| The result was the Catholic Reformation. Dissidence and excess were now brutally repressed. For the moment, at least, the orgies and mistresses were out, austerity and chastity were in. The new severity was personified by Paul IV, a brutal and pedantic prig who regarded the ancient monuments of Rome as pagan and, therefore, heretical. He said he would have liked to destroy them all. But worse, he was disgusted by the naked private parts of the Renaissance masterpieces, and ordered many of them to be painted over. It is his fitting punishment that history remembers him above all as the Fig Leaf Pope. The curse of the fig leaf is still visible today on Michelangelo's later work in the Sistine Chapel. The Last Judgment was the final masterpiece of the Renaissance. I think it's the finest celebration of the grace and dignity of the human body, but it also brutally reflects the dystopic mayhem of the Sack of Rome. Its naked passions appalled the Catholic Reformation and some of Michelangelo's beautifully bare figures now wear rather strategically placed pieces of cloth. |
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