Life, Death, Rebirth: Bill Viola faces Michelangelo at the Royal Academy
Image of the exhibition leaflet which pairs Viola’s Fire Woman with Michelangelo’s drawing of The Risen Christ
It’s been such a sunny weekend that spending time in darkened rooms gazing at artworks that raise deep questions about the human condition may not have been high on your list of priorities. But I was lucky to start my Saturday at a bloggers’ preview of the Royal Academy’s show combining the works of two superb artists: Bill Viola / Michelangelo: Life, Death, Rebirth. I’ve long been mesmerised by Viola’s works, and who can resist a chance to see a significant group of Michelangelo drawings displayed together, so I’ve been excited for this opportunity to see the exhibition in such privileged emptiness.
The pairing of an Italian Renaissance sculptor and draughtsman with a twentieth-century video artist might not seem an obvious one, but as the exhibition title suggests, both men similarly attempt to grapple with the big, timeless questions of life, largely through a focus on the human figure and its expression of emotion. The show is also nicely foregrounded in a dialogue between their works, initiated by Viola visiting the Michelangelo drawings kept in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle, and the exhibition emerging in conversation with the Head of Prints and Drawings, Martin Clayton. The resulting display at the RA puts 12 video installations alongside 15 works by Michelangelo, including 12 drawings on loan from the Queen and the RA’s own Taddei Tondo, the only sculpture by Michelangelo in the UK.
One of my main practical questions before entering was how the curators would allow for the different viewing experiences required of the works, the drawings being small and needing carefully-controlled light levels, but light nonetheless, the video’s needing a large dark space. The result feels really nicely paced: a selection of rooms showing only Viola’s work are interspersed between 3 rooms which show the two artists’ works on facing walls. I found these mostly very powerful.
A series of drawings in which Michelangelo dwells on the corporeal reality of Mary and Jesus from the nativity to the descent from the cross faces Viola’s Nantes Triptych showing a woman giving birth, a floating figure, and his mother on her death bed. Michelangelo’s ‘Presentation Drawings’ that dwell with devotion on the human body face Viola’s Man Searching for Immortality/Woman Searching for Eternity where images of an elderly man and woman examining their naked bodies by torchlight are projected onto black marble slabs. Each set responds to slow, deliberate attention by the viewer, contrasting the real and the idealised body, the reality of the human and the idea of the divine.
Viola’s works also hold their own power in separate rooms. Particularly mesmerising is the gallery that ends the exhibition, showing a monumental projection of Fire Woman alternating with Tristan’s Ascension (The Sound of a Waterfall Under a Mountain). In one a raging fire slowly becomes the vibrant reflection of gold and blue on the surface of water, summoned by a female silhouette; in the other a white-clothed man lying as if on a tomb is slowly drawn upwards by a retracting, roaring curtain of water. These are visceral conjurings of the elements in tension with human life, akin to his extraordinary commission for St. Paul’s Cathedral Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water).
The pairing didn’t always work for me. Some of Viola’s solo works felt unnecessary to this narrative, weakening the sustained tension of the rest of the show. In the last ‘face-off’ with Michelangelo’s crucifixion drawings, Viola’s Surrender appeared directly between the drawings and this somehow belittled both, the drawings seeming small and wan, the video large and gauche. Ending with Fire Woman and Tristan’s Ascension, however, sets you up to leave with just the right sense of immensity and wonder.
Viola / Michelangelo is a powerful, sometimes tense, pairing that compels you to think about the human body in all its power, identity and fragility, both timeless across the centuries that separate these two artists and deeply rooted in their own period sense of their body and their art form.