{"id":28,"date":"2008-04-06T12:49:15","date_gmt":"2008-04-06T12:49:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/benedictions\/2008\/04\/agony-and-ecstasy-and-rip.html"},"modified":"2008-04-06T12:49:15","modified_gmt":"2008-04-06T12:49:15","slug":"agony-and-ecstasy-and-rip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/2008\/04\/agony-and-ecstasy-and-rip.html","title":{"rendered":"Agony and Ecstasy, and R.I.P."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Heston.jpg\" The obituaries for Charlton Heston tend to play up his larger-than-life roles, such as the fearsome, bearded Moses or the powerful, bare-chested Ben-Hur, or the noble, doomed El Cid. I always think of him as the passionate, difficult genius Michelangelo, playing opposite Rex Harrison as Pope Julius II (now there’s<\/em> a pope) in “The Agony and the Ecstasy” of 1965. Apart from my love of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the creation o which is the focus of the film, my connection of Heston with that movie is surely because the closest I ever came to the actor was while I was working at Vatican Radio in the late 1980s, the same time the Vatican was having the Sistine Chapel restored (or cleaned, or damaged, depending on how you view it). (AP photo via NYTimes)<\/em>
\nAny story about the chapel was a great one to report, natch, and when we heard that Charlton Heston was in town, the stars–so to speak–had aligned…<\/p>\n


\nYet somehow my colleague, Lana, an L.A. native with ties to the entertainment biz (she was named after Lana Turner), always managed to score the celeb assignments. And so it was with Heston. We worker bees set about putting out a news broadcast, while Lana disappeared up in the Vatican somewhere to meet “Chuck.” And sure enough, she came back glowing a few hours later (we were sweating; live broadcasts do that to you). Not only had she convinced Heston to give her an interview, but she managed to have the Sistine Chapel opened<\/em> after closing time for a private tour. It wasn’t that hard, really. Vatican officials get as star-struck as anyone, and a mention of Heston’s name in a call to the archbishop in charge of the chapel set His Excellency atwitter and before they knew it, the doors of the chapel swung open, and Lana and Chuck (and the monsignor, presumably) even went up on the scaffolding for a close-up of the restoration process.
\nThe interview was of course a keeper. But the best bit was when Heston explained that in order to create the illusion that he (as Michelangelo) was painting the ceiling lunette by lunette, they photographed the entire frescoed expanse and reproduced it on a sound stage ceiling. After each day’s shooting they would then plaster over a lunette, until the end of the film the entire ceiling was a “blank canvas” of white fresco. Then in the editing suite they cut the scenes in reverse order, so it appeared that Heston was painting a plain white ceiling bit by grueling bit, covering it in stunning images, rather than the reverse, as they filmed it. (I hope that makes sense.)
\nIn any case, what was really fascinating is that until that interview, Heston had never seen (as none of us had) the ceiling as Michelangelo painted it, in all its brilliance. Indeed, the “glorious” ceiling that emerges (or submerges, as the case was) from the film version is actually the sooty, muted version we–and art scholars–grew up with.
\nSo what did I report on that day instead of Charlton Heston’s return to la Sistina<\/em>? Who knows? Who cares?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The obituaries for Charlton Heston tend to play up his larger-than-life roles, such as the fearsome, bearded Moses or the powerful, bare-chested Ben-Hur, or the noble, doomed El Cid. I always think of him as the passionate, difficult genius Michelangelo, playing opposite Rex Harrison as Pope Julius II (now there’s a pope) in “The Agony…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nAgony and Ecstasy, and R.I.P. - Benedictions: The Pope in America<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/2008\/04\/agony-and-ecstasy-and-rip.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Agony and Ecstasy, and R.I.P. - Benedictions: The Pope in America\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The obituaries for Charlton Heston tend to play up his larger-than-life roles, such as the fearsome, bearded Moses or the powerful, bare-chested Ben-Hur, or the noble, doomed El Cid. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}