The lord of masterly rock

Charles Dance, fresh from donning Michelangelo’s smock for the BBC, discusses the role, the value of mentoring and why the Sistine chapel is like playing King Lear

RAPHAEL, that nasty little sycophant,’ hisses Charles Dance, with a withering look. He’s not having a go at someone in his entourage (he has come alone to The Beaumont Mayfair, London W1, his only company a newspaper under his arm), but discussing the rivalry between the three titans of the Renaissance—the young upstart from Urbino and the two men against whom he competed: Leonardo and Michelangelo. ‘A lot of the time, artists,’ he says, his eyes now twinkling, ‘are bitchier than actors. If you go to a dip [diploma] show at the Slade or the Royal Academy—it’s worse than a first night in the West End.’

There is no doubt Mr Dance favours Michelangelo of the three rivals, not only because he was—not merely acted—the artist in Renaissance: The Blood and Beauty, a dramatised documentary by the BBC that delves into the moment that changed Western art, the men who drove it and the bloodshed, struggles, envy and burning ambition in which they were steeped. ‘You look at Raphael’s drawings and they’re rather clinical. There’s a purity about them, but it’s a clinical purity. It’s not an emotional purity. It’s not a very good analogy, but, you know, it’s a bit like CDs and vinyl.’

As the longest lived of the three artists, Michelangelo, whose 550th birth anniversary falls this week, is the lynchpin of the series, looking back at the group’s lives and work from his 80th decade. ‘Everything, almost everything I said were his words, whether from his letters or his poems,’ Mr Dance explains, adding: ‘He wrote very eloquently, in a very beautiful hand.’ He rather obviously adores Michelangelo and his voice rings with emotion when he says: ‘To get inside, or try to get inside, the skin of that man, the little I learned about him, I thought: “Oh God, I would have loved to have met him.”’