[People shouting] [Swords clanging] [Woman screams] Narrator: Over 3 decades, Michelangelo has won fame and prestige, creating masterpieces for Italy's most powerful rulers...

I'd borne the whims of my patrons, men who knew little of true art.

[Shouting continues] Narrator: but these are brutal, dangerous times, an age of almost constant war.

Man, voice-over: Italy becomes the battlefield for all these conflicts and eventually, these city-states like Florence start to get overwhelmed.

Narrator: When religious revolution engulfs Italy, Michelangelo's beloved Florence will be laid to waste.

Michelangelo finds himself living in a very, very dangerous world.

Narrator: The path he chooses will be a matter of life and death and leave him questioning what his life's work has all been for.

Man, voice-over: He's reassessing everything-- reassessing his faith, reassessing the kind of work that he's done.

♪ There's only one judge in the end.

He alone will know if these mortal hands have proved worthy of their promise.

♪ Woman: The Renaissance is usually regarded as this beautiful period where everything is golden and shiny, but there is another side to it.

[People shouting] Man, voice-over: It's endlessly bloody and conflicted and violent, and that's what the art responds to.

The art feeds off that.

♪ Woman, voice-over: Art is propaganda in the Renaissance.

Images are extraordinarily powerful.

In that respect, it's actually very modern.

Man, voice-over: This is really the age where patrons realize the power of art, and once you start to mix art and money, then it's a lethal cocktail.

♪ Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, they are really the first superstar artists.

♪ I am Michelangelo Buonarroti, artist and an old fool.

Man, voice-over: He lived for his art, but it was almost like his vocation was a sentence.

Michelangelo: I've had so many paymasters-- bankers and princes, cardinals and popes-- but what I did was always in the service of God and in the pursuit of perfection.

Man, voice-over: Two things go hand in hand in the Renaissance-- a ruthlessness in politics and a true belief in the power of art, but to really understand the Renaissance, you have to tell the whole story.

♪ ♪ ♪ [Birds chirping] Narrator: Michelangelo is working on the biggest commission of his life for the most powerful patron in Italy--Pope Julius II.

He's painting an enormous fresco on the vast ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the most important church in Rome.

Michelangelo: Here was a chance for my work to adorn the inner sanctum of God's house.

♪ [Sighs] To fail would have been the end.

♪ Narrator: Working all but single-handed, he's embarked on an incredibly complex design.

Man, voice-over: Michelangelo was not a painter.

Has not made frescoes.

It's totally insane and he does raise the stakes for himself.

He has the ambition to paint hundreds of figures on a curved ceiling, which is a very irregularly curved ceiling.

The technical challenge is fresco.

You have to paint tiny sections into wet plaster.

You also have to understand how quickly the plaster dries and what color will the paint be once it's dried.

It will not be the same color as you started out.

It is a challenge for Michelangelo.

Wallace: To get a figure larger than life to look in proper proportion from far down below, it's desperately difficult.

Woman, voice-over: Julius trusts that Michelangelo will create something amazing in the Sistine Chapel.

It's where the Pope celebrates mass in front of ambassadors, diplomats, and the papal court.

It's essentially the stage on which he performs his most important liturgical functions.

This project's, therefore, of the utmost importance to the Pope.

Narrator: But after months of work, Michelangelo makes a terrible discovery.

All of a sudden, having painted a section of the ceiling, it began to develop a very, very serious mold problem.

♪ Michelangelo: My figures were scarcely visible behind the mold, everything I'd done ruined.

I felt like throwing myself off that scaffold.

Primo: The reason why the mold has set in is that it's an incorrect mixture of the actual plaster.

Wallace: Mixing the plaster with the right proportion of water is a skill, a skill that Michelangelo had not learned as a sculptor.

Primo: Fresco is all about how damp the air is.

Michelangelo is from Florence, and Florence is quite different atmospherically than Rome.

He's actually got this wrong.

Narrator: Michelangelo tries to back out of the commission, but the Pope won't let him go.

Michelangelo: I told the Pope, "This is not "what God wanted of me.

Painting was not my calling," but it was fruitless.

He wouldn't let me leave the work.

I had to go on.

♪ Narrator: Michelangelo has to hack off almost everything he's done, remix the plaster with less water, and start all over again.

While he struggles on, his greatest rivals thrive.

Leonardo has rebuilt his reputation and is enjoying creative freedom in Milan while his other great rival, Raphael, is much closer, just down the hall from the Sistine Chapel.

He's painting a smaller fresco in a state room, where the Pope hosts important visitors and foreign dignitaries.

I was caught in a vise, in my mind and my body, whilst Raphael, a copier and sycophant, was scheming for commissions and turning the Pope against me.

♪ Woman, voice-over: Michelangelo must feel that Raphael's making inroads.

Raphael's a very young age.

No one could imagine him having the impact that he has and all of a sudden, there's your main rival working right next door to you.

Wallace: I love the idea of them so close to one another.

They are two personalities who really are very, very different.

Narrator: Michelangelo and Raphael are both servants of Julius' ambition, to glorify himself and Rome.

Julius, he's deeply aware of the power of art.

There's a means of propaganda and the architecture of Rome, the art of Rome is an opportunity to reflect the power and authority of his Papacy.

♪ Raphael, the consummate flatterer, is ready to deliver for his patron once again.

On one wall of the Pope's State Room, he's already glorified Julius as a godly figure, a direct descendant of Christ.

Now, on the opposite wall, Raphael shows him as an intellectual giant.

♪ Warnberg: The "School of Athens" is a picture of all the great thinkers of the ancient world.

♪ Talvacchia: It's amazingly good work.

How could Julius not be totally blown away?

♪ His palette was clear and balanced and quite beautiful.

The colors that he used added richness to his compositions.

Warnberg: Raphael is representing Julius exactly as he'd wish to be seen, somebody who's a great patron of thinkers, of poets and oversees a Rome where intellectual arts can flourish.

Talvacchia: Raphael puts Plato and Aristotle in the middle as the sort of culmination of the philosophic tradition of the ancient world.

It's telling us something about Julius as the inheritor and the upholder of all of these great thoughts.

Warnberg: This is a balm for his ego, and this is exactly what Julius needs at a time when he's been criticized for being a bloodthirsty warrior.

Narrator: Raphael hides details within the painting to delight the Pope.

He gives the great philosopher Plato the face of Leonardo, and Raphael even puts himself among the throng of leading lights, but one figure, the man in reality struggling to paint the Sistine ceiling, is cast as a lonely outsider.

Primo: That figure is the only one who's on his own and not exactly dressed in a particularly nice way, either.

It's a real slight against Michelangelo.

♪ Wallace: I think if Michelangelo even recognized that this was his own portrait, it's like, "Uh, well you should pay tribute to me because I'm the greater artist."

♪ Michelangelo: They all loved Raphael, but let me tell you, all he learned of art, he learned from me.

♪ Narrator: Michelangelo is driven on my Raphael's success, but the Sistine ceiling is a mammoth task.

Michelangelo: Painting that ceiling, it took its toll.

I even stopped writing letters.

My family thought I'd died.

[Chuckles] Often felt that the better choice, but... ♪ I couldn't surrender.

I could not lose.

♪ Narrator: Julius is proving himself a great patron of the arts, but the vast sums he's spending to glorify himself and the Papacy are causing growing alarm.

In 1510, a German monk called Martin Luther makes his first pilgrimage to Rome and is horrified by what he finds in the holy city.

[Woman laughs] Man, voice-over: He's seeing sex work.

He's seeing a sort of opulence and a luxury that he's just devastated by.

♪ He's appalled by all the conspicuous consumption of the church amid so much poverty, and he says that if there is a hell, it's built under Rome, and he says it's a cesspit of sin.

Nobody's under any illusion that the Catholic Church is in some kind of trouble.

It is a corrupt institution.

It's corrupt financially, and it's corrupt sexually.

You know, many of the people working in the Catholic Church have mistresses when they should be celibate, and huge amounts of money have been spent on art, and they're going to need even more money.

Narrator: What offends Luther most is how the Pope is paying for it all.

He's taxing the ordinary people of Rome by selling them a lie, that they can buy their place in heaven.

Brotton: And the main thing that he's appalled by is papal indulgences.

People can buy a piece of paper which says, "All your sins, wiped away."

Cash for the Pope is explicitly going into art.

It's coming from the sale of papal indulgences.

It's outrageous.

It's incredibly clever, but it's outrageous.

Narrator: Martin Luther returns to Germany to campaign for reform of the church, intent on challenging all the evils that Julius represents.

♪ The Pope then faces another grave threat to his authority.

France has long been eying Italy's wealth and, not for the first time, invades.

They seize the northern papal state of Bologna.

It's a defeat that reflects badly on the Warrior Pope.

♪ In his haste to conquer and rebuild Rome, Julius took on too many burdens, and he was a man of great energy, but no man, not even he, could quell the tide of discontent that he brought upon himself.

♪ Narrator: The people grow angry with Julius, aggrandizing himself with art they paid for while they're dying in his wars and going hungry on the streets.

He needs to clean up his public image, so he commissions something different from his loyal favorite Raphael-- a new papal portrait.

Warnberg: This portrait will be on show to everybody coming in to Rome.

In Santa Maria del Popolo, the first church through one of the main pilgrim gates of the city, thousands of people will come and see Julius.

♪ Raphael's portrait of Julius II is remarkable.

Here we see Julius not as a warrior, but as a thoughtful man, a man who's determined.

He's gripping the handle of the chair.

He's deep in thought, remote, but he's also human.

He's wearing a beard in mourning for the loss of Bologna.

Talvacchia: That snowy white beard that was painted so magnificently.

He said he was going to grow that beard until all the French forces were out of Italy.

Warnberg: It can certainly be seen as a piece of propaganda.

So many people traveled to church to see it, that it's described as being like a jubilee.

Brotton: It's an idea with which we're quite familiar today in terms of the concept of artwashing, so how multinational corporations will commission art really in their best interests to make them look good.

You can look back and say, "Where does this start?"

Julius is your ultimate example.

Julius is delighted with Raphael.

Raphael might have been ready to sell his soul but I would not.

♪ Narrator: Michelangelo isn't interested in simply serving his patron's political ambitions.

He wants to make art that reflects the depth of his faith.

♪ Wallace: It's difficult labor.

His face looks like the floor of the chapel where the paint has been dripping.

His neck is cricked in a permanent position.

Michelangelo: I spent so long looking up that my body was in a permanent state of contortion I could no longer read looking down.

I had to hold letters up, like that, to the light, so that I could read them.

Narrator: Despite all the pain, Michelangelo perseveres, believing his masterpiece will glorify God.

Finally, after 4 long, punishing years, the ceiling is finished.

♪ It's astonishing that one man with very little assistance was able to do this.

It's just astonishing.

♪ Loh: It's approximately 600 square meters, so that's, roughly speaking, 3 tennis courts.

Woman: It's huge.

It's overwhelming.

The sheer scale of it takes you back.

There's so much of it that you could walk around in there for months, years even and still not see everything.

♪ Warnberg: It's hard to imagine how absolutely delighted Julius must be.

Now he can celebrate mass underneath perhaps the greatest work of art in all of Christendom, and he, Julius II, commissioned it.

♪ Loh: Michelangelo envisions 3 different parts of the Old Testament.

There's the creation sequence.

There's the creation of Adam and Eve.

Then there's the story of Noah.

He wants the story to be about the translation of power through all these generations of biblical figures, down to the Pope himself.

Michelangelo begins by painting the flood, and that is why that is the strangest of the panels.

It's crowded, the figures are too small and it's really difficult to read, but as he moves forward into the space of the church, his style starts to loosen up.

The figures become much more simplified, much more dynamic, and much more sculptural... ♪ almost like if Michelangelo were carving out of paint rather than painting.

♪ When I look at the fresco, there's, like, this passion, this wildness.

Everyone's got these expressions.

The hair's blowing, and it's got so much drama going on.

It still brings tears to your eyes and blows you away in this day and age when we're bombarded with imagery.

It's incredible!

Wallace: There's so much there, such richness, that Michelangelo is really suggesting God's ability to create the richness of the world... ♪ and most people finally end up focusing on little fingers that meet one another.

♪ LaChapelle: The creation of Adam, it's so bold, it's so graphic.

It's just reduced down to the bare minimum.

It's become pop art, really.

You show it all over the world and everyone knows, that's Michelangelo.

♪ Wallace: For Julius, this is an immensely successful propagandistic move.

He has created, at the center of Christendom, the most beautiful work of all time.

♪ It was a triumph, of course.

♪ Wallace: As spectacular as it was, it must have been an extremely difficult and deflating moment for Michelangelo.

Dunant: The man must be absolutely physically and emotionally drained.

You do not spend all of those years trying to create the creation of the world without you coming out of it feeling utterly shattered-- spiritually shattered as well as physically shattered.

♪ All I wanted to do was sculpt, to get back to the path God had chosen for me.

Lay my cheek against cool stone.

Ah.

Feel the weight of a chisel in my hand.

♪ Narrator: Michelangelo has delighted Julius, but it's left a bitter taste.

Brotton: Michelangelo does seem to go through something of a crisis of faith.

There's a concern around papal indulgences, and I think what Luther is saying speaks to Michelangelo, but he's too deep in.

Rome really has now defined and shaped him.

His art is part of that story, and I think, yeah, he's worried about it.

Years of my life have been spent pleasing my masters.

Huh.

[Sniffles] ♪ Narrator: The Sistine ceiling guarantees Julius II's name will go down in history, but his own mortality is another thing.

Just 3 months later, he succumbs to a fever and dies.

His successor is chosen, and it's a Medici, a family whose appetite for power has not waned.

After decades in exile, they've violently retaken Florence and now they have a Pope in Rome.

Brotton: This is a massive turn around for the Medici, because having been out in the wilderness, they're suddenly completely in charge of the Papacy and Florence.

But this isn't necessarily good news for Michelangelo because he's so disillusioned by what's happened both within the papacy and within Florence.

And the Medici returned to Florence and spilled innocent blood.

The citizens held their tongue, as did I.

♪ Narrator: Where Julius had used art to immortalize himself, the new Medici Pope, Leo X, wants to exploit it to make political deals.

He plans to use his artists to help him bring the hostile French into line.

Man: France had sort of a jealousy almost about Italy.

It was producing much greater art, much greater architecture, and they're trying to import the Italian Renaissance to France.

Narrator: The Pope recruits Leonardo da Vinci and sends him to the French court as a gesture of goodwill.

♪ Now 64, Leonardo enjoys an artistic freedom Michelangelo can only dream of, experimenting and working obsessively on one painting, that's captivated his imagination for more than 15 years.

♪ Isaacson: One reason the "Mona Lisa" is so famous is because it's the greatest painting ever made.

Leonardo had spent a lifetime studying science, studying mechanics, doing anatomy, knowing how light goes into the eyes.

It all culminates with the "Mona Lisa."

Bernocchi: The "Mona Lisa" is truly engaging with us.

We have this feeling, of course, that we can follow her gaze as we move.

Isaacson: One of the things that defines Leonardo is that sense of mystery.

What's the Mona Lisa smiling about?

The shadows of the lips move upward but the details move downward slightly, so as you shift your eyes the smile goes on and off.

It's interactive... ♪ and he does things with the optics of the light so that her hand is rather sharp but the background is very hazy because he knows that's how your eye sees perspective.

♪ Bernocchi: This fictive landscape is dominated by water.

Light is filtered through this misty environment, so we have also a study of light.

Isaacson: It takes him 16 years and even on his death bed, if you asked him, he'd say, "No, no, there are a few more brushstrokes I could do."

♪ Narrator: After 3 years in the French court, Leonardo dies, aged 67.

♪ Isaacson: There's a very haunting line that he wrote in his notebooks, and it was, "Tell me if anything was ever accomplished.

Tell me if anything was ever done," and I think he's worried that he really hasn't accomplished what he could have.

♪ Talvacchia: When Michelangelo and Raphael hear of the death, I mean, he is the other contender.

They were the top 3, and I think they had respect for him and sadness at his death.

♪ We all lost something when Leonardo died.

He'd pleased himself... [Chuckles] but left behind too little for so great a talent.

What will my legacy be?

What will I bequeath to the world?

♪ Narrator: Since finishing the Sistine ceiling, Michelangelo has not won any commissions from Pope Leo.

♪ Wallace: Leo X was not attracted particularly to Michelangelo's rather difficult character.

The Pope, without a doubt, was attracted much more to the very, uh, urbane and sophisticated Raphael, who was much easier to work with.

Narrator: Leo chooses the reliable Raphael to make 10 lavish tapestries for the walls of the Sistine Chapel to eclipse his predecessor Julius.

For Raphael, it's a chance to outdo Michelangelo.

When people enter the chapel, they won't look up at Michelangelo's ceiling, but be awed by Raphael's eye-level masterpieces.

Tapestry had always been seen as the ultimate in luxury items to have, so if you're producing tapestry, you're really producing a valuable piece of art.

Narrator: Raphael makes preparatory sketches before painting the full-scale tapestry templates in color.

♪ Talvacchia: He made them as independent works of art, and that's how important the commission was to him.

Raphael's cartoons tell the stories of the Acts of the Apostles, and, of course, the Pope is the direct successor of Peter the Apostle, so this has specific meaning for the Pope.

♪ Narrator: The tapestries depict miracles performed by Jesus, such as the healing of a lame man, the miraculous draft of fishes, and Jesus declaring Peter His representative on Earth, giving him the keys to the gates of heaven.

Talvacchia: He knew how to get the effects he wanted with color.

He privileged really rich, sometimes elaborate, color schemes, extremely effective in their simplicity, and he particularly strove to get the best in color because he knew that he could excel over Michelangelo in that arena.

♪ Narrator: Raphael's cartoons are sent to Brussels, where the tapestries are made.

Each one is 3 meters tall and woven with wool, silk, and real gold thread.

Loh: The tapestries were worth 5 times the amount paid to Michelangelo for the Sistine ceiling.

So much more is being spent by the Medici Pope for this one cycle.

Because so much gold thread was actually used in them, these tapestries were actually described as heavenly.

That was a most grievous insult.

No matter how much gold or silk and thread he might have had woven in, they would not outshine my ceiling, which required no gold to radiate heaven's light.

♪ Brotton: Everything seems to be going brilliantly for Raphael.

He's incredibly successful, you know, he's talented, and then he suddenly gets sick.

He catches a fever.

He's bled.

That, of course, makes things worse because it weakens him... ♪ and he dies.

He's 37.

It's utterly shocking... ♪ but his death is a shock to everybody, no more so than Michelangelo because the rivalry between them, like with Leonardo, he's lost the thing that he's rubbing against, so he's devastated.

Michelangelo's motivation is all about trying to outdo whoever's come along next.

This is his fuel.

This is what keeps him going.

♪ Now they're all dying... Leonardo--1519, Raphael--1520, so, yes, it does affect Michelangelo's drive and motivation.

Raphael's excesses caught up with him.

Tsk.

[Chair creaks] This is no victory for me.

♪ Narrator: Pope Leo's favorite artist is gone, but he has much more to worry him than who'll make him beautiful tapestries.

Over the past decade, Martin Luther's horror at papal extravagance has ignited a movement that's starting to look unstoppable.

Brotton: Initially, it's a protest against Catholic papal indulgences.

That snowballed into a complete rejection of the key tenets of Catholicism, and he says, it's really about a relationship between yourself and the Word of God in the Bible.

You don't need popes and bishops as the mediators between you and God.

He says, "Why do we need these people?"

because the results are all this opulence, all this luxury, all this decadence, which is just hateful.

♪ Dunant: Suddenly, the Catholic Church has a huge fight on its hands.

Luther's sermons find a big audience, and then the printing press takes them up.

Brotton: Printing of protestant pamphlets and Lutheran material, including his own translation of the Bible, goes--it's viral.

It just sweeps across Europe.

That is the spark that sets off the Reformation, and its impact is going to be absolutely incalculable.

♪ Narrator: Michelangelo is deeply disillusioned.

He's lost his greatest rivals, and Luther's ideas shake his own faith to its foundations.

Brotton: There is a deep-held spiritual belief that he has, and I think it's bedrocked on Catholic principles.

It's a time, obviously, of deep religious turmoil and soul searching.

There is a sense of a real despair that we get through his poetry at this time.

Michelangelo: Since I was captured, my soul has been searching for a thousand remedies to get back on its earlier road, but beauty is like bait taking me from heaven.

♪ Narrator: With no work for him in Rome, Michelangelo returns home to Florence, but even here, he cannot find the answers he seeks.

Instead, events outside his control cause chaos.

♪ In Rome, Pope Leo suddenly dies of pneumonia.

From then on, the Papacy is in crisis.

By 1523, another Medici is given the impossible task of re-establishing papal control.

♪ Brotton: Clement VII has no chance, really.

He's really up against it on every front.

There's money running out, the playbook is raise taxes, papal indulgences, get more money into the coffers, but all that's doing is fanning a new kind of fire 'cause there's then resentment, even within your Catholic base.

[People shouting] ♪ Brotton: There are attacks on clergy.

♪ Things are building to some great explosion.

♪ Narrator: The controlling forces of the church and powerful families like the Medici are faltering.

Radical forces are sweeping across Italy, heralding a seismic shift.

Warnberg: The ramifications of Luther's ideas lead to the splintering of Christendom.

Leaders of particular states realize this is their chance to throw off papal authority and get control of the church in their own lands.

Narrator: The Habsburgs, who rule a vast swath of Western Europe, sense an opportunity to seize powers from Pope Clement.

On the 6th of May 1527, the Habsburg army marches towards Rome, with orders to surround the city, but the soldiers are mostly radicalized followers of Martin Luther.

They defy orders to hold at the city walls and brutally attack.

What then happens is absolutely appalling.

It's what's called the Sack of Rome.

One onlooker said that it was like, "Hell had come to Earth."

[Women singing in Latin] ♪ Brotton: Nuns are raped.

An orphanage is just massacred.

They kill children.

♪ 40,000 to 50,000 people are massacred.

♪ Bodies are dumped into the Tiber.

People say that the river literally runs red.

♪ Warnberg: The soldiers themselves said they were going to take Rome by storm, and they were there not only to loot and to pillage but also to humiliate the church.

♪ Brotton: Artwork is decimated, so the Lutherans, of course, see this as iconic art which needs to be destroyed.

Warnberg: There seems to be an attack on the very idea of Rome and a condemnation of everything that the church has become.

♪ [Birds chirping] Narrator: In the wake of the Sack of Rome, Florentines seize their chance to reclaim independence from their Medici overlords.

A lot of Florentines feel like the city's really serving the Vatican and that their interests are not taken care of.

They see it as an opportunity to oust the Medici and build a real republic.

Wallace: And this is another one of these extremely difficult moments for Michelangelo, who does not want to get involved in politics, but everybody has to choose a side.

When news reached Florence of the Sack of Rome, we did not mourn.

Instead--ha ha!-- we imagined ourselves to be released from the yoke of the Papacy.

Perhaps us Florentines, we could be free at last.

♪ Narrator: Michelangelo turns against the very family who originally took him in and nurtured his talents.

Brotton: He is getting uneasy about the politics and the warmongering of his patrons, and he sees this as an opportunity to support the homeland.

Michelangelo: We chased the Medici out of the city and announced that only God would rule in Florence.

The Florentines announce a republic, the David against the Goliath of the rest of the political world of Italy.

Wallace: Michelangelo decides to side with his own Florentine state.

He becomes a military engineer.

The Florentine state comes to him to design the fortifications that would help protect the city from the inevitable siege that is going to come.

Narrator: Soon these defenses are put to the test.

Following the Sack of Rome, the Habsburgs make peace with Pope Clement, who enlists their army to retake Florence for his Medici family.

[Scoffs] How naive we were to think that David's Florence could match the Goliaths of the mighty Habsburgs and the Pope.

My fortifications, well, they slowed them down, but... there was no saving the city.

[People shouting] Narrator: Michelangelo's beloved Florence is overrun, and his life is suddenly in danger.

Di Cinto: Clement's men round up the anti-Medici supporters and either imprison them or execute them... ♪ and Michelangelo's name shows up on these lists.

♪ He is chased by people that want to kill him.

♪ Wallace: It is an utterly terrifying moment, probably the most dangerous moment in Michelangelo's life.

His friends and associates are being executed, and Michelangelo, of course, thinks that he's probably next on the list.

Narrator: In a bitter irony, he finds sanctuary in a room beneath a chapel built by the Medici, the very family who are hunting him down.

♪ He stays in hiding for two months.

♪ Brotton: He's seen so much by this point in life.

He's been through so many different theological crises.

He's seen the Reformation... [Door creaks] and I think, because of his religious beliefs, he must be thinking of his own death and what he leaves behind.

♪ Narrator: But it's not his executioner who comes.

Wallace: Clement VII, recognizing the value of Michelangelo, actually writes a letter to secure his safety.

Narrator: Despite the ravages of the Reformation, Clement still believes in the power of art to shore up his Papacy.

He pardons Michelangelo and invites him to Rome.

Di Cinto: So once again, art saves his life.

I looked death in the face and survived.

I knew that I must use what art was left in me to serve Him.

He had decided my time was not yet done.

♪ Narrator: When he arrived in Rome for the first time, more than 30 years before, Michelangelo was a lowly craftsman, utterly beholden to his patrons.

Artists now are of such importance that they deserve the attention and respect of the powerful.

Michelangelo has risen to a level equal almost to the Pope.

Brotton: But the return to Rome leaves him a different man, I think.

He's much older now, he's been through so many different patrons, so what does he want to do in these latter stages, really, of his life?

Wallace: Maybe there's a larger purpose to art.

Now he wants to devote himself entirely to things that really matter, and what matters most?

The salvation of your soul, the forgiveness of your sins, and the hope for a good death.

As he describes himself, "I work for God."

♪ Narrator: And where better to serve God than in the Sistine Chapel?

Clement sets Michelangelo a task that will push him to confront the deepest questions of his faith.

I was back once more in Rome, gazing up at what I'd done, and I saw I needed to do something greater.

With the gifts that God himself had granted me, I had to say what I felt.

♪ Wallace: I've been to the Sistine Chapel, I think, 55 times, and just like everybody who comes in that door, I'm struck by the awesome, overwhelming power and scale and magnificence of "The Last Judgment."

LaChapelle: When you walk into the Sistine Chapel, it steals your breath.

Imagine what it was like for someone who had never seen imagery before, especially on that level.

Loh: What is so shocking is the sheer size.

He paints over 300 figures into this wall.

♪ Bernocchi: "The Last Judgment" was a traditional subject, Christ's decision to save some of the souls after the end of times and to condemn other souls to an eternal life of suffering.

The only person who is immediately recognizable is Christ, who is the center of the entire composition.

He is said to have two hands, a blessing hand and a punishing hand.

♪ Heaven is up, and hell is down.

♪ The figures that tend to go up seem to be full of energy.

♪ The figures that go down that, of course, are damned seem to get progressively compressed.

♪ They are in pain.

Their faces demonstrate their terror of what's to come.

♪ Gormley: I think that Michelangelo, rather like me, had terrible dreams about the condition of his soul.

Terrible, terrible premonitions about whether, at the Last Judgment, he was going to be found wanting.

♪ Narrator: Michelangelo paints himself into the scene, in the flayed skin of Saint Bartholomew.

Gormley: This is an acknowledgment that the surface of things doesn't matter.

It's the internal condition that matters, and it's very, very clear that Michelangelo knows that he is going to be judged.

♪ Dunant: That painting is not about "the church."

It's about the moment between God and all of the people who have died, and they are Lutheran ideas, which suggests you don't need the church to intercede from you.

In the end, it is you and God together, but I think it sums up artistically the shock of what has happened to the Catholic Church.

♪ Lister: He depicts saints and holy figures naked-- that's pretty shocking in and of itself-- and they look scared.

Even though they've dedicated their entire lives to following the teachings of God, they don't know if they're going to get in.

♪ The saints and the big players in the church are being shown to be exactly the same as everybody else.

♪ It's saying, "You are not more powerful here.

"You are fragile.

You are vulnerable.

"You are frightened.

"You are naked, as is everybody else.

"Only God's going to judge, "and we will all be naked and equal before Him when that time comes."

It must have been so cathartic for him to paint.

♪ Wallace: In some ways, we can see "The Last Judgment" as a kind of grand summary not only of Michelangelo's life and his art, but maybe even of his times.

Michelangelo puts everything in there-- the good and the bad, the beautiful and the horrible.

This is a moment of unprecedented freedom on the part of the artist, and that is what a modern artist does, so "The Last Judgment" is one of these culmination moments... ♪ one of the greatest works of art of all time.

♪ Who have I served?

I've had so many paymasters, difficult patrons, petty rivals, all seeking immortality through my art.

Will they be remembered?

♪ Brotton: Michelangelo transforms the whole notion of the role of art and an artist in society.

Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael, they've moved from being nameless artisans when he's really a kid in the Medici household, to being these superstars that have kings and popes demanding, you know, their work.

Ironically, we don't remember the politics, the patrons, and the warmongering, but the art lives on.

That's what survives.

Wallace: We're attracted to the idea that humanity can accomplish things of such beauty and grandeur in a time of war, devastation, and mayhem.

We all have a debt, I think, to Michelangelo and to the artists of the Renaissance because they showed us what we can do beyond the complexities of the world and the mess of politics.

They showed us what is possible.

♪ [Groans] Oh, God.

Ha ha!

I am so old now.

Death is tugging at the cape to go along with him, but there's still so much to do, so I shall keep him waiting for a while longer.

♪ ♪ This program is available with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video ♪