During the Roman spring and summer, 3,000 visitors a day file through the Sistine Chapel, staring, as long as their necks can stand the crane, at Michelangelo's great swirling frescoes on the vaulted ceiling. This week millions of television viewers can have a closer and more relaxed look at Michelangelo's rich creations in a new color movie, shot in many cases from only a few feet away — the closest filming of the ceiling ever permitted. Careful tuning of the TV set is obviously required, but The Secret of Michelangelo: Every Man's Dream (ABC-TV, Dec. 5, 9:3010:30 p.m. E.S.T.) is still a rare instance of television illuminating art. The closeups of the human and heavenly throng, many of them unfamiliar except to scholars, are a powerful sight in themselves. But their impact is strengthened by the evocative narration, spoken by Christopher Plummer and Zoe Caldwell, and by the imaginative sequence of the pictures. Sometimes the figures almost seem to move, and the putti to dance.
Under the direction of Producer-Director Milton Fruchtman, a crew of 25 worked nights for two months to get 25 miles of film and 650 still pictures, using a camera atop a 64-foot-high movable aluminum tower. Both the script and the overall editing are the work of a former TIME art critic, Alexander Eliot. Now a freelance writer of magazine articles and an author of books,
Eliot spent several hours a day for six weeks atop the tower within touching distance of the ceiling, contemplating the frescoes as Michelangelo himself saw them in his four years of labor.
"Masterpieces often remain hidden in plain sight," Eliot said last week, "but none more so than the Sistine ceiling, perhaps the greatest painting ever made. It is exposed to view and yet cannot be seen. For one thing, it gleams a long way overhead, 68 feet at its apex, and it is enormous—5,599 square feet. The huge blue vault of air beneath it obscures all but the main figures."
Human and Angelic. "So up we go. The tower trembles alarmingly as we ascend, and the faces of the tower crew below us look dime-sized. Now the ceiling seems to tent us in, and there is a vast rush of images, a crystalline turbulence. The clarity of colors is the first surprise. From the floor, the figures overhead look like painted sculpture. Up here you find transparency, veils of atmosphere, light-filled shadows. Perhaps Michelangelo felt that opaque colors would be out of place in a world of legend, myth and mystery.
"Throughout the vast expanse of the ceiling, Michelangelo presents mutually exclusive themes or moments or levels of meaning as simultaneous images. He deliberately interweaves human, titanic, planetary and angelic, and even divine motifs. When you lie atop the tower day after day, his figures seem to be moving and communicating in a thousand ways. At times, the mere glance of a painted eye, an unexpected highlight, or the crook of a finger clues you in to some new turning of the artist's labyrinthine mind. The bonds between his figures are abstract, of course, but no less real for that."