Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel (26 page)
Read Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel Online
Authors: Andrew Graham-Dixon
The fundamental assumption behind the interpretation of the Sistine Chapel ceiling offered in this book is that Michelangelo felt that he was sufficient of a theologian – as Condivi’s story indicates – to paint his own vision of what he believed to be the eternal truths of Christianity. That vision is full of subtleties and complexities and will continue to be the subject of debate and argument – one of the hallmarks of any great work of art being its ability to inspire passionate disagreement among those who care about it. But ultimately, what makes Michelangelo’s vision so powerful is its combination of monumentality and directness.
To approach the Sistine Chapel ceiling as if it were an iconographical picture puzzle, to go to it in quest of secret meanings and veiled correspondences, seems fundamentally perverse – like going to the music of Bach, not to be moved, but to hunt out the mathematical principles that might underlie its harmonies. The essential meanings of the cycle are unfolded across each of its levels with a great and at times chilling clarity.
The figures of the ancestors collectively embody the idea that those who exist in the absence of divine revelation are foredoomed to lives of unenlightened, unrelieved mundanity. They are the lowest of the images on the ceiling, because they represent the lowest of its several spheres of human experience.
Placed aptly above the figures of the ancestors are ranged the mighty figures of the prophets and sibyls. They incarnate the belief that the search for revelation, for direct contact with God and for an understanding of his plans and purposes, is at once the noblest and the most difficult of all human undertakings.
The nine narratives that span the vault of the ceiling, forming the apex of its meanings, tell the ancient story of Man’s alienation from a God whose perfection and omnipotence will always haunt him – and which, one day, he hopes to find again. Below them, the four pendentives show the severity of God’s justice and the immensity of his mercy and grace.
The nine paintings from the Book of Genesis tell a progressive story of loss and fragmentation. That story reaches its climax with
The Deluge
and might even be said to extend beyond it, reaching into the world of everyday life that lies outside and beyond the chapel itself. This effect of Michelangelo’s frescoes is inseparable from the ineluctable choreography of every visit to the Sistine Chapel – which ends, inevitably and always, with the act of leaving. This might seem obvious. To experience the paintings in any building, we have to enter it. To go back to the business of our lives, we have to leave. But Michelangelo’s paintings incorporate those acts into the pattern of their meaning.
Standing at the entrance to the chapel, the viewer looks up towards the altar, above which are the scenes of God creating the world, and Man. Following the course of the narrative, the viewer sees next the Fall of Man and its consequences for humanity. Looking up at the last of the nine scenes,
The Deluge
, he or she is confronted with Michelangelo’s most explicit image of the fallen and sinful nature of humanity. It is under that image that all must pass, on the way out of the building. Having been drawn in, drawn up and into a vision of God Almighty, perfect and all-powerful, we are expelled, thrust back into mere mortal existence, by the momentum of the narrative.
3
Michelangelo’s fresco cycle pursues those who look at it, even as they depart from it. In leaving the chapel and re-entering the ordinary world, the visitor encounters the yet greater fragmentation – a fragmentation beyond even that of the scattered bodies strewn across the painter’s
Deluge
– of the broken images that succeed one another in the course of every daily existence. Re-entering the world outside the chapel, we encounter the images that finally complete this part of its meaning. Leaving behind God in his perfection, holding in our mind’s eye the mere memory or after-image of his likeness, we ourselves re-enact the destiny of Adam and Eve – which is to leave paradise, to enter the fallen world that it is the destiny of all mankind to endure.
pp. 1-8
Linda Murray,
Michelangelo, His Life, Work and Times
, London 1984, p. 57
Ross King,
Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling
, London 2002, p. 212
Murray,
Michelangelo
, p. 66
Andrew Graham-Dixon,
Renaissance
, London 1999, p. 201
Sir Joshua Reynolds,
Discourses on Art
, ed. Robert R. Wark, New Haven 1975, pp. 278-82
Murray,
Michelangelo
, p. 9
The best-known examples are Irving Stone’s novel
The Agony and the Ecstasy
, which was subsequently made into a film starring Charlton Heston as the variously agonised and ecstatic artist.
Ascanio Condivi,
The Life of Michelangelo
, trans. Alice Sedgwick Wohl, Pennsylvania 1999, p. 58
Michelangelo Buonarroti and His World, pp. 9-66
Condivi,
Life
, p. 10
Giorgio Vasari,
Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects
, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere, ed. David Ekserdjian, London 1996, II, p. 643
Condivi,
Life
, p. 9
Murray,
Michelangelo
, p. 9
Quoted in Robert S. Liebert,
Michelangelo, A Psychoanalytic Study of His Life and Images
, Yale 1983, p. 35
Vasari,
Lives
, II, pp. 646-7
James Fenton,
Leonardo’s Nephew: Essays on Art and Artists
, London 1998, p. 38, remarks: ‘It must have been a bit like a garden, a bit like a stonemason’s yard and a bit like a school – but a school where members of the ruling elite dropped in to observe the pupils at their studies.’
Condivi,
Life
, p. 12
Condivi,
Life
, p. 12
Condivi,
Life
, pp. 12-13
Vasari,
Lives
, II, p. 649
Vasari,
Lives
, II, p. 649
Vasari,
Lives
, II, p. 649
Condivi,
Life
, p. 15
Condivi,
Life
, p. 17
Condivi,
Life
, p. 18
Eamon Duffy,
Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes
, London 1997, p. 151
George L. Hersey,
High Renaissance Art in St Peter’s and the Vatican: An Interpretive Guide
, Chicago 1993, p. 12
Damian Thompson,
The End of Time: Faith and Fear in the Shadow of the Millennium
, London 1996, p. 76
Hersey,
High Renaissance Art
, p. 12
The sculpture, now lost, is believed to have been owned by Cesare Borgia and Isabella d’Este, and then the dukes of Mantua, before passing into the collection of King Charles I of England. It was probably destroyed in the fire at Whitehall Palace in 1698.
Condivi,
Life
, pp. 21-3; it has also been suggested that this work was commissioned by Cardinal Riario, who refused it on the grounds of indecency, and that it was only then purchased by Galli.
Vasari,
Lives
, II, p. 651
Michelangelo,
Complete Poems and Selected Letters
, trans. Creighton Gilbert, ed. Robert N. Linscott, Princeton 1980, poem no. 18, pp. 11—12
The remark, reputedly made by Michelangelo to a priest whom he knew in Rome, is quoted in Michelangelo,
Complete Poems
, p. xxxv
Vasari,
Lives
, II, pp. 653—4
Vasari,
Lives
, II, p. 655
Vasari,
Lives
, II, pp. 654—5
Murray,
Michelangelo
, p. 22
Murray,
Michelangelo
, p. 22
Duffy,
Saints and Sinners
, p. 147
Loren Partridge,
The Renaissance in Rome
, London 1996, p. 19
Duffy,
Saints and Sinners
, p. 139
André Chastel, in
The Sack of Rome
, Princeton 1983, p. 78, notes that Giles of Viterbo passionately argued the case for continuing the sale of indulgences to Julius II’s successor, Leo X.
Lauro Martines, in
Power and Imagination
, London 1980, pp. 416— 17, argues that it was Julius II’s uncle, Sixtus IV, who set the course for the division of Christian Europe. The point can be debated, but the broader thesis — that the
style
of the papacy was a direct cause of the Reformation and its discontents — is powerfully argued by the author: ‘With the pontificate of Sixtus IV (1471—84), the Renaissance papacy went over to sanguinary nepotism, worldly splendour and power politics in a manner that was to contaminate the whole hierarchy of the Church in Italy for nearly a century. The glaring disparities between doctrine and conduct, between responsibility and the neglect of parishes, generated confusion and dismay, and if the Protestant Reformation was one of the consequences in parts of Northern Europe, the fragmented outcome for Italy was in mysticism, prudent silence, tiny pockets of fervent reform, extremes of cynicism and hypocrisy, and finally in the backlash of the Inquisition and Counter Reformation.’
Graham-Dixon,
Renaissance
, p. 205
Condivi,
Life
, pp. 33—4
Condivi,
Life
, pp. 29—30. Condivi adds that Michelangelo was inspired by ‘the wish to emulate the ancients’. According to legend, Dinocrates, a Greek architect of the fourth century BC, planned to carve Mount Athos into the likeness of a human figure.
Condivi,
Life
, p. 30
Murray,
Michelangelo
, p. 52
Condivi,
Life
, p. 35
Murray,
Michelangelo
, p. 55
Condivi,
Life
, p. 38
See John Shearman, ‘The Chapel of Sixtus IV’, in André Chastel et al.,
The Sistine Chapel: Michelangelo Rediscovered
, London 1986, pp. 23—4
A fascinating account of the papal conclaves and the superstitions surrounding them is given by D. S. Chambers in a brief essay: ‘Papal Conclaves and Prophetic Mystery in the Sistine Chapel’,
JWCI
, 41 (1978), pp. 322—6
James Hall,
Michelangelo and the Reinvention of the Human Body
, London 2005, p. 107
Sydney Freedberg puts it well in
Painting in Italy 1500—1600
, London 1970, p. 36: ‘the conception and the making of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, which followed on the first design for the tomb and which Michelangelo was compelled to undertake instead of it, was affected essentially by his thinking for the tomb design ... that design was not abandoned with the suspended project for the tomb, it became the basis from which Michelangelo evolved his design for the vast fresco, transposing the major elements from one to the other, as if the scheme intended for the tomb should be unfolded flat upon the ceiling space.’
Michelangelo,
Poems
, pp. 5—6