Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel (27 page)
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Authors: Andrew Graham-Dixon
The Sistine Chapel Ceiling, pp. 67—157
See Charles Seymour, ed.,
Michelangelo
:
The Sistine Chapel Ceiling
, London 1972, p. 83
According to Giorgio Vasari, ‘Michelangelo complained at times that on account of the haste that the Pope imposed on him he was not able to finish it in his own fashion, as he would have liked; for his Holiness was always asking him importunately when he would finish it. On one occasion, among others, he replied, “It will be finished when I shall have satisfied myself in the matter of art.” “But it is our pleasure,” answered the Pope, “that you should satisfy us in our desire to have it done quickly”; and he added, finally, that if Michelangelo did not finish the work quickly he would have him thrown down from the scaffolding.’ (Vasari,
Lives
, II, p. 668) Both Vasari and Condivi tell of the Pope becoming so infuriated with the artist, another time, that he actually hit him with a stick. In Condivi’s account, ‘when the Pope demanded when he would finish the chapel, Michelangelo answered in his usual way, “When I can.” The Pope, who was precipitate by nature, struck him with a staff which he had in his hand, saying, “When I can, when I can.” ’ (Condivi,
Life
, p. 59)
See Murray,
Michelangelo
, pp. 6—7
See Seymour,
Sistine Chapel Ceiling
, pp. 93—5
Condivi,
Life
, p. 42
John Milton,
Paradise Lost
, ed. Alastair Fowler, London 1971, p. 496n
Quoted in Kenneth Clark,
The Nude
, London 1976
Vasari,
Lives
, II, p. 746
Condivi,
Life
, p. 105
Eugène Delacroix,
The Journal of Eugène Delacroix
, Oxford 1951, p. 181
See Erich Auerbach,
Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature
, Princeton 1968
Charles de Tolnay,
The Sistine Ceiling
, II, London 1945, p. 45
See Edgar Wind, ‘The Crucifixion of Haman’,
Journal of the Warburg Institute
, I, no. 3 (January 1938), pp. 245—8
See, for example, Charles de Tolnay,
Michelangelo
, New York 1945— 60, II, p. 64; Clark,
The Nude
, pp. 198—9; Seymour,
Sistine Chapel Ceiling
, passim.
Condivi,
Life
, p. 48; Vasari,
Lives
, II, p. 670
See Partridge,
The Renaissance in Rome
, p. 89
Condivi,
Life
, p. 48
See Loren Partridge,
Michelangelo, The Sistine Chapel Ceiling, Rome
, London 1996. This is a particularly helpful guide to the iconography of the ceiling.
Quoted in King,
Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling
, p. 171
Condivi,
Life
, p. 48
Condivi,
Life
, p. 9
Michelangelo,
Complete Poems
, p. 6
Vasari,
Lives
II, p. 669
The Last Judgement,
and Other Endings, pp. 159—75
Duffy,
Saints and Sinners
, pp. 158—9; Hersey,
High Renaissance Art
, p. 27; Christopher Hibbert,
The House of Medici, Its Rise and Fall
, New York 1975, p. 245
Vasari,
Lives
, II, p. 292
Condivi,
Life
, p. 84
Vasari,
Lives
, II, p. 692. The frequently told story that Michelangelo gave his own features to the flayed skin held by Saint Bartholomew is a myth. None of the painter’s contemporaries refer to it as a self-portrait. If it really had been a likeness of Michelangelo they might have been expected both to notice and to comment on the fact.
These details are closely derived from Luca Signorelli’s fresco of
The Resurrection
in Orvieto Cathedral, a work which Michelangelo knew well. The apocalyptic theme and urgent, animated style of Signorelli’s work seem to have exerted a powerful and lifelong influence on Michelangelo, although — perhaps characteristically — he chose never to mention it.
Quoted in Anthony Hughes,
Michelangelo
, London 1997, p. 254
For an extended discussion of these pictures, see chapter 4 of my book on the Renaissance:
Renaissance
, pp. 213—17
The Rondanini Pietà
provoked Kenneth Clark to write one of his most penetrating remarks about the artist’s late style: ‘in the humility of his last years, Michelangelo has pared away everything which could suggest the pride of the body, till he has reached the huddled roots of a Gothic wood carving.’ Clark,
The Nude
, p. 249
Although the poem is directly inspired by the ceiling, hence the allusions to the almost touching fingers of God and Adam, it seems to me to evoke the sombre piety of Michelangelo in his later years. It is printed here for the first time.
pp. 177—86
Vasari,
Lives
, II, pp. 662—3
Condivi,
Life
, p. 27
This aspect of the experience of the chapel has been altered by the rearrangement of entrances and exits to accommodate the vast number of tourists visiting every day. The pope and his entourage would not have experienced it in the way that I describe — they entered and left the chapel from the side — but the laity would have done so. In any case, although we no longer perform the same choreography in paying a visit to the chapel, the experience is fundamentally the same. We enter and we leave, and in leaving we are reabsorbed into the continuum of fallen, human time — taking up and re-enacting the story told in the chapel, so to speak, at the point where it leaves off.
An extensive bibliography of the literature published on Michelangelo in the English language is contained in William Wallace, ed.,
Michelangelo: Selected Scholarship in English
, New York 1996 (be warned, it runs to five volumes). There are also good specialised bibliographies to be found at the end of each of the entries on different aspects of Michelangelo in
The Dictionary of Art
, London 1996, pp. 431—61.
What follows here is a list of the sources directly referred to in the endnotes.
Auerbach, Erich,
Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature
, Princeton 1968
Chambers, D. S., ‘Papal Conclaves and Prophetic Mystery in the Sistine Chapel’,
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes
, 41 (1978) pp. 322—6
Chastel, André,
The Sack of Rome
, Princeton 1983
Chastel, André, et al.,
The Sistine Chapel: Michelangelo Rediscovered
, London 1986
Clark, Lord Kenneth,
The Nude
, London 1976
Condivi, Ascanio,
The Life of Michelangelo
, trans. Alice Sedgwick Wohl, ed. Hellmut Wohl, Pennsylvania 1999
Delacroix, Eugène,
The Journal of Eugène Delacroix
, ed. Hubert Wellington, Oxford 1980
Duffy, Eamon,
Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes
, London 1997
Fenton, James,
Leonardo’s Nephew: Essays on Art and Artists
, London 1998
Freedberg, Sydney Joseph,
Painting in Italy 1500—1600
, London 1970
Graham-Dixon, Andrew,
Renaissance
, London 1999
Hall, James,
Michelangelo and the Reinvention of the Human Body
, London 2005
Hersey, George L.,
High Renaissance Art in St Peter’s and the Vatican: An Interpretive Guide
, Chicago 1993
Hibbert, Christopher,
The House of Medici, Its Rise and Fall
, New York 1975
Hughes, Anthony,
Michelangelo
, London 1997
King, Ross,
Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling
, London 2002
Liebert, Robert S., MD,
Michelangelo, A Psychoanalytic Study of His Life and Images
, Yale 1983
Martines, Lauro,
Power and Imagination
, London 1980
Michelangelo,
Complete Poems and Selected Letters
, trans. Creighton Gilbert, ed. Robert N. Linscott, Princeton 1980
Milton, John,
Paradise Lost
, ed. Alastair Fowler, London 1971
Murray, Linda,
Michelangelo, His Life, Work and Times
, London 1984
Partridge, Loren,
The Renaissance in Rome
, London 1996
Partridge, Loren,
Michelangelo, The Sistine Chapel Ceiling, Rome
, New York 1997
Reynolds, Sir Joshua,
Discourses on Art
, ed. Robert R. Wark, New Haven 1975
Seymour, Charles, ed.,
Michelangelo: The Sistine Chapel Ceiling
, London 1972
Thompson, Damian,
The End of Time: Faith and Fear in the Shadow of the Millennium
, London 1996
Tolnay, Charles de,
Michelangelo
, vols 1 and 2, Princeton 1943, 1945
Vasari, Giorgio,
Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects
, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere, with an introduction and notes by David Ekserdjian, London 1996, 2 vols
Wind, Edgar, ‘The Crucifixion of Haman’, in
Journal of the Warburg Institute
, I, no. 3 (January 1938), pp. 245—8
All colour illustrations of the Sistine Chapel ceiling are reproduced with permission of the Vatican Museums and Galleries, Vatican City.
Michelangelo Buonarroti and His World
- p. ii Autograph sonnet with self-portrait (Scala, Florence)
- p. 13 Self-portrait of Michelangelo, black chalk, pricked, the Teyler Museum, Haarlem
- p. 24
The Battle of the Centaurs
, marble, Casa Buonarroti, Florence (Bridgeman Art Library) - p. 32
The Drunkenness of Bacchus
, 1496—7, marble, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence (Bridgeman Art Library) - p. 36
Pietà
, marble, St Peter’s, Vatican (Alinari) - p. 40
David
, 1501—4, marble, Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence (Bridgeman Art Library) - p. 43 Seated male nude,
c
. 1511, red chalk heightened with lead white, the Teyler Museum, Haarlem - p. 44 Studies for Haman, 1511—12, red chalk, British Museum, London
- p. 46
The Battle of Cascina
, after Michelangelo, 1542, oil on panel, Collection of the Earl of Leicester, Holkham Hall, Norfolk (Bridgeman Art Library) - p. 49 Portrait of Pope Julius II, Raphael,
c
. 1512, oil on panel, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (Bridgeman Art Library) - p. 60 Sistine Chapel exterior (Scala, Florence)