A day like today: The Sistine Chapel

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There is a man climbing on top of a scaffold, he is 33 years old, his beard turned and his eyes furious; He has lived there for several years, up there, sometimes sleeping next to the tables. Even at the top of the scaffolding, they take the food.

He is dedicated to painting a work of art. He is so obsessive in his work that when he remembers to eat, he eats with one hand and with the other he paints.

Below is a rude, violent, haughty character who feels that he owns the world and lives; he dresses pompously and shouts at the artist that he does not like a nude he is painting, that he covers the body of that woman figure. The furious artist answers him to get out of there, or is capable of the worst; the man below responds with worse insults and threatens him with death.

That couple who hates each other to death is Michelangelo Buonarroti, up on the scaffold, insolent, defiant, haughty. And the man who is below, who is even more haughty and violent, more defiant and rude, is Pope Julius II.

They are several years already of heated disputes with the worst insults of part and part. Julius II, the Pope, is a man of arms to take, in the literal sense of the word, and has not hesitated to apply the death penalty on more than one occasion. Michelangelo is considered the great artist of the time, and does not hesitate to respond with equal insults to the Pope, because he knows that only he is capable of painting what he is painting; and Pope Julius II, the owner of many lives, bends his head and curses to the inside, because he knows he needs the insolent Michelangelo, because only that artist is capable of painting what he is painting.

Thus, during four years, those two characters fought in their own way, the Pope wanting to impose a moralistic vision in the paintings prohibiting the nudes; and Michelangelo imposing the beauty and energy of the bodies

In the end the most extraordinary work of painting in history was achieved: the Frescoes of the Sistine Chapel. Today, they are astonishment for the world and are due to the earthly tenacity of Pope Julius II who decided the work, and to the almost celestial capacity of Michelangelo, the only human being capable of performing the most important pictorial work of all time.

And that colossal monument to ingenuity and the human spirit, was beginning a day like today: May 10, 1508.

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