I

1475

By BARBARA NIVEN
(London, England)

HROUGHOUT today’s world,

which is also tomorrow’s,

the quater -centenaries of
three titans are being celebrated
this year, Shakespeare and Gali-
leo, born 400 years ago, and the
quater-centenary of Michelange-
lo’s death. Probably more people
now would be aware of Floren-
tine Michelangelo as a supreme
genius in European art than of
any other man throughout those
400 years. Why?

He was, majestically, the Re-

naissance man in a Renaissance’

Europe. Sculptor, painter, archi-
tect, he himself claimed to be a
sculptor foremost. Born into the
ripeness of Florentine discovery
of individual humanism in the
arts, he became a hero at its
peak.

Characteristically in the for-
cing house of such a hero of
his own time (one who, in the
words of Plekhanov, learns to
see further and deeper into men’s
consciousness than his fellows),
he was wet-nursed by the wife

of a stone cutter who prepared
the blocks for Florentine palaces,
and learned even his alphabet
through chisel strokes.

His entire life was spent in
the struggle to design and carry
out enormous commissions for
the competing city States of
Florence, Rome and Bologna,
against a tumultuous background
of change, where enormous
schemes dissolved in the person-
al’ conflicts of his patrons.

Literally dissolved—as an in-
stance, a bronze statue of Pope
Julius II established in Bologna,
was pulled off its niche and
melted down by the Bolognese
for a cannon to use against
Papal troops.

Men who live and work in
1964, aware of their own strug-
gle and their own possibilities,
should take a quick look at the
personal struggle of this man
to work his way through to his
giant presentations of the poten-
tialities of man at the centre of
his own world.

I quote from one of his letters
from Rome, during his work on

stand.

J.$. Wallace

ARK IT AND STRIKE IT is the autobiography of a

TV star as well known as Jack Paar but I have a

brain black-out this afternoon and can’t recall his
name. The book is interesting for many reasons, among
others for its revelation of the pressure that was put on
him when he headed a ban-the-bomb organization.

He states that some of the biggest corporations have
blacklists against all who even take a mildly progressive

one Most interesting of all to me is the quotation I found
in it from Father Gerard Hopkins. Besides being a Jesuit,

he was a poet of a high order though he published no
book during his life time: the English poet laureate Rob-
ert Bridges did many years after Hopkins died. That
makes this quotation all the more interesting:

“I must tell you that I am always thinking of the
Communist future . . . horrible to say, in a manner I am
a Communist. Their ideal barring some things is nobler
than that professed by any secular statesman I know of
tte besides it is just. I do not mean the means of get-
ing it are.*

“But it is a dreadful thing for the greatest and most
necessary part of a very rich nation to live a hard life
without dignity, knowledge, delight, or hopes in the midst
of plenty — which plenty they make. They profess they
do not care what they wreck and burn, the old civiliza-
tion and order must be destroyed. This is.a dreadful out-
look. But what has the old civilization ever done for
them?”

®

Y SISTER has three sons who are priests, two of them
Jesuits. Naturally, I have sent her this quotation.

Once when I sharply criticized a priest for his poli-
tical utterances she wrote: “I don’t think you should talk
about a priest like that.” I wired her back:

The nerve of her \
To raise a stir

About my criticisms

When she’s had three

Across her knee

And spanked their solecisms.

*It is curious that ever since 1607 the Jesuits have been accused of believing
the end justifies the means and that Hopkins falls into the same trap about the
Communists, He Is equally off the mark about burning and destroying: I've
seen the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad and the Tretiakov Galleries in Moscow:
shine eure of how the workers, when they take over, treasure the best
of the past,

MICHELANG

the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,
written when he was 34:

“For the last 12 years I have
been drudging all over Italy; I
have borne every shame; I have
endured every hardship; I have
rent my body with all sorts of
hard-work; I have exposed my
life to a thousand dangers.”

In this letter he sends a son-
net “On The Painting of the
Sistine Chapel”:

I’ve grown a goitre by dwelling

in this den as cats from stagnant
streams in Lombardy,

or in what other land they hap

to be which drives the belly
close beneath the chin.

My beard turns up to heaven,
my nape falls in,

fixed on my spine; my breast

bone visibly grows like a harp:

a rich embroidery bedews my
face

from brush drops thick and thin.

My loins into my paunch like
levers grind;

my buttock like a crupper bears
my weight; :

my feet unguided wander to and
fro;

in front my skin grows Gost
and long; behind

by bending it becomes more taut
and strait;

crosswise I strain me like a
Syrian boy’. ;

Whence false and quaint, I know,
must be the fruit of squinting
brain and eye;

for ill can claim the gun thal.

bends awry.

Come then, Giovanni, try

to succor my dead paintings and
my Fame;

since foul J fare and painting is
my shame.

The angry laugh one can hear
growing in this private cry
comes from the painter who took
the whole legend of Genesis and
placed the glory of man at the
centre of it with his “Creation
of Man” — Adam, receiving life
from God (and, to us now, visib-
ly transcending God).

It comes from the man who
at the age of 60, was called back
to Rome by another Pope to the
Sistine Chapel, to paint the huge
wall of the Last Judgment, of
purple thunderous sky in which
to trumpet blasts the damned
men fall’to the river of Charon
but in which: the medieval hell
is just not there.

Michelangelo’s enormous pe-
netration into the human body’s

New Canadian Comedy
at Neptune Theatre

ALIFAX’S Neptune Theatre
will open its second sum-
mer season June 26 with a
Canadian comedy written by
actor-playwrite Tommy Tweed.

“John A. Beats the Devil,” a
comedy about Sir John A Mac-
Donald and the problems of

forging Confederation, will

open a repertoire of six plays
to be Breseatest at the theatre.

power, with all it carries as the
conscious instrument of discov-
ery, expression, understanding
of our actual world, lives in his
Moses (reproduced on_ this
page) .

Our sculptor Henry Moore, in
a recent interview published in
the Sunday Times color supple-
ment, said of this:

“The way he builds up a mass
of detail yet keeps the same
vision and dignity throughout it
—it really is staggering that any-
one should do that out of such
an intractable material as mar-
ble.

“There’s an ability to realize

his conception completely in the.

material and to find no restric-
tions or difficulties in doing it.
You look at any of the parts
and it’s absolutely _ perfect:
there’s no hesitation — it’s by

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615 SELKIRK AVE. -

July 3, 1964—PACIFIC TRIBUNE—P™”

Statue of MOSES in the San Pietro Church in Vincoli,
Produced by Michelangelo in 1513-16 ~

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fi:

someone who can do
he wants to do.”

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can see the history g
the Colosseum, the ™,
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rock, the tessellated #
of the square trodden
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The impact of the ii
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they are the hands of
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ously, there. 4a

And they are also J
of everyone carving
for men.

—