British Museum explores final decades of Michelangelo's life in new exhibition

euronews (in English)

Among the exhibition's highlights is Michelangelo's sole surviving complete cartoon (Epifania), a full-scale preparatory drawing, which is one of the largest Renaissance works on paper.

Transcript

00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:03 A lot of people, when they're thinking of Michelangelo,

00:28 will think of the early works.

00:29 So David, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, that sort of thing.

00:33 And it's easy for people to forget

00:35 that he goes on working until the age of almost 89.

00:38 And the later works show quite a different side to him,

00:42 much more introspective, much more thoughtful.

00:45 We get to see more of him as a person,

00:48 coming to terms with these very universal human feelings

00:51 that we all face as we get older.

00:57 Michelangelo could be quite a difficult person sometimes.

01:00 We know a great deal about what he was like,

01:02 because we have 500 letters of his that survive in total.

01:05 We're including some of them in the show.

01:08 And we also include some letters that he

01:10 wrote to his nephew, who bore the brunt of his temperament

01:13 on numerous occasions.

01:14 [MUSIC PLAYING]

01:17 I think there's a perception that creativity is something

01:32 which happens when someone is young, when they're still

01:35 finding their feet and experimenting.

01:37 Whereas I think what this exhibition makes clear

01:39 is that even after the age of 60,

01:41 and for a long time after that, artists

01:44 can remain incredibly creative and innovative,

01:46 and can take on new and really challenging projects.

01:49 [MUSIC PLAYING]

01:52 [MUSIC PLAYING]

01:56 (music fades)

01:58 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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