Miguel Ángel (El pecado)

I found watching Il Peccato / Sin (2019) a delight!

Some user reviews of this film express their disappointment in the fact that you don't see the great master in action, working on marble or drawing. But I see that differently. Being trained as an art historian, I recognized the events and characteristics of Michelangelo shown in this film from the historical documents that have survived from that time. Having spent a significant amount of time studying the subject before making the film, I believe Konchalovskiy in particular closely read Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550/1568), a contemporary collection of biographies of Renaissance artists (in the case of Michelangelo, Vasari knew him personally), as the major themes in the film correspond with Vasari's account of this episode in Michelangelo's long life.

Echoing his early masterpiece Andrey Roublev (1966), which he made together with Andrei Tarkovsky, Il Peccato shows how artists are subjects of the time they live in, dependent on power structures and turbulences in violence and prosperity. The film gives a good insight in Michelangelo's social interactions with his family, rivalling artists, and patrons. Moreover, the cinematography is impressive, and the largely unprofessional acting crew performed overall very strong. A great addition to the genre of movies about artists, much more nuanced and intelligent than the classic The Agony and the Ectasy (1965). Hopefully, Michelangelo's rival Leonardo da Vinci will get a biopic of comparable quality soon!