meeting contacts, arranging payments, obtaining permissions. It was a question of time.

Having no beginning and no end, circles represent the infinite, ergo the divine. Giotto and the pope knew such things by heart.

Evidently, Michelangelo was intrigued to contemplate the aftermath of his own experience of eliciting beauty from abstract rock.

Perhaps no artist in history had ever been treated so gingerly.

By provoking separate studies of monumental male nudes in self-consciously handsome postures, he established the curriculum for generations of imitators.

Nothing about the figure alludes to its identity apart from the book, which remains embedded in the rough-cut rock like the rest of its body. Only the apostle's left knee projects sufficiently to raise the shape of breaking out.

One suspects he disdained the traditional preparations of drawing and modeling in favor of cutting straight into the marble containing the captive soul yearning for release. The result is a kind of metaphor perhaps unconscious for the struggle of artistic creation. The only way Michelangelo could show us this was to leave the figure half-embedded in the rock.

Honoring artists on a par with military heroes was a humanistic innovation intiated at Brunelleschi's death in 1446.

If Brunelleschie provided the intellect for the creation of Renaissance sculpture, Donatello supplied the heart.

During the winter of 1499 Bramante came to Rome in search of patronage. He at once took advantage of his unemployment to immerse himself in the monuments, even dashing off a four-page pamphlet for classically-minded tourists.

By the time Michelangelo arrived in Rome, the Belvedere hill was inclined in a massive building site that would eventually yield gardens, courtyards, porticos, and an open-air sculpture loggia fit for a Christian emperor.

A passionate desire for posthumous glory was a leading motive for men of the Renaissance, whatever their calling.

The myth of Rome's everlastingness had been given relentless voice in Virgil's Aeneid, only to shatter with the sack of Rome in 410.

The Divine Comedy brings together the whole sprawling welter of medieval contradictions about Rome and declares them pages in a single story: the Rome of the Aeneid is the Rome of Acts; the Rome of Caesars, the Rome of martyrs, the Rome of Minerva, the Rome of Mary; Rome, the Great Whore of Babylon (in Revelation), and Rome, the triumphant New Jerusalem.

Despite their age difference-Pope Julius was sixty; Michelangelo, thirty-and their similarily contentious temperaments, neither man could believe that anything he passionately wanted would be denied him.

Shrewdly and deliberately, Julius orchestrated every aspect of his building campaigns, tomb project, paintings, and ceremonial pageantry to convey the message that he was born to be-and had rightly assumed his God-given role as-his Christian Caesar.

Mamo, the Italian word for marble, comes from the Greek marmairein, meaning "to shine". Geologically speaking, marble is limestone transformed by the heat and pressure of the earth's crust into a medium-hard, crystalline rock. Cold to the touch, marble yields willingly to the sculptor's chisel. Over time, white statuary acquires an ivory patina remarkably evocative of the warmth of human flesh.

As a building stone, marble was first used extensively by Pericles in the construction of the Parthenon in Athens in about 438 B.C.

The Roman emperor, Augustus famously boasted that he had inherited a city of brick and was leaving one of marble.

Marble that was still attached to the mountain vein, or freshly quarried, was considered alive because porous stone retains moisture absorbed from the ground. Quarry sap makes the marble soft, sparkling, and easy to work. After exposure to the air, this calcium-soaked water evaporates, and the stone becomes drier and harder-cotto, Michelangelo calls it in his contract.