HOW ACCURATE IS THE MOVI E THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY?
The Agony and the Ecstacy was a fictionalized account of Michelangelo’s life, so it never really pretended to be wholly accurate. Most parts of it were, however, reasonably faithful to what was known in the early 1960s, but of course research and conservation over the last forty years have uncovered a lot of material that was unavailable to Irving Stone, and that shows how some of our most cherished stories about Michelangelo-many of them spread by the film-are actually untrue. YOUR BOOK ASSERTS THAT, CONTRARY TO LEGEND, MICHELANGELO DID NOT FRESCO THE CEILING ALONE, BUT WITH A TEAM OF ASSISTANTS. HOW MUCH OF TH E CEILI NG IS HIS WORK, AND HOW MUCH IS THEIRS? It was absolutely impossible to paint a fresco on your own, especially one that was 12,000 feet square. Painting in fresco was difficult, complex and extremely time-consuming, and as such it was always a product of teamwork. Michelangelo recruited as many as a dozen men to help him during the four years he worked in the Sistine Ch
