March 6
Today is Michelangelo’s birthday. He’d be well over 500. If it were really possible to live to that kind of age, could anyone sustain their creative output over such a long period? Everybody knows him as simply Michelangelo, although his full name was Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni. He’s known as one of the foremost Renaissance painters and sculptors. What’s slightly less well known is his work as an architect. And even less known that that is that he was also a poet.
Michelangelo didn’t actually think very highly of painting; he preferred sculpture, and completed his most famous two pieces early in his career. The Pietá was sculpted around 1499, and David a few years later. He did both before the age of 30. And he kept up his creative output for practically his entire 88 years; he became the architect of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome when he was 74, and significantly redesigned it to what it is today.
Michelangelo was unusual among artists — he was celebrated during his own lifetime. In fact he’s the first European artist to ever have his biography written while he was still living — and there were two of them. He was called “Il Divino” (divine one), and even other artists didn’t fully understand his ability to completely overawe viewers. There was a whole school of art called Mannerism just devoted to imitating Michelangelo. And this was during his lifetime, too.
Just like some famous artists in our time, Michelangelo was rich; his bank records and deeds still exist, and show that he was wealthier than plenty of noble princes. But he evidently lived an ascetic life. His apprentice Ascanio Condivi reported that he said “However rich I may have been, I have always lived like a poor man.” One of his biographers went even further, saying “His nature was so rough and uncouth that his domestic habits were incredibly squalid, and deprived posterity of any pupils who might have followed him.” Some modern creative icons have lived like that, too. The poet Robert Frost, for one, spent part of his time living on a rural farm with few modern improvements.
So could Michelangelo have kept up his creative projects past a normal lifetime? Impossible to know, but later in life he was doing more architecture and writing than sculpting and painting, so maybe given the chance he would have embraced more different creative outlets.
Today is Cyrano de Bergerac’s birthday. He’d be over 400. If it were really possible to live to that kind age, could anyone continue to live an excessive life like his over such a long period? de Bergerac (whose full name was Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac) was a novelist and playwright, but is mostly remembered as the inspiration for the play Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand. Other than that play, nobody really knows all that much about Cyrano. He was born in the French countryside, and had several brothers and sisters, but we know hardly anything about them. Cyrano’s father sent him to live in Paris at a fairly young age — possibly with his uncle. He went to school, but nobody knows which one. He did emerge, sometime in his late teens or early twenties, as a well known drinker and gambler around Paris. He may have begun writing in order to fit in with the bohemian literary companions he met in the Parisian cafés and taverns, and his works were often so original they were startling. He even wrote very early examples of something like science fiction: Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon, and The States and Empires of the Sun.
Cyrano didn’t live a long life — he was only 36 when he died, and it’s not even clear what he died of. It might have been an accident, or an illness (possibly resulting from his lifestyle), or he might even have been killed by one of the many enemies he’d accumulated from constant boasting and frequent dueling. My guess is he probably wouldn’t have been able to sustain his style of living over a long life, particularly since it may have been the main reason he lived only a short life. But he’s almost unique in history; a writer mostly remembered not for his writing, but as a character in someone else’s writing, and someone who’s been remembered for four centuries, but without anyone really knowing that much about him.
Today is Lou Costello’s birthday, of Abbot and Costello. He’d be over 100. It isn’t common, but it is possible for humans to live that long. There have been other humorists and comedians who have lived to very old age (although not quite 116), so we do know that humor, at least, is something you can maintain throughout a long existence.
Costello first teamed with Bud Abbot in 1936. They were at first a touring burlesque act, and that’s where they developed their routines of rapid-fire back and forth banter. The best-known one, of course, is Who’s on First? That routine propelled them into the new media of the time: radio shows, and after that movies. Abbot and Costello made 36 movies between 1940 and 1956, and were among the very top-tier movie stars during the 40s. Their popularity sank in the 50s, and dropped their partnership in 1957. Costello had some significant health problems starting in the 1950s; he had several bouts of rheumatic fever, and died in 1959 from a heart attack, when he was nearly 53.
Could Lou Costello (whose real name was Cristello) have revived his career as a comedian and/or humorist, and extended throughout a longer life? A good example might be George Burns, who was one of Costello’s contemporaries, and continued his career in comedy until just a few weeks before he died (also of a heart attack) at 100 years old. And for that matter, another famous humorist, Mark Twain, lived to be 74, mostly in the 19th century, and was active until the end as well. Maybe there’s something about humor that makes it a particularly sustainable pursuit. (Please note that I managed to keep from claiming that “it’s a funny thing about humor…”)
Today is Shaquille O’Neal’s birthday. He’s over 50. His first career was as an athlete; he was a superstar professional basketball player for almost 20 years, won four NBA championships, was rookie of the year, most valuable player, and is in the NBA Hall of Fame. Most sports careers, though, can only last a certain number of years; aging bodies just can’t compete athletically with younger ones. O’Neal, though, has shifted to new careers. He’s a musician, for one thing, with at least four albums — and one of them was so popular it “went platinum.” Producing music and performing music are pretty closely related these days, but they’re not quite the same — and O’Neal is a producer as well as a performer.
O’Neal’s imposing physical appearance — he’s over seven feet tall — made him instantly recognizable, and that might have helped propel him into another career: he’s an actor. He’s been in quite a few movies and TV shows. He’s also done voiceover work for animated films like The Lego Movie and The Smurfs 2. His television work also includes sportscasting and hosting reality shows, as well as acting in commercial ads for products from Pepsi to printers to pizza (also some other things that don’t start with “p,” so they don’t help my little alliteration exercise).
Oh, but I almost forgot; O’Neal’s athletic career wasn’t limited to basketball — he’s also appeared in professional wrestling events and trained in mixed martial arts (although I don’t think he’s competed publicly).
Then in his spare time, O’Neal became a real-estate investor, was a co-owner of an NBA team (the Sacramento Kings) for several years, owns a Krispy Kreme donut shop in Atlanta, and is on the board of directors of the Papa John’s pizza company.
I think O’Neal is a good example of sustaining creative, productive output across different fields for a long time. That’s the kind of thing we could keep at for five centuries, if we had them. But on the other hand, since we don’t, we can take O’Neal as a good example of the diversity of things anybody can do within the single century most people have to work with. Sure, not everybody is seven feet tall and physically gifted like that. But really…so what?
