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Even Michaelangelo hated his job at times.

The Renaissance master may have immortalised himself by painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but he was not happy about it. The torture of creating his masterpiece even led him to write a sonnet to his friend, Giovanni da Pistoia, in which he bemoans ‘the toils of beautifying the most sacred space in Christendom on behalf of Pope Julius II’.

Besides being a typical tortured artist, Michelangelo considered himself mostly a sculptor, and not a painter. When Pope Julius II asked the 33-year-old artist to paint the ceiling, he had never before completed a mural painting. But refusing a pope in 16th-century Europe was a bad idea.

Michaelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling between 1508 and 1512, and today it is considered a cornerstone work of High Renaissance art.

 

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The work was indeed back-breaking. Michelangelo’s discomfort while painting the 3.3 square kilometre ceiling stemmed a great deal from his standing posture, with his neck twisted backwards and his arm raised far over his head. In his sonnet to Giovanni, he even used a caricature of a man ‘always pushing upward’ to emphasise his point.

All this time on a rickety scaffolding metres above the floor caused Michaelangelo to become ‘lost in his own thoughts and doubts.’ By this time he also had an enlarged thyroid gland, his spine was crooked and knotted, his thighs cramped constantly, and his chest was tight from huffing paint all the time. The aforementioned paint also constantly dripped onto his face.

“My brush / above me all the time, dribbles paint / so my face makes a fine floor for droppings!”

If you are unhappy in your career, take heart in knowing that even a great artist like Michaelangelo sometimes thought their job sucked. He wrote this poem for you:

I’ve already grown a goiter from this torture,
hunched up here like a cat in Lombardy
(or anywhere else where the stagnant water’s poison).
My stomach’s squashed under my chin, my beard’s
pointing at heaven, my brain’s crushed in a casket,
my breast twists like a harpy’s. My brush,
above me all the time, dribbles paint
so my face makes a fine floor for droppings!

My haunches are grinding into my guts,
my poor ass strains to work as a counterweight,
every gesture I make is blind and aimless.
My skin hangs loose below me, my spine’s
all knotted from folding over itself.
I’m bent taut as a Syrian bow.

Because I’m stuck like this, my thoughts
are crazy, perfidious tripe:
anyone shoots badly through a crooked blowpipe.

My painting is dead.
Defend it for me, Giovanni, protect my honor.
I am not in the right place—I am not a painter.

[source:artnet]