‘The Agony and the Ecstasy’: Veneration of a creative life

Reading is not just a hobby that one indulges in to delight oneself. It is a desire to know, to learn, to enjoy, to let the words seep into ones consciousness and to feel an unique feeling of merging with the printed word, till you and the reading matter become a pulsating reality.

Irving Stone, one of my favorite writers, who began with his ‘Lust for Life’, where he had gone deep into the life of Vincent Van Gogh, took the same concentrated path of penning fourteen more biographical novels, before he arrived at, ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy’.

What this book has become for me is a merging of myself, my being, my entirety into the oneness of being Michelangelo Buonarroti, who was devoured with the burning hunger of serving just one love, the ‘pietra serena’.

Those who love traveling, those who love to delve into the history of the fifteenth century Rome and Florence, crave hungrily to see the Sistine Chapel, see David, Mother and Child, the Pieta, Pope Julius at Bologna, the crucifixion of St Peter, Zeus Apollo, Atlas, Bacchus, and the rest of Buonarroti’s work. They marvel, not by just gaping at the art work but are confounded with what must have gone on in the mind of the creator, of these excellent work. Was life for him a smooth ride to offer his life with such love, resoluteness and earnestness?

This great novel, is a veneration of an amazingly creative life. Irving Stone renders the cyclorama of the vibrant passage of years, in the life of the most versatile artist of all times. From the age of 13 to the early 80’s the pages of the book are sheer ‘agony and ecstasy’.

Life that had begun for him at Settignano, had in fact fashioned his destiny. As his life’s race began, we find him going back again and again to the Topolinos of Settignano. Based on an analogical study one will find him recover from the storms and stresses of life there. The book merges history and art. There is beauty and realisation of the greatness of being able to be a ‘Michelangelo Buonarroti’.

“I’m never less alone, than when alone.”

This was because his best interest was always his best work to be performed excellently, perfectly, precisely and satisfactorily with demoniacal energy. Even at 82 he was a flurry of activity. It’s sad, for a person like him to have to die. Age cowed before him, rivals cringed, and excellence thrived. The last happy thought he cherished was that if Lorenzo de Medici would have been alive, he would have had been profoundly happy to see what his dear Michelangelo had achieved. Forces of destruction never overcome creativity. Rome will be as much of Michelangelo’s, as it would be a Caesar’s or Constantine’s.

The sob that caught on to my throat as I felt his soul leave his body even after centuries have passed by, point at the excellence not only of the subject of the book but also of the excellence of Irving Stone’s presentation.

— The reader is a teacher based in Dubai.