Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel (19 page)

Whereas the Bible implies that Noah’s sons themselves are clothed – which was how earlier artists had envisaged the scene – Michelangelo paints them as nudes, just like their father, giving them merely token robes that do nothing to obscure them. This is a daring invention, epitomising his bold habit of transforming the conventions of religious art, bending them to purposes and meanings that evade purely theological analysis. The young men’s upright, athletic and muscular bodies, lit by an irregular play of lights and darks, as though by the flare of lamplight, contrast cruelly with Noah’s slack and slumped form. The image is an archetype of that moment, late in the father-son relationship, when the child must take on the role of parent because the parent, enfeebled, has become a kind of child. It can also be seen as a metaphor for the sudden, shocking recognition of death as an ineluctable fact of human existence.

Seeing their father like this confronts the sons with their own mortality and mutability – that mutability which, within the scheme of the Old Testament stories, governs all of life in the postlapsarian world. As he is now, so they will become. Their powerlessness to change that fact is emphasised by the inadequate flimsiness of the wisp-like drapery with which they have been furnished. The sons cannot cover their father’s shame and they reflect his vulnerability in their own uncovered state. Man is always naked before God.

There are four spandrels, triangular in shape and curved in form, at the four corners of the ceiling. Michelangelo chose to decorate these awkward spaces with four more scenes from the Old Testament, creating a subordinate level of narrative below his story of the origins of the world and of human existence. They all depict episodes in which the people of Israel are miraculously saved from evil, or persecution, or their own weakness. The first two show
David and Goliath
and
Judith and Holofernes
. The subjects of the second pair are
The Death of Haman
and
The Brazen Serpent
. Each of these scenes of salvation, in accordance with the general pattern of the ceiling’s meanings, is to be regarded as a prefiguration of the saving of all mankind by Jesus Christ. The four paintings also serve to unify the many disparate images in the whole lower zone of the vault, to which they belong – images of the prophets and the sibyls and the ancestors of Christ. As stories of Israel’s salvation, they bear witness to God’s perpetual presence in the life of all his people, and the constant renewal of the promise of redemption.

The four spandrel paintings bear witness to the tremendous evolution that occurred in Michelangelo’s style between 1508, when he started the ceiling, and 1512, when he completed it. The first two were painted at the start of the project, the last two at its close. They might almost have been painted by different artists. So great is the difference between them that they demonstrate, more clearly than any other works on the vault, the extent to which Michelangelo had to wrestle his own mutating style into subordination to the totality of his scheme. The final two spandrel paintings are works of unique originality and virtuosity, even by the already extraordinary standards of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. They inaugurated a new style in Italian art that would eventually come to be known as
maniera
, or Mannerism – tense, nervy, difficult, violent. It is no surprise that Giorgio Vasari, who was himself a Mannerist – albeit of meagre talent – thought these paintings the finest on the whole vault.

The first two spandrel paintings are comparatively straightforward narrative images. They have a solid, grounded, earthbound quality. Each shows a single, frozen moment of drama.

David and Goliath
represents the climax of the famous story told in the Book of Samuel. The Philistine army advanced upon Israel and a challenge was set. One man from each side would be chosen to represent his nation in a fight to the death. The champion of the Philistines was a man named Goliath of Gath, ‘whose height was six cubits and a span’ and who was armed with sword and shield, and a spear so large it ‘was like a weaver’s beam’ (I Samuel 17: 4-7). The young hero David volunteered to fight for the Israelites, confident that the Lord would deliver him ‘out of the hand of this Philistine’. Refusing arms and armour, ‘he took his staff in his hand, and chose him five smooth stones out of the brook, and put them in a shepherd’s bag which he had’. Running to meet Goliath, he let loose a stone from the sling ‘and smote the Philistine in his forehead, that the stone sunk into his forehead; and he fell upon his face to the earth’. Having no sword, he quickly drew Goliath’s own sword from its sheath, ‘and slew him, and cut off his head therewith’ (I Samuel 17: 32-51).

This is the moment that Michelangelo has depicted. The triumphant David, whose slingshot lies on the brown earth in the foreground, straddles the back of his fallen opponent. As Goliath struggles confusedly to rise to his feet, David seizes him by the hair and raises a scimitar aloft. The hero of the Israelites is solemnly focused on the task of beheading his opponent. There is no sense of exultation in his severe expression and the action is poised in a way that speaks of steady inevitability, of the divine will being done. The scene is set against the backdrop of the Philistine encampment, abbreviated by the artist to a pair of skulking faces at the base of a single pink and yellow tent. Its apex is cut off by the upper edge of the triangular spandrel. The shape of the sword raised in David’s hand is perfectly silhouetted against the narrow band of yellow that stripes the upper part of the tent, and thus starkly isolated – a symbol of divine retribution against the wicked. Michelangelo has arranged the colour scheme of his composition in such a way that David’s costume of blue, with a yellow cape, seems like a brighter version of Goliath’s muted, sea-green cuirass with yellow trim. Both figures have hair that grows in tight curls, so that they might almost be larger and smaller versions of the same person. Good triumphs over evil, but Michelangelo’s symmetry implies that the conflict between virtue and vice also represents, for every individual, an inner choice. In slaying Goliath, David is also, symbolically, subduing his own unruly passions.

The spandrel of
David and Goliath
is paired with that of
Judith and Holofernes
, which tells the story of how a beautiful and chaste Jewish heroine saved her people by slaying the general of the Assyrians. The tale is told in the Book of Judith, a text excluded from the Old Testament in Protestant translations, but still to be found in Orthodox and Roman Catholic bibles. Judith was a pious and beautiful woman, in mourning for her dead husband. She dressed plainly and spent all day praying and studying the Torah. When the Assyrians laid siege to her home town of Bethulia, Judith conceived a plan to save her people. She dressed in her finest clothes and went to the Assyrian camp, where she fooled her enemies into believing she wished to defect to their side. Holofernes, the Assyrian general, made advances to her and she agreed to have supper with him in his tent. While he gorged himself on many delicacies and wine, she ate only the humble kosher food that she had brought with her in a bag from Bethulia. When Holofernes fell into a deep, drunken slumber, she took his sword and beheaded him with it. She put his head in the bag that had held her provisions and escaped from the city. Michelangelo painted Judith leaving the tent, entrusting the severed head of the tyrant to her maidservant and looking back, one last time, at the corpse of her enemy.

It had been traditional to find a parallel between the stories of David and Goliath and Judith and Holofernes since the Middle Ages. Both are tales of the strong brought low by the weak, of evil conquered by good, with the help of God. For centuries it had also been conventional to interpret the stories as allegories of the triumph of particular virtues over particular vices. David’s defeat of Goliath was seen as the victory of Fortitude over Greed. Judith’s defeat of Holofernes was seen as the victory of Humility over Pride and Luxury. Such traditional distinctions were not absolute – Savonarola, for example, associated David instead with Humility – but they underpin Michelangelo’s interpretation of the stories in the Sistine Chapel spandrels.

Just as the figure of David, stern and resolute, is the embodiment of fortitude, so Judith embodies humility. She is dressed in the fine clothes required by her stratagem, their colours echoing those of the clothes worn by David in the other spandrel. Under a greenish-white dress she wears a light blue bodice with a golden yellow border, as well as a headdress of matching blue and gold. As her maid stoops to allow Judith to cover the head of Holofernes with a cloth, the two figures, mirroring one another in graceful
contrapposto
, might almost be dancing. The head of the Assyrian general has been placed in a serving dish rather than the bag described in the Bible. Michelangelo may have chosen this detail by analogy with medieval and Renaissance depictions of another story from the Bible, in which John the Baptist’s severed head is presented to Salome on a plate. Perhaps the artist felt that it would look undignified to have Judith cramming Holofernes’s head into a sack, like a thief in the night. Putting the head on a dish is a more elegant solution, which also has the effect of emphasising Judith’s humble, lowly status. She and her maid might be serving women removing the plates from a banquet.

The poorly preserved figure of a soldier slumbers at the edge of the scene. Judith looks as though she is walking on tiptoe, so as not to rouse the camp. She looks back into the darkness of Holofernes’s tent, which Michelangelo has painted as a marble building, perhaps to emphasise the tyrant’s association with luxury and decadence. Within that dark space, framed by curtains the colour of blood, the nightmare from which she has delivered her people still restlessly lurks. Sprawled on a rumpled white bedsheet, the decapitated body of Holofernes jerks menacingly, even in the last spasm of death. With his right hand the tyrant reaches above and behind him, as though sightlessly groping for the sword with which he has been decapitated. It has sometimes been believed that Michelangelo included his own likeness in the form of the tyrant’s severed head. There is a faint resemblance to the artist as he became in his later years, but since he was only in his early thirties when painting the Sistine Chapel the idea that the wizened, bearded face of Holofernes really is a self-portrait seems fanciful.

Each of the first pair of spandrels depicts a single moment in time, whereas the later pair compress a multitude of incidents into their congested and convoluted compositions. Their subjects, linked once more by the theme of Israel’s salvation, are
The Death of Haman
and
The Brazen Serpent
. In these works, Michelangelo leaves the still and solid world inhabited by Judith and David far behind. Each of the later spandrels is a phantasmagoria, filled with writhing, struggling figures, lit by fickle dapplings of glare. Their colours are acid and disjunct, a riot of sharp yellows and lime greens, of orange and gold, lilac and lavender. Whatever their intended place within the scheme of the ceiling, these are pictures of such eruptive, irregular, expressive force that they go beyond the meanings of their iconography. Symbolism of the type that can readily be applied to the earlier spandrel images of David and of Judith seems quite inadequate as a guide to these works. They give no strong sense of exemplifying any particular virtues and are shot through with a sense of agitation so extreme that it borders on hysteria.

The Death of Haman
is drawn from a story in the Old Testament Book of Esther which defies succinct synopsis. Haman is chief minister to Ahasuerus, king of the Persians. His mortal enemy is Mordecai, a Jew serving in the chancellery, who has won royal favour in the past by foiling a plot hatched by two court chamberlains to assassinate the king. Mordecai has offended Haman by refusing to bow down to him as a mark of respect on his appointment as chief minister. To take his revenge, Haman plans to kill all the Jews in the Persian Empire. Mordecai learns of the plot and warns his cousin Esther, Ahasuerus’s queen. Risking her life by appearing unbidden, she approaches the king, who offers to grant her anything she desires. Esther declines to tell Ahasuerus her wish but invites him, instead, to a banquet she has prepared for him and Haman. When the three meet, she once again demurs but tells the king that all will be revealed at a second banquet that she is preparing for him and Haman for the following day. Meanwhile, Haman, unaware of Esther’s machinations against him, orders a great gallows to be constructed, from which he intends to have Mordecai hanged. That night the chronicles are read to Ahasuerus in his bedroom, reminding him of his old debt to Mordecai for saving his life. The next day, at the second banquet, Esther reveals to Ahasuerus that she is Jewish. She tells him of Haman’s plans for a genocide of the Jews and begs the king to save her people. Soon after this, Haman vengefully attempts to rape Esther, is discovered by the king, and condemned to death. Ahasuerus decrees that he is to be hanged on the same gallows prepared for Mordecai. The king’s will is done, Haman dies and the Jews are saved.

In squeezing a number of episodes from this breathlessly complicated narrative into the triangular shape of a single spandrel, Michelangelo created a busy and restless image, one so crowded that it is difficult to interpret with any great degree of certainty.

To the left, at least, there is no ambiguity. Here Michelangelo shows the second banquet, at which Esther tells Ahasuerus of Haman’s plot. The king looks dumbfounded, while Haman reels away in surprise. In the middle, Haman meets his unpleasant end. To the right, matters are more complicated. Here, some kind of compressed version of the start of the tale appears to be illustrated, against the normal convention of narrative chronology unfolding from left to right. At the threshold of the palace, Mordecai, dressed in yellow, urgently gestures to Esther, seated next to him. Inside, Esther appears again at the king’s bedside, together with a scribe and two furtive figures who seem to be trying to sneak away. These scenes are ambiguous. Mordecai might be telling Esther of the plot to assassinate the king. If that is so, the background scenes probably show her warning Ahasuerus of the danger to his life, and the king, in response, passing sentence on the two chamberlains, who try to escape while a court scribe notes down the judgement. Alternatively, Mordecai might be telling Esther of Haman’s plan to kill the Jews, in which case the scene in the background may be meant to show Esther approaching the king unbidden, to seek his help. Literal interpretation of this part of the painting is further complicated by the fact that the king’s vengeful, pointing gesture seems directed at the figure of Haman in the centre of the painting, doomed to die. Whatever the artist’s precise narrative intentions, this is essentially a painting about wickedness judged, and punished.