Cine and Sculpture: “MICHELANGELO INFINITO”

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Direction: Emanuele Imbucci, 2017 (Italy)
Cast: Enrico Lo Verso, Ivano Marescotti
Awards: 2018, David di Donatello Award: nominated for best special effects Duration: 97 min.
Michelangelo “Miguel Ángel” Buonarroti (1475-1564) needs no introduction: what more can be said about the genius of sculpture and painting, who also demonstrated the talents of an architect (his is the design of the dome of the St. Peter of the Vatican). An angry man, often arrogant, he did not compare well and competed with painters such as Raphael Sanzio and Leonardo da Vinci, and fought with papal patrons such as Julius II, Leo X and Clement VII. What more can be said that we have not seen in documentaries of all kinds and even films: Charlton Heston is hard to get out of his head like the Renaissance genius who had his pluses and minuses with a Juli II played by Rex Harrison in "The Agony and Ecstasy" (Carol Reed, 1965), a film based on Irving Stone's novel of the same name.

The documentary reconstructs the life of the Florentine artist, since he was educated as a child in the school of the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio, when he showed the sufficient doses of genius and pride that would accompany him all his life, the stage of learning with Bertoldo di Giovanni and the admiration and support of a mature Lorenzo the Magnificent of Florence (for whom, along with other members of the Medici family, years later he designed an unfinished sculptural group in the sacristy of the basilica of St. Lawrence in the city of Arno). Fruit of the following years would be pictorial works like “The Sagrada Family or the Tondo Doni” (c. 1506) or sculptures of the stature of the “David” (1501-1504) ...
... Mixing soliloquy and performances of Lo Verso as Miguel Ángel (especially in front of a block of marble and with a mace, too obvious a metaphor for the inexhaustible passion of a genius who always sought this infinity that is mentioned in the title), the documentary chooses and recreates in some episodes and works of the life of the Florentine genius, and also shows it as a figure painted by other artists, such as Heraclitus in "The School of Athens" (1510-1511) of Raphael, or himself in the guise of St. Bartholomew's "The Last Judgment" ...
... The result is a documentary that is too entertaining in a transcendental and allegorical dramatization of the character, but which, as we anticipated, shines in the magnificent exhibition of his most iconic works, from David to Moses and especially the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel. It is these minutes dedicated to showing in detail the wonderful works that we will never tire of seeing, and more so after the recent restoration in the aforementioned chapel of the Vatican Museums, which allow us to enjoy a documentary more than correct, but far from the brilliance of films that we have recently been able to contemplate and that leave us with our mouths open. In this case, the excess of fictional drama and music that, grandiloquently, ends up being irritating. But aside from that, the truth is that the documentary has enough incentives to delight art lovers. Michelangelo Buonarroti could have wanted infinity, as art did not seem to fully satisfy him (paraphrasing a quote from another genius of sculpture, Auguste Rodin, mentioned at the end of the film), but he certainly caressed it. countless times with the chisel, hammer and paintbrushes (Óscar Gonzalez, October 2019).
Michelangelo infinito: Longing for perfection
It also contains a series of unpublished and almost unknown images: charcoal drawings on the walls of a Florentine basement, discovered in 1975.
It's an art tour film, a special kind of documentary that incorporates a bit of fiction to "contextualize" the story; in the present case, a narrator, Vasari, a contemporary and biographer of Michelangelo, and a couple of "paintings" that recreate some moments in the artist's history. The result is exciting: a review of the life and work of the genius of the Italian Renaissance, which underscores the longing for perfection and transcendence that he pursued all his life ...
... The freedom of this quasi-documentary allows for striking visual effects. It also contains a series of unpublished and almost unknown images: charcoal drawings on the walls of a Florentine basement, discovered in 1975, and the reconstruction of the cardboard for a fresh missing person that he made to compete with another of Leonardo. , also lost ...
... A delight for lovers of art and a different, didactic cinema (Fernando Gil Delgado).