In a scene from the 1965 film "The Agony and the Ecstasy," Michelangelo, played by Charlton Heston, escapes to the marble quarries of Carrara, Italy, to sort out his frustrations with his first attempts at painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling. He rises from a deep sleep and slowly steps into a clearing, wide-eyed, searching, as if he were experiencing the world anew. A golden sunrise beckons his gaze heavenward, and in those first few moments, divine inspiration strikes. Billowy cloud formations of finger-like projections meet in a crescendo of celestial strains. The creation of Adam never looked so ... so ...
"Hokey," said William Wallace. "But in many ways, once you are in these extensive Alpine mountains, you see the grandeur and sublimity translated into Michelangelo's works. At one point, the artist declared that he wanted to carve the whole mountain into a colossal figure. The experience of going there, in part, is to see why."
Wallace, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology, has visited the quarries at Carrara, the most famous and productive in all of Italy, some 20 times. Excavated nonstop since the first century, these mountains not only supplied Michelangelo with his materials, said Wallace, but also provided him a spiritual retreat.
Through the years, Wallace has quarried his own brand of materials in an effort to lend new shape and definition to Michelangelo and his work. He has mined the riches of the Florentine archives; spent a sabbatical year as a fellow at Villa I Tatti in Florence (the Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies); and conferred with international art experts on the Sistine restoration.
In writing "Michelangelo at San Lorenzo: The Genius as Entrepreneur" (1994, Cambridge University Press), Wallace focused on the less studied "middle history" of the artist's work -- the long period between design and final product. Wallace detailed in the book three principal commissions undertaken for the Medici family: the San Lorenzo facade, the Medici Chapel and the Laurentian Library.
"My larger point in this book states that Michelangelo was characteristic of how Renaissance artists worked," Wallace said. "If you wanted to build buildings and carry out monumental sculpture commissions, inevitably, you had to work as a businessman."
This larger point is playing a significant role in Wallace's current project, a biography of Michelangelo that he says will "reinsert the idea of a gigantic artist and genius of all time back into his own life."
"Another Michelangelo book sounds rather one-dimensional," Wallace said, laughing. "The artist is a bit like a Beethoven or a Shakespeare -- endlessly fascinating. And, yet, there is never a last word."
Wallace said the biography, a culmination of nearly 20 years of research, will be accessible to an audience larger than his first book may have reached. "Rather than sitting down, mired in facts and archival discoveries, with masses of notes, I'm sitting down with a viewpoint," he said. "Of course, the book will be documented and accurate; but it will also require a distant view. This is very liberating -- to finally write as I see it."
The last truly great biography of the Renaissance master was written in 1893 by John Symonds, who wrote an entire history on Renaissance Italy, said Wallace. "It is a magnificent book but sounds very Victorian, which it is. The very thing missing from Michelangelo studies is his human side. We're so overwhelmed by his great accomplishments that we tend to deny the fact that he had a real life: friends, neighbors and family who were very important to him. I want to create a picture of a very human individual who achieves superhuman accomplishments. This is a fascinating conjunction."
Will the work-in-progress result in the definitive text? "There is no such thing as a definitive book on an artist," Wallace answered, echoing the advice imparted to him by his mentor, the late Howard Hibbard of Columbia University, where Wallace received his doctorate in 1983. "Certain other professors had said Michelangelo was too complicated and there was nothing new to say. Hibbard said, 'On the contrary! Every new generation has something to say.' I like to pass along this idea to my students."
Wallace is a member of a University department that in the past decade dramatically has transformed itself from a sleepy enclave into a vibrant cluster of faculty, each of whom is a contributing, internationally recognized scholar. "While we are smaller than a Columbia or Princeton, we offer more hands-on attention in an intimate environment where you really get to know the faculty and have a good place to study," Wallace said.
"Professor Wallace doesn't just like or have knowledge of his subject," offered Catherine Payne, a junior fashion design major who took Wallace's Western art history survey course last year. "He has a clear, whole-hearted passion that comes through his teaching, even in a large class."
The professor's draw sends students scrambling for front-row seats in Steinberg Hall Auditorium and has garnered him, with the showing of the last slide at semester's close, rounds of thundering applause.
Martha Ahrendt, a doctoral candidate in Renaissance studies and a student in Wallace's class on Renaissance patronage, said, "His upper-level classes are exciting because he talks about the same things he is studying. He shows that research is alive.
"He believes that students can come up with new ideas, too," continued Ahrendt, whose dissertation adviser is Wallace. "Last year, toward the end of his seminar, he said to us, 'OK, this is what I've learned from you.' He spent 10 minutes reading through a list of things he'd written down through the course of the semester."
In eyeing the broad picture of higher education today, however, Wallace expresses a deep concern: "Too many students come with pre-planned ideas as to what they'll be doing later," he noted of incoming freshmen. "While I think some of this is due to parental pressure -- maybe rightly so because college costs so much -- students come with the idea that they must succeed and learn their life skills now. I like to think that this four years of life is potentially the most dramatically changing."
While an undergraduate at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., Wallace took the time to explore his own interests. A three-week trip in his junior year to study the art in Florence and Rome captured his imagination.
He recounts the poignant moment on one trip home when he chose to tell his father, an electrical engineer, that he was contemplating an art history major: "I was expecting some kind of explosion," Wallace remembered. "I'll never forget his response. 'It's your life,' he said. 'I hope you will make the most of it, and I hope you are happy.'"
Wallace's reflections on his upbringing reveal a childhood rich in cultural influences that have colored his life. The son of a naval officer who moved his family often to locations such as Hawaii and Japan, Wallace recalls a house always filled with interesting objects.
"My parents traveled extensively. My mother took up Japanese painting at one point," Wallace said. "When he was working at the Pentagon, my father would take lunch hours at the art galleries in Washington while other guys were downing two-martini lunches.
"So they (parents) were willing to see me go abroad and supported my choices." Wallace takes a deep breath. "I hope I can maintain this with my children when they're in college. I hope that when they come back to say, 'I want to be a military engineer'" -- Wallace breaks into a laugh at the irony of such a scenario -- "I can say, 'Fine, if that is what you're interested in.'"
Whatever path the Wallace children take in life, one thing is certain: They will have a solid base of knowledge in art history, by sheer osmosis, if nothing else.
"Yes, I talk to the children about my work all of the time," Wallace said of Sam, 9, and Katie, 6. "They can pick out a Botticelli and a Gauguin, not because I insist upon it but simply because they're surrounded by it ... and taken to many, many museums."
Sam was born in Florence the year his father began the research for his first book and is mentioned on the dedication page. Katie has been promised her name in the biography-in-progress.
"His lineage was a driving force behind his social aspirations. He had a social ambition to make money and was very wealthy -- today's equivalent of a multimillionaire --by the end of his life. His was a noble aspiration, not just a mercenary drive. In this way, he becomes that much more like his contemporaries."
A look around Wallace's office reveals Michelangelo's presence in an array of objects. Many are gifts given by appreciative students -- "Dress Up David" paper dolls, a pasta box picturing the artist and a roll of toilet paper embossed with the likeness of David, to name a few.
"Art history will not change the way politics works," acknowledged Wallace. "It will not balance the budget nor do what we think we need to fix society. On the other hand, we can't live without culture. It is very important to the quality of life and essential to one's viewpoint.
"See," Wallace said, laughing, "David" refrigerator magnets in hand. "He's very much a living artist."
-- Cynthia Georges
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