Ideas - Learning to Look in the Sistine Chapel: Jeannie Marshall

Episode Date: May 22, 2024

Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel may be one of the most exalted works of art in the world. In her book All Things Move: Learning to Look in the Sistine Chapel, Canadian writer and Rome resident Jeannie Marshall probes the power of art to move us and transcend the historical and religious contexts that shaped it. *This episode originally aired on June 13, 2023.

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. It's one of the most iconic images in Western art. Two fingers reaching towards each other, but not quite touching. God about to bring Adam to life.

It's the most famous scene on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, rendered in the early 16th century by the Renaissance genius Michelangelo. And then you've got God working in this really muscular way to create the universe. Along with Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Botticelli's Birth of Venus, the Sistine Chapel's ceiling is a quintessential masterpiece. If we're really looking, we'll see that Michelangelo is not showing us something beautiful, though there is beauty in it, but horror and destruction. The possibility that all our worldly concerns are pointless,

that if the world ceased to exist, both our most precious and utilitarian objects would amount to nothing. Canadian writer Jeannie Marshall has lived in Rome for two decades, but avoided visiting the Sistine Chapel for years. It took quite a while before I really understood that there was more going on on a personal level. My mother's anguish over her place in the world of the Catholic Church, that was definitely a part of the story for me. In her book, All Things Move, she reflects on looking at and beyond the Sistine Chapel and probes the fundamental question of why art moves us the way it does. They're being kicked out of the Garden of Eden.

I guess that's a temptation. It's like two things in one, because on one side, they're just eating from the forbidden tree. And then on the other side of the same panel, they're being chased out by an angel. Fellow Canadian and resident of Rome and longtime contributor to ideas Megan Williams visited the Sistine Chapel with Jeanne Marshall and strolled through the

streets of their adopted city with her. For most people it's not easy getting a look at the Sistine Chapel even if you make it to Rome. First, there's the long line-up, often under an unrelenting sun. If you don't have a ticket, go to the booking office. You can go today or tomorrow. The scalpers who try to con you into a ticket at a ridiculously inflated price. Do you want as a guide or without guide? Without guide.

37 euro. And the cries and chaos of the eternal city all around you as you inch forward in the line. Who are you? I was apologizing to everyone because they're like blaring at me. It's in this lineup, one I vowed never to do, that I meet Jeannie Marshall, just after a downpour of rain that somehow makes everything brighter. My kids, with their school, tried to come here three different times. Oh, you're kidding.

And they couldn't get in. We're here, if we get in, to gaze at Michelangelo's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. As a journalist and writer living in Rome for more than two decades now, I've been lucky enough to see the Sistine Chapel with a small group of reporters. First in the year 2000, when it reopened after being scoured of almost five centuries of soot and smoke. Then again during the conclaves that elected Pope Benedict XVI and Francis. And then when it reopened to the public after the COVID pandemic. But like Jeannie, I mostly stayed away from it.

Way too crowded. What about, you know, just the fact that it's so overexposed and oversubscribed? Yeah, and that too. Well, you feel like you've seen it already, even though you really haven't, but you just feel like it's so familiar that it could almost put you to sleep, you know, in its presence, and it's become dulled by familiarity. And so there was also that, for sure. And also I felt like I don't really understand it, and so why am I going?

And I think, sometimes I think that for a lot of people, like, why are we going? Why are we here? Like, what have we come to see? You know, what do we expect? And I think most of us don't have a clear idea of what we're doing here, what we're looking for. But it's so big and enormous that, you know, it took me years, and I think it can take years to really unravel it. The Sistine Chapel is inside the Vatican Museums, and to get to it, you have to push through

dozens of rooms loaded with masterpieces of their own, paintings, sculptures, mosaics, until finally, down a narrow staircase and through a tiny door, you're in. It's like stepping into a jewel box. The walls and ceiling are teeming with painted figures that startle with their color, movement, and tension. Angels and cherubs, devils and flayed skin, the saved and the damned, clouds and floods, and above us, on the most famous ceiling in the Western world, the hand of God shooting life into Adam. And on the altar wall, the side we walk in from,

painted 24 years after the ceiling, the last judgment. Almost shocking in magnitude and lurid in color. Oranges and pinks and purples and blues. The people, even the ones on the, you know, the side of the who are being saved, there's something kind of frightening about it all. And still the crowds pushing from all sides. But Jeannie's resistance to coming here all those years wasn't just about avoiding hordes of sweaty tourists. It ran deeper, and it was more personal. So I would feel guilty about not going. I knew I had meant to go, I had intended to go,

and I felt like I better go, I just better go. And so when my mother died, we moved house, it all happened around the same time. And I found sort of a little booklet that I had been keeping all these years that I bought when we first came to Rome and intended to study it and go to the Sistine Chapel. And I saw it and I felt like, okay, maybe it's time. She came a second time and a third. And that's when something for her moved. She'd found a spot on the stone bench along the wall and gazed up at the scene on the ceiling high above her,

the deluge depicting women, children, and men pulling themselves onto high ground as the world floods around them and Noah's Ark sails away. Before I was able to sit down, I thought maybe this will be the last time. But it just opened up and I felt like I have to look at this a little more carefully. And also, I just couldn't stop thinking about it. And then I had so many questions, so much excitement about it. Somehow it was a big, daunting piece of art, but I thought I could wrestle with it and maybe I would come out of it with some sort of understanding of my own life. Well, I was born in a hospital in Newmarket, Ontario, but my family lived in Keswick at that time on Lake Simcoe in a little bungalow on a dirt road.

In the early 60s, born into a large family with little money, her father's struggling to find work as a carpenter. There was something cozy about it. There was a fireplace and it had a big soot mark. I remember the fireplace. I don't really remember the fires, but I do remember there was a sense of home there, but everything was temporary all the time. We moved constantly. Jeannie was the youngest of nine children, three from her father's first marriage, born a year before her dad died. My mother was not a, she, I could see sometimes that there was stress and there was a lot of stress about money, but she was someone who always tried to not dwell

on the negative and to try to ensure that we were all happy and did things that were fun. The one rule her mother imposed on the kids was that they couldn't attend a Catholic church. She herself was Catholic, but quietly raged against the church. My mother always wore a wedding ring, and I didn't know my father, and I didn't know much about their circumstances. And I remember as a child even asking her about her wedding, because I was a girl and I was interested I remember as a child even asking her about her wedding, because I was a girl and I was interested in weddings as a little kid. And I didn't know why there were no pictures of their wedding. What kind of dress did she wear? And she would always deflect.

Her mom worked as a bookkeeper to support the family with some help from the older kids and urged them all to find jobs that provided security. Jeannie got an English degree by taking night courses, working clerical jobs by day, then a master's degree in journalism, and a job writing for Canada's National Post newspaper. In the early 2000s, when her partner James got offered a position at a UN agency here in Rome, she jumped at the adventure of living here. And so when I moved to Rome and my mother came to visit, we went around to some of the churches to look at the artwork, and she was interested but agitated. And we went to St. Peter's where I said to her, you could say your confession in English if you

wanted to, which just completely horrified her. She made a joke about it and said they would not have time to listen to all of my sins and I would not have time to do all the Hail Marys that they are likely to assign me. On the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the story of Noah and the flood takes up three panels. It was the middle one, painted by Michelangelo as part of the whole ceiling between 1508 and 1512, that captivated Jeanne on that third visit. It's so detailed, it's hard to see, but she'd studied an image of it the night before going. It's hard to see, but she'd studied an image of it the night before going. And so I really knew what I was looking at.

So I could look up and see the people, the complexity of this frame. I could see the woman trying to get out of the water while she's got a table on her head. And she obviously expects to get through this. But we know because we've read Genesis that she's not going to make it, that these are not the chosen people who are going to survive this flood. These are the people who will die. And so that's sort of the first time I realized that they're going to die. I thought they're pulling themselves out of the water onto dry land. They're going to then get in the ark. But then you look at the painting, you realize the arc is way on the other side, and it's floating away. So there was a kind of moment of realizing that, oh, I really was not looking carefully at this painting at all. Why do you think Michelangelo chose to focus on them

as opposed to the people sailing away safely in the art? I've thought about it quite often, because he so often doesn't show you the thing that you expect to see. So he seems to have some sort of sympathy for these people. It's almost as though, you know, the very pious thing to do would be to show these people as being terrible people because God wants to kill them. So if God wants to kill them, they have to be pretty bad. And you would think he would show them that way, but he doesn't. He shows them like us. They look just like us. And they look upset and scared, and they're helping each other, and they're trying to find a way to survive. I don't know why he did that, because it is a bit of a questioning, the motivation of the Old Testament God, it seems. So it is surprising. And it is surprising that he doesn't show Noah and his

family sailing away safely about to repopulate and start the new world. Michelangelo was born Michelangelo Buonarroti in a village outside Florence in 1475, at the height of the Renaissance. He was still a little boy when Pope Sixtus enlisted leading artists, Botticelli and Perugino and others, to paint the walls of a chapel named after him, Sistine VI, beside St. Peter's Basilica. Michelangelo didn't come to Rome until he was about 30. He'd just made an astonishing breakthrough as a sculptor, taking a massive block of marble, old and brittle, and carving it into the masterpiece David. Julius II was now pope and summoned Michelangelo to Rome to sculpt his tomb.

But when Michelangelo got here, he got roped into painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo didn't really consider himself a painter and had serious doubts he'd be up to the monumental task. When you look at the ceiling, it's really high. It's really, really high. So it must have had to have so many layers to be able to get up that close.

And then he had to, it's not that he was laying on his back, but he had to sort of twist himself around. And he suffered physically from what he had to put himself through in order to be able to paint the ceiling. And he did most of the painting himself. So his assistants would prepare the fresco, would prepare the plaster, would grind the paints, mix them together. But for the most part, he painted it all himself, which means long hours in this cramped and twisted position. He even wrote a poem about it. I've already grown a goat from this torture, hunched up here like a cat in Lombardy or anywhere else where the stagnant water's poison. My stomach's squashed under my chin, my beard's pointing at heaven, my brain's crushed in a casket, my breast twists like a harpist. My brush, above me all the time, dribbles paint so my face makes a fine floor for droppings.

My haunches are grinding into my guts. My poor ass strains to work as a counterweight. Every gesture I make is blind and aimless. My skin hangs loose below me. My spine's all knotted from folding over itself. I am bent, taut as a Syrian bow. Grazie a painter. Difendi ormai Giovanni, è il mio onore. Non sendo in loco buon, ne io pittore.

Ma se quei quattro anni di agonia hanno provato niente, è che Michelangelo era un pittore, un pittore straordinario. Ma c'è un effetto che se guardi in diretta, sembra che stia guardando in cielo. E quasi lo sai. But there's supposed to be an effect that if you look straight up, that it looks like you're looking into the sky. And you almost get it. On the ceiling, he laid out the story of Genesis, from cosmic creation with the almost carved out of paint, heavy and erotic and captured in motion, looking in one direction, turning in another, always a ripple of muscle and tension. Lining that central panel are prophets and sibyls, the pagan female prophets who appear in Virgil's Aeneid and

St. Augustine's City of God, foretelling the Messiah. There's debate about how much theologians and humanists advised Michelangelo. One of the likely contenders is Giles of Viterbo, who was an Augustinian priest who believed in looking at other religions for wisdom. who believed in looking at other religions for wisdom. He didn't see them as lesser than Christianity. He was very interested in Jewish mysticism. He was even interested in paganism itself and was said to have visited the site where the Kumaean Sybil is supposed to have lived.

He was just studying and seeking and searching and looking for answers. And he believed very much in going back to original sources. So he learned a lot of languages, Hebrew and Greek, but also Aramaic and Arabic too. And he was a great influence on Michelangelo, probably. Posed alongside the main panel, one Sybil twists around, her arms reaching out to pick up a large open book of prophecy. The idea is that Christianity was present in the Sybils, and they were able to see it in their oracles, in their prophecies, that they would predict that there

was this child that was coming. It's as though Christianity existed in them, even though they weren't Christians, they're pre-Christian. And that sort of fits with Joseph of Terrible's ideas that it wasn't just that they were stepping stones or that other religions were stepping stones, but there was wisdom on the way. And it wasn't even clear that he believed that Christianity was the end point. It was that we were still working through something that eventually we would have a greater spiritual knowledge. And he understood scripture as being sort of opaque and difficult and poetic even, because we couldn't understand the direct communication of God. So it had to be mediated through this kind of poetic language of scripture. And Art had a role in responding to prophecy in scripture.

We all want something from the Sistine Chapel. We want to understand it, but we also want some of its glory sprinkled upon us like holy water. We want to take hold of the messages painted into the plaster to gain some insight into life here on earth and to figure out how to live. We want to be people who have seen the Sistine Chapel, but even our shallower motivations lie on top of something more profound, the desire to see and be touched by greatness and to discern its meaning in our lives. When we arrive, if we're really looking, we'll see that Michelangelo is not showing us something beautiful, though there is beauty in it,

but horror and destruction. The possibility that all our worldly concerns are pointless, that if the world ceased to exist, both our most precious and utilitarian objects would amount to nothing. We were nothing and will be nothing. Art has had a long history of inspiring, overwhelming emotions. Goethe, Simone Weil, Stendhal, and many others have written about the delight

and terror that works of art provoked in them. There's even a name for the many breakdowns that works of art provoked in them. There's even a name for the many breakdowns that sometimes seize people looking at art, Stendhal syndrome. Like Jeannie, I'm not religious, but can still find myself overwhelmed with emotion when I enter a church in Rome. And there are the news stories about museum visitors impulsively slicing or smearing or throwing objects at priceless works of art. I've had strong reactions myself to some pieces of art and I've never wanted to damage something, but sometimes I've been surprised at the level of feeling that I might

have. It might be irritation sometimes or great sadness in front of a piece of art and sometimes nothing. So I don't really know where it comes from exactly. But I also felt that I grew up in an environment where there was a lot of anger. We lived in these places that were somewhat impoverished and there would be just this feeling of futility and also a sense that people were going along and not knowing how to make their lives mean something. They knew their lives should have meaning, but they didn't know how to find it. And so sometimes I think when we're facing a big piece of art, we feel like it should have meaning and its meaning should relate to us. And maybe we're almost catching it, but we can't quite. should relate to us. And maybe we're almost catching it, but we can't quite. And that is enormously frustrating. Frustration that Jeannie felt at first when looking inside the Sistine

Chapel, that that dizzying display of biblical narratives didn't relate to her life in any way. I didn't see the connection at first at all. And it wasn't until I started really exploring the Sistine Chapel further beyond the central panels, beyond my sense of an idea of rage and art coming together, it took quite a while before I really understood that there was more going on on a personal level. You know, it's not a logical connection, but definitely I can see that my mother's anguish over her place in the world of the Catholic Church, that that was definitely a part of the story for me. Michelangelo's depiction of Genesis resonated with Jeanne's very own Genesis, her mother,

and the unsteady ground her mom stood upon as a Catholic. Everything fell apart if I didn't have the story of my mother and her relationship to Catholicism and how that unspoken issue that she had affected our lives and just through the way that I felt about the art I felt that it was all about feelings it isn't art in many way about feelings you don't necessarily interpret it in a logical way so sometimes you have to stand there and think why am I having this reaction why do I feel the way I do? Why do I love that painting? Why do I love that particular depiction of a story that's been told over and over and over again? Like even just the numerous images that we see of Mary and the child, you know, why do some of them, you know, make me upset and some of them,

I love some of them and some of them I don't care about. So I can't understand it on a logical way, but I can certainly understand it now in terms of how my past is still there. You know, it's still a part of you. You take it with you. All the paintings and sculptures of Mary holding her dead son after he's been taken down from the cross became more distinct to me after these years of casually looking. Her grief multiplied and left the realm of story and entered the real world where real things hurt. Christ's beaten, broken body began to seem less a

subject for artists to demonstrate their skills in anatomical painting and more the very picture of human suffering. Despite my resistance to the Christian story, I felt the conviction and concentration of these artists. I felt their sincerity and belief. Whatever it was that the artists were trying to say was starting to reveal itself to me. In these moments, when something in the image made me think about the biblical story and about the time it was painted until my thoughts eventually came back to the present where I stood staring at it. I could see how the artwork might have functioned in the Rome of the Renaissance. I could almost feel it. And though the popes and their financial schemes effectively splintered Christianity instead of uniting it, though their need for money to finance the

artistic revival of Rome brought violence and mayhem, despite everything that was destroyed, it is the art that endures. It's still here, waiting, quietly available to anyone who will only take the time to look. You're listening to Ideas contributor Megan Williams with Jeannie Marshall, two Canadians who live in Rome discussing Marshall's book, All Things Move, Learning to Look in the Sistine Chapel. Ideas is heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas.

We're a broadcast and a podcast available on your favorite podcast app. You can also find hundreds of past episodes of Ideas on the CBC Listen app and on our website. I'm Nala Ayyad. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. 500 years ago, a devout Catholic painted scenes and figures from the Bible on the ceiling and altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, arguably the most ambitious and celebrated work of Renaissance art. Jeanne Marshall is a Canadian writer living in Rome.

She happens to be atheist. While grieving the death of her mother, she did something she hadn't done in all the years she'd lived in the city. Visit the Sistine Chapel. Her encounter with Michelangelo's masterpiece made her ponder how religious art can unlock deeply emotional responses in people of other faiths or no faith, and how the most iconic work of Catholic art helped her make peace with her mother's anguished, even tortured relationship with that church and with Jeannie's father.

They both came from Catholic families, and he had already been married and had three children, so he couldn't divorce his wife. But his wife was a very severe alcoholic, and she was not really able to look after the children. There had been some incidents where she really had put them in harm's way. And so he was trying to look after the children while working as a carpenter. And he wanted my mother to live with him and help him with the children. And so she said, yes, she did that. And then they started to have more children. A situation that left her feeling deeply conflicted. He told her that his wife was not going to survive long. Her state of health was just so bad that she wouldn't live, and that when she died, they would get married.

And my mother said it seemed horrible to actually have to wait for someone to die in order to get married, so she just didn't think about it. But Jeannie's father ended up dying long before his wife did. And so my parents never did get married, and so my mother was left with this situation where she had all of these children and she had violated the church. She was also a religious person. So this worried her terribly. And she just didn't talk about it. Not to us. But during one of her visits to Jeannie in Rome, she did.

And we were walking around and she just told me in kind of a blurt, it all came out. And I realized that she'd been carrying this all this time. And when I told one of my brothers, in fact, I told him when he was visiting Rome and we were walking in and out of the same churches, I didn't know that he didn't know. Of course, there was no moral judgment from us, but it was the realization that she had carried this terrible weight all this time. I'm going to cry. I'm sorry. You know, it's a very sad thing because she, you know, she did love her children. She was trying to do the right thing. Sorry. You think, you know, she was a good person, but she suffered because she was afraid of what would happen afterwards. She was afraid of even just the authority of the church. You know, in her day, it was all, you know, men in black

robes who were very stern. And I remember one of them called Aloysius. And I thought only a priest could be called Aloysius. And he seemed to really frighten her as a child. And this was her image, I think, that she had of these people who would be very, very, very displeased with her. So there was the human element of the people who control the church being very upset with her, and then her own relationship with her sense of spirituality. So I realized that it was, I think it was good for her to tell me. I think it did at least allow a little for her to be able to take some of the

weight off or to share the weight. I couldn't say to her that it doesn't matter because it did matter to her. The anguish Jeannie's mother felt as a Catholic wasn't just about shame. There was rage too, something many have felt about the hypocrisy of the church and even about the art market, now fueled by speculative finance and then, five centuries ago, by war and indulgences. Indulgences were a scheme developed by the Catholic Church where believers thought they could buy forgiveness from sin. The corruption outraged critics, among them an Augustinian friar and professor of moral theology in Germany, Martin Luther. In 1517, he's said to have posted on a church door his 95 Theses, also known as the

Disputation on the Power of Indulgences. It's a gesture now seen as the spark that ignited the Protestant Reformation. Luther posted this disputation, and that sort of got the ball rolling. So he was pretty mild at first, though. He was just saying, maybe don't do this anymore. But the more the church fought him, the more Luther just kept publishing. This also coincides with printing presses and pamphlets and the fact that these things could become more available to people. He heard that churchmen were relieved that he was doing all of this arguing in Latin

because ordinary people were not understanding. So he started publishing them in German so that people could understand. And that really meant his popularity increased so much. As a schism in the Catholic Church burst open, violence broke out across Europe. France and Spain fought over Italy. Italian states fought back and against each other. Ten years after Luther wrote his 95 Theses, a hungry mercenary army entered Rome and sacked it. Those soldiers, they had many reasons for sacking Rome, but one of them was that they had listened to Martin Luther and they felt that the Catholic Church had been lying to them. And so the things that they believed in, they

could no longer believe in. They were angry that their sense of meaning had been taken away, and they responded with enormous and unbelievable violence. For weeks, they raped and murdered and pillaged. They felt almost like they were being good Christians by going in and sacking Rome, destroying this place that obviously was just so opulent. place that obviously was just so opulent. Can you imagine if you've come from Germany where all the money is flowing out of Germany and into Rome, and there's this opulent church being built. There's all this artwork, everybody. And they're also, all the Rome's, everybody's clueless. They don't know the anger that is building outside of Rome. So they're quite shocked when these soldiers come in and they take over. The Pope, they sent him on the run to Castel San Angelo. So he's holed up there. They take over his apartments, basically. They're all swarming all through the apostolic palace. And they had taken over villas of wealthy people

and were basically just ransacking everything. Carving scrolls of anti-Catholic graffiti into the walls of various luxurious palaces that can still be seen today. I knew about indulgences because my mother used to mutter about them all the time as though this was the great problem in Catholicism. She had a lot of things, I think because she felt judged by the church, she would judge it as well. She was raging against some of the same things that the mercenaries who sacked Rome were raging against. That sense of there being a double standard, that this was no longer about spirituality, and instead it was about power and riches. Michelangelo returns to the Sistine Chapel to paint Judgment Day on the altar wall in 1536. It's almost a quarter of a century since he's completed the sealing,

and both his church and he have changed. As the revolution set in motion by Luther grew, the Catholic Church's counter-reformation is now in full swing. Michelangelo is no longer buoyed in his arduous task of painting by an open intellectual atmosphere. He's in his 60s, an old man by the measure of those times, and feels implicated in the actions of his church. We can see that he is concerned. He's definitely concerned. He was always devout, but as he got older, he became more and more devout and would make his own beautiful little crosses that he would use for his own devotions. But he was worried.

He was worried that when he was young, he had been arrogant. He had accepted the money that was raised by wars and annexing territory and by indulgences. That money was being used to create all this artwork. And it's not that he was wealthy by any means, but he was certainly part of it. He was accepting it and didn't question it. As you might not, if you're in the middle of it all and don't think about the larger question of what's going on. You do think that, well, this great artwork is for the glory of God and the church, but you don't think about the people who are suffering in order to pay for it. 30s. And he painted God creating the sun and the moon as himself, in the same position he would have assumed while painting, cheekily flashing his naked buttocks at viewers. When you look at the prophets, they're always looking off wistfully somewhere as though they're trying to solve the great mysteries of existence. And so are the Sybils as as well they're looking at their prophecies and trying to puzzle it out and then you've got god working in this really muscular way to create the universe

god with his bum it's very strange but he painted god's bum up there and and all of this nudity that he painted to all of this kind of exuberance, really. And even in the destruction of the world, in that panel, there's so many people and there's so much. It shows up there, too, and the fact that these people want to live. It's all about that. When he paints Judgment Day on the altar wall, he shows Jesus separating the damned from the saved and paints himself on the side of the damned. damned from the saved, and paints himself on the side of the damned. It's so troubling. There's a lot going on. So you have to find Christ in the middle,

and then he's really big. And so then you look at his very severe face, and you can see that it's all over at this point. It's all done. St. Peter hands the keys back. All the work of the church is finished by this point, and we're all going to be judged here, and it's not going to be pretty. The most crowded side is the side that's all going to hell. So there's an eternity to be faced here, and it's grim. The sympathy Michelangelo conveyed for the damned when he painted the deluge years earlier, gone here. Even on the side of the people who are being saved, I can't find anything that seems remotely,

I don't know, redeeming in it. It just seems like it's all so focused on damnation. This is one of my favorite churches. Again, I love this blue, the blue on the ceiling. And the arches, the arches, incredible. You just almost feel like it's groaning. There's something just so huge about it. A few days later, Ginny Marshall and I step into Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, a beautiful church tucked in the backside of the domed Pantheon

with this strange elephant statue by the Baroque sculptor Bernini in the front. Yeah, so this was the seat of the Inquisition here in Rome, and this is where Galileo was brought before it. Part of the Catholic Church's counter-reformation, its attempt to keep Protestantism in check, was Pope Paul III's creation of the Holy Office, otherwise known as the Inquisition inside the dim church beside the altar is a statue of the risen christ michelangelo sculpted it in the 25 year period between painting the ceiling and the last judgment i love that how people walk up snap a picture and then move on it's like i've done it myself you know i think i'll look at it later it's beautiful really but it's just this very very

simple body muscular but not overly muscular not the way he often does every every muscle and every tendon this is a little softer but i kind of love the feet i just love that you know it's always like details he's really good with feet. Very realistic. And, you know, if your foot is sort of slightly over the edge of the stone, it's going to be splayed a little bit. Christ's genitals are covered with a rather heavy-handed bronze cloth. Yeah, so it's like... It looks like breeches were added later to this one as well.

Yeah, and it's really heavy. It's bronze. And it was added, I think, around the time of the Inquisition. The Council of Trent, the Roman Catholic response to the doctrinal challenges of the Reformation, spanned two decades in the mid-1500s. And it enlisted censors to cover up nudity in art, including some in Michelangelo's The Last Judgment, adding fig leaves and loincloths. the last judgment, adding fig leaves and loincloths. It earned the artist who carried out the work the nickname Il Braghetone, the breaches maker. Jeannie and I leave Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, cross Largo Torre, Argentina, the site where Caesar was assassinated, and make our way through one of Rome's most famous piazzas, Campo dei Fiori.

It dates back to Roman times, and by day is still this boisterous flower and vegetable market. At night, it's party central for young people. But looming in its center, startling and in Congress, is a dark, menacing statue of the philosopher Giordano Bruno, who in 1600 was burnt alive in the square by the Inquisition. It says, a Bruno, il secolo da lui divinato. To Bruno, it says, the age he predicted here where the stake burned. So it's a man standing wearing long robes, definitely the robes of a Dominican priest,

and a hood draped over his face so that his face is in shadow. It seems like no matter what time of day you come, it's hard to see the face. It's always in shadow. There are pictures of Bruno that were made during his lifetime, and he doesn't look like this. He looked like he was a much smaller, slight man with almost boyish looking, and this looks like a very serious, strong man. It's a symbol more than anything. He considered himself a philosopher, but right from early stages, there is evidence to suggest that although he was a priest, and although he was a Catholic, he didn't really believe in the Trinity,

and that is fundamental to Catholicism. So the idea of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, he didn't see them as real people. He saw them as metaphors. That Christ would be wisdom, and that's what he wanted his church to be, about wisdom. He was interested also in Jewish mysticism, as Joseph Viterbo was as well, and he had this idea of multiple worlds, multiple universes. So when he was finally captured by the Inquisition and kept for eight years and questioned again and again and given opportunities to repent. He refused to repent. It's from Giordano Bruno and a modern poet that Jeanne took the title of her book, All Things Move.

In one of the works of his on the immense and the number list, he has this beautiful phrase of God moves in waves through all things. And there's a poet called Heather McHugh, and she wrote a poem that is also about Giordano Bruno, and she uses his words, so God moves in waves through all things, all things move. All things move. If God is not the soul itself, he is the soul of the soul of the world. Such was his heresy. The day they brought him forth to die, they feared he might incite the crowd. The man was famous for his eloquence. And so his captors placed upon his face an iron mask in which he could not speak. That's how they burned him. That is how he died,

without a word in front of everyone. A world always about to become, but one that never quite becomes. An idea, Jeanne says, that wasn't much different from what Michelangelo believed when he painted those rising, falling, twisting bodies on the Sistine Chapel. They had the same intellectual influences, but for Michelangelo, he came along early enough that he was celebrated for his work and his ideas and using those ideas, whereas Bruno was considered to be a heretic. It always just seems like this horrible, horrible thing happened here. And it's easy to just say, oh, the church was awful and they did this terrible thing, but I think there are just other forms of it. We commit terrible things constantly thinking that we are in the right

and we are the judges and we have the moral authority and so we can decide which is really what the church thought at the time. But it does seem like a horrible thing to do to a human being. And then his ashes were thrown into the Piber River. We stroll past Palazzo Farnese, a palace completed by Michelangelo, another commission from Pope Paul III. This is also one of those things that you get a feeling for in Rome

as you're walking around. You get this feeling for what it must have been like when religion controlled everything and religion ruled your day because it's everywhere. You've got churches pretty much all around you and then these Madonnas on the corner. It's just, there's just symbols everywhere to remind you constantly, It's just, there's just symbols everywhere to remind you, constantly to remind you to pray, to go to Mass, to behave yourself.

We turn one corner and there's more arches and churches down the road. We cross the Tiber River. Pont de Sistoc, named after the same Pope, I guess. Sixtus, yeah, the one who got Sistine Chapel named after him. That's right. Into the Trastevere neighborhood, Tras meaning beyond and Tevere, the Tiber. In many ways, it feels like home to me

because we lived here for about 10 years, and then previous to that, not far from here. I asked Jeannie if she could imagine her life without having moved here to Rome. Never imagined that it would stretch into 21 years. And my son being born here, I've gotten older here, and I feel like it has changed, and I have changed. It's impossible to untangle that now and imagine who would I be had I not come to live in Italy. There's something about living outside your own culture,

not feeling quite in your culture or in your place, but I feel like it's given me a chance to think and to experience my own life differently as well. I always think that the experience of living in a place that's not your place amplifies that inside-outside perspective that you have to have as an artist or a writer. Yes. Where you get inside an experience and you're explaining it from the outside. Yes.

No, I think being an outsider is actually a positive thing. Maybe it can be a bit lonely or maybe you don't always feel like you belong somehow. can be a bit lonely or maybe you don't always feel like you belong somehow but it does I think allow you the space to to think about your environment a slight hyper awareness and that is also the feeling you get when you really study a piece of art or when you're really engaged by a piece of art that sudden awareness that you're in your own body and you're right there so I have that just walking the dog in the morning sometimes. Well, and it's also because there's just so much beauty everywhere. You're in a corner and there's just something beautiful.

There's something beautiful, even amid the chaos, and in fact almost inextricable from the chaos. The garbage piled against ancient Roman columns, cars parked against Baroque walls, and the tourists and scalpers and pickpockets pushing along over the gleaming neglected cobblestones she says seeing the layers of the past always present in rome helped make her realize that it encompasses her own life and that the eternal city taught her to look first at it then at the sistineistine Chapel, and without realizing it at first, at her own past,

which then gave her the courage to write about it. It starts from having been a journalist, as you know as well. You have this permission to ask questions and to research something and to dig deeply. I just took that a little further, I suppose. I'm not trying to pretend that I'm a scholar or an expert, but I feel that art in particular is something that is for everyone, and anyone can be an artist, so why can't anyone think about art or contemplate it or

write about it, rather than only critics or only experts or scholars? only critics or only experts or scholars. No one invented art and no one invented language, and yet we humans use it and bend it and twist it and change it to meet our needs. In trying to explain the Sistine Chapel frescoes to myself in words, I am translating one form of communication to another, and this process makes it apparent that visual art is a way of communicating the things that words alone cannot convey. Language is a way of trying to get the thoughts in my head out and into other heads. It's always an approximation. And sometimes the most effective language is the least direct, such as when we use poetry to convey complex emotions, when we use a language that pushes us to feel more than to reason

and allow that feeling to open into something meaningful. We go into another church, the religious heart of this neighborhood, Santa Maria in Trastevere. She says her feelings about art are the way that many people approach religion, as a struggle to make meaning of our life. It's really one of my favorite churches. I mean, it's a beautiful church, but also it's just the church I used to come to most casually all the time and just stop in, you know, to get out of the heat or to just come and have that feeling of entering another world. And it still have that feeling of entering another world and

it still has that feeling like you come inside and it's cooler and darker so at first I did feel like it was a little bit wrong to to enter the space but now I don't feel that way at all I do feel like they're very much public spaces and you do feel welcome in them as well. The grandeur of these big open spaces, the fact that they're usually lit by natural light, like the clouds just came over now and it darkened the whole room. And I like actually seeing that people do come and pray, and they're actually here for other reasons as well. Five centuries after Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel, and almost ten years after Jeanne Marshall first glimpsed it,

unmoved and even irritated, she now sees this masterpiece of religious art as offering something for her, too, even as a non-believer. It was such a pleasure, not just an aesthetic pleasure, but it was a spiritual pleasure, I think, pay attention to one thing and to realize that I'd be thinking about it all the time, that on some level, I'm walking around doing other things, hanging up the laundry or picking up things for my son. I realized that this other part of my brain is going along and thinking about Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. And that was wonderful. Allowing myself to be immersed in it and to pay attention to it for the length of time that I did was

an immense gift I gave to myself. A few years before her death, her mother also gave a gift of sorts to herself, one that Jeannie had encouraged her to give, to go to a Catholic church and confess, not as a way of admitting wrongdoing, but to free herself from the burden she'd carried her whole adult life as a fearful and angry but faithful Catholic. And she realized that time was running out. And so I think she thought she better face it. So she went to the Catholic church in her neighborhood and didn't make an appointment. She just walked in and they found the priest for her. And he turned out to be a very good person. And he spoke to her like a human being, I think.

And he was sympathetic to her. And he asked her if she loved her children. And of course, she said she didn't. He said, well, that's important. It would have been a sin had you not loved your children. So I think she felt that she had been wrong to love her children. And that's the sad part of it all. So she did get some sense, I think, that maybe the church had changed.

I wish she had done it sooner in her life. But at least she had that. You know, I do feel better at least that she had some kind of a sense of not being absolved, but I think of being understood. And he helped her. He did give her a lot of Hail Marys, apparently, though. I asked Jeannie what she thinks her mother would have made of her daughter, whom she'd forbidden from attending Catholic Church, devoting almost a decade to looking at

and thinking and writing about the most monumental work of Catholic art in the world, and also including her mom in that book, her life in southern Ontario in the second half of the 20th century, raising nine children as an unmarried, deeply conflicted, but still believing Catholic woman. She would probably be embarrassed, I think, mostly. She wouldn't want people to know. So I do feel a little bit guilty that I've revealed her secret. But at the same time, I think she would agree that it's a story worth telling. You know, I gave it to my brother.

I gave him the manuscript to read at first because I thought maybe he would have concerns, but he didn't at all. He, in fact, didn't want to change a word, and he felt that it sort of restored her dignity. I hope so. You've been listening to Ideas contributor Megan Williams with fellow Canadian and resident of Rome, Jeanne Marshall, the author of All Things Move, Learning to Look in the Sistine Chapel.

Sistine Chapel. This episode was produced by Megan Williams with Ideas producer Chris Watzkow. Technical production, Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer, Nikola Lukšić. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad.