By then Michelangelo was desperate to leave. “To me it seems like a thousand years,” he wrote to Buonarroto, “for such is the way in which I’m living here that if you knew what it’s like you would be appalled.” After tedious months spent filing off the blemishes and buffing the metal to a fine sheen, the statue was finally lifted into place on the afternoon of February 21, 1508. From high on his perch in the city’s main square, the brazen Julius glowered over the people he had conquered and then abandoned to the tender mercies of the ferocious cardinal Alidosi. Though Michelangelo’s colossus was destroyed only a few years after its installation,V a contemporary penned a few verses that captures the menacing figure Michelangelo had conjured:
From whom do you flee, frightened traveler,
As if the Furies or Gorgons
Or the piercing Basilisk pursued you?
Julius is not here, but only the image of Julius.
Michelangelo was back in Florence by early March, relieved to be done with the onerous task and to have escaped the hostile city still in one piece. A few days after his return he wrote a friend to say he was finally enjoying some “peace and quiet.” He was anticipating an extended stay in Florence, since later that month he signed a one-year lease on the house on the Borgo Pinti that had been set aside for him by the Opera del Duomo. But the pope apparently had other plans. Michelangelo had barely settled in when Julius summoned him once more to Rome, this time to take up the project first contemplated two years earlier—to paint the vault of the Sistine Ceiling.
II. HOLY OF HOLIES
Sitting at the northeast corner of the massive Basilica of St. Peter, the brick box of the Sistine Chapel is both unimpressive and forbidding. Built in 1483 by Julius’s uncle, Sixtus IV, the chapel features thick walls, narrow windows, and bristling battlements that testify to the constant threat of violence that bedeviled the Renaissance papacy. Conceived as half place of worship, half fortress, the architect even furnished the building with slits from which defenders could pour boiling oil down on would-be attackers.
Despite its dour exterior, the chapel played a key role in the pomp and ceremony of the papal court, serving as both the pope ’s private place of worship and the site where, upon the death of the reigning pontiff, the cardinals met in the conclave to appoint his successor. In 1483, as Cardinal di San Pietro in Vincoli, Julius himself had presided over the chapel’s consecration; two decades later it was the scene of his greatest triumph when his colleagues decided to crown him with the papal tiara. The vital role the chapel played in papal ritual is also hinted at by its rather odd proportions: measuring 134 feet long, 44 feet wide, 68 feet high, the Sistine Chapel has the precise dimensions given in the Bible for the Kodesh Kodeshim, the Holy of Holies in the Temple of Solomon.
Architecturally, the chapel’s interior is almost as plain as its exterior, a simple rectangular shed topped with a shallow barrel vault. This severe layout is relieved by a series of arched windows that pierce the upper walls, providing light but also imparting a rhythmic articulation to the otherwise uninterrupted expanse of the ceiling.
The austerity of the three-dimensional layout, however, is deceptive since from its earliest days the walls were covered with frescoes painted by some of the greatest masters of the age. On one side are scenes from the life of Moses; on the opposite wall, scenes from the life of Christ—parallel narratives that together establish the Church’s role as the vehicle of salvation. Among the masters summoned by Sixtus to decorate his private chapel were Perugino, Pinturicchio, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, and Piero di Cosimo, the last three sent by Lorenzo the Magnificent as a peace offering at the conclusion of a two-year war between the Florentine Republic and the pope.
Only the ceiling retained something of the chapel’s original austerity. Here, some 60 feet above the inlaid marble floor, was a 5,800-square-foot expanse of blue sky speckled with golden stars, the vault of heaven presiding serenely over teeming narratives below. But in 1504, and again in 1508, large cracks had appeared in the plaster, requiring patches that marred the beauty of the celestial realm. It was these unsightly intrusions that first suggested to Julius the idea of employing Michelangelo to provide a new decorative scheme. Michelangelo himself later recalled the origins of his most famous fresco:
After I installed the figure on the façade of San Petronio and returned to Rome, Pope Julius still did not want me to carve the tomb, and assigned me instead to paint the vault of the Sistine, for which he agreed to pay me 3000 ducats. The initial scheme was to paint the twelve Apostles in the lunettes, while the rest was to be covered with the usual decorations. Then, having begun the work, it seemed to me it would turn out poorly, and I told the pope that depicting only the Apostles would seem a paltry thing. He asked me why: I told him: “Because they themselves were poor men.” So he gave me a new commission, telling me that I should do what I wanted and that he would accommodate me, and that I should paint all the way down to the histories below.
It is reasonable to question Michelangelo’s version of events, particularly since it came in the context of the decades-long quarrel over the completion of the tomb, when he was anxious to shape the facts to bolster his case against Julius’s heirs. Indeed, many scholars balk at the notion that a pope as opinionated as Julius would ever have permitted a lowly artist a free hand to paint whatever he liked, particularly in the chapel where he himself communed with the divine. But however improbable, the evidence supports Michelangelo’s claim.VI Several sketches survive that show variations on this original scheme. Together, they reveal an artist struggling with the limitations of his assignment and looking for a way to turn a thankless task into something worthy of his genius. It was typical of Michelangelo that even though he was dragged kicking and screaming to the project, once committed, he dedicated himself heart and soul to making something that would astonish the world.
Whether Michelangelo himself developed the program for the ceiling or whether (as many scholars contend) he was merely following a program developed by a learned theologian profoundly impacts how we interpret the vast panorama that unfolds above our heads. According to the latter theory, the nine narrative panels, the enthroned prophets and sibyls, the dozens of nude figures sprawled in startling attitudes across the ceiling, as well as the lunettes depicting the ancestors of Christ and the four scenes in the corner spandrels, all form an elaborate intellectual puzzle that can be decoded only by those well versed in the arcana of sixteenth-century religious doctrine. In this scenario the Sistine Ceiling is a work of profound erudition and obscure symbolism, promoting an agenda that can have no resonance for contemporary viewers. Each departure from tradition—like the placement of the panel depicting the Sacrifice of Noah before the panel depicting the Flood or the conflating of the scenes depicting God’s Creation—becomes a key to unlocking the hidden meaning of the whole.
But for all the impressive scholarship that has been marshaled in an effort to determine the Sistine Ceiling’s elusive meanings and to unmask its secret author, the evidence strongly suggests that Michelangelo himself was almost entirely responsible for what we see, and that he developed the elaborate program organically in response to the demands—technical, conceptual, and esthetic—that confronted him when he discarded the pope ’s simplistic plan and opted for a more elaborate scheme. What we see is the product of Michelangelo’s genius, not merely the skills of a consummate craftsman illustrating a theological text, but the passionate, unconventional vision of an artist who thought deeply about the miracle of Creation and developed his own unique language to confront life ’s most profound mysteries.
Michelangelo cherished his artistic independence too much to submit to the dictates of a bookish scholar. As he often reminded those who were inclined to look down on his profession, he was no simple-minded artisan churning out formulaic altarpieces but an artist of titanic ambition, a philosopher in marble, a rhapsodist in pigment, a conjurer of celestial visions and plumber of infernal depths. He embodied the
transformation from skilled artisan to man of letters that had been urged by Leon Battista Alberti at the beginning of the fifteenth century. “It would please me if the painter were as learned as possible in all the liberal arts,” he wrote in his treatise On Painting: “For their own enjoyment artists should associate with poets and orators who have many embellishments in common with painters and who have a broad knowledge of many things.” Michelangelo lived by this creed. For two years he had been in daily conversation with the greatest minds in Europe—Ficino, Pico, Poliziano, and Lorenzo the Magnificent himself, who had taken the awkward boy under his wings—and he always sought out men and women of learning. He certainly did not need some professor whispering in his ear to inspire him. The old division of labor between the patron who developed the iconography and the artist who skillfully arranged a predetermined set of figures and symbols was under assault by a new generation of artists. Men like Leonardo, Raphael, and, above all, Michelangelo, rewrote the rules, wresting control of the creative process from their masters. Even a man as opinionated as Pope Julius recognized that to get the most out of his protégé he had to step aside and allow him to follow the promptings of his own temperamental muse.
Once Michelangelo decided to replace the Twelve Apostles with a more ambitious scheme, the choice of subject matter was practically forced on him by the logic of the decorative program already in place. His narrative had to complete, or at least complement, the meaning of the scenes on the chapel walls chronicling the parallel lives of Moses and Christ that led logically and inexorably to the foundation of the Holy Church.VII Following the three-part division of history proposed by St. Paul, Moses represented the history of Man sub lege (under law), while Christ represented the history of Man sub gratia (under the dispensation of grace). Thus it was only natural that Michelangelo would choose as his subject the Book of Genesis, the history of man ante lege, that is, before Moses received the Law on Mount Sinai—a theme that had the added advantage of providing maximum narrative drama.
A far more challenging task was to develop a coherent scheme for a series of complex, uneven spaces, encompassing not only the vast expanse of the vault itself, but also numerous smaller fields. These smaller fields include lunettes (the half circles above the windows that, in turn, are interrupted by small openings), spandrels (the triangular spaces at the intersection of the arched windows and vertical supports), pendentives (the fan-shaped fields where the windows and the ceiling meet, and the four larger fields in the corners just below the vault), and all the awkward spaces in between. Generally underappreciated by art historians, the solution Michelangelo contrived to overcome this difficult problem was the essential creative breakthrough, providing him with an armature of unprecedented expressive power and conceptual richness.
Instead of minimizing or ignoring the natural divisions of the ceiling, Michelangelo chose to build on them. He organized the visual field like an editor organizing a difficult text, dividing it into various chapters and subchapters, each with its own heading and each assigned its proper place. The moldings and cornices of the actual chapel anchor an elaborate simulated architecture that, in turn, serves to articulate the hierarchical structure of the celestial realm. Unlike the actual architecture of the building, governed by the laws of physics—by the imperatives of stress and weight—this trompe-l’oeil architecture is governed by a purely metaphysical logic. At the base, supporting everything else, are the massive thrones of the prophets and sibyls; these ancient seers who foretell Christ’s coming are the theological foundation upon which all else rests. Running along the pillared arms of these thrones is a cornice topped by plinths that serve as platforms for athletic nudes who squirm on their perches like restless children. These are the famous ignudi, who act as intermediaries between the earthly and heavenly realms. Behind these plinths spring ten graceful arches that divide the ceiling into nine distinctive “bays,” each of which contains a scene from Genesis chronicling the early history of the world: from Creation to the Fall of Man, and from the Fall to his first redemption in the Covenant between God and Noah.VIII
This basic scheme allowed for almost infinite elaboration. The lunettes and spandrels, for instance, occupy a distinct metaphysical zone; relatively low on the ceiling, near the feet of the prophets, they belong to the terrestrial realm. Surprisingly, Michelangelo has populated these panels with a motley crew representing the ancestors of Christ, human specimens who run the gamut from the noble to the grotesque. Michelangelo’s irreverent treatment seems odd until one remembers that while Christ’s spiritual nature derived from God, his earthly nature was inherited from flawed men and women.
We still haven’t exhausted the full range of possibilities opened up by Michelangelo’s imaginative architectural setting. The trompe l’oeil piers and arches are decorated by a class of motifs that constitute “the art within the art” of the ceiling—faux-marble statuettes and reliefs that enrich the main narrative, often playfully, sometimes ominously, but always adding new voices and textures to an already polyphonic choir. Among those providing a lighthearted counterpoint to their more heroic neighbors are pairs of marble cherubs; rendered as part of the architecture, these statuettes—illusions of illusions—testify to the reality of the other figures who balance precariously on the stony framework. Yet another race of beings, the so-called brazen nudes—demonic figures who lurk in the shadows like trolls beneath a bridge—are squeezed into the narrow triangular spaces between the arches that frame the windows and the prophets’ thrones. They are the grim cousins of the cherubic infants, reminders of the varied menagerie that lurks in the unlit corners of God’s Creation.
The “art within the art” also includes ten faux-bronze medallions that carry forward, as if in a distant echo, the main narrative of human history unfolding at the summit of the vault.IX Add to these the four corner pendentives, each of which involves a symbolic rehearsal of the Passion of Christ, and the chapel (viewed as a unified program) embraces human history from the Creation to the Fall, to our final redemption through Jesus’s sacrifice on the Cross.X
One of the peculiarities of Michelangelo’s scheme is that there is no “right way” to see it: there is no single perspective, no privileged viewpoint, that allows us to make sense of the whole. This is most apparent when we come to the apex of the vault, where the nine scenes from Genesis are framed by rectangular openings in the fictive architecture like patches of sky glimpsed through a stonework trellis. Instead of pursuing an elaborate illusion in which the fictional architecture appears to open onto a vision of the celestial realm, Michelangelo renders these scenes so as to undermine any notion of a coherent space. Some of them—particularly the later scenes depicting God’s Creation—make use of dramatic foreshortenings as though we were seeing the figures from far below, but most make no concession to our point of view. Panels like The Deluge, The Temptation, and The Creation of Eve lie on a plane perpendicular to the one we stand on, and bear no plausible relation to the foreshortened architecture that frames them. This demonstrates that Michelangelo was learning the tricks of the trade as he went along since, as Vasari pointed out, this painting al di sotto in sù (from below to on high) posed “a more formidable task than any other in painting.” But this inconsistency was not merely a product of inexperience; it is built into a scheme that is superficially logical but utterly impossible. There is no correct vantage point from which the ceiling makes sense, no possibility of final resolution. Rather than diminishing the impact, however, this defiance of the basic laws of gravity heightens our sense that we are witnessing something miraculous, a reality beyond our reality that is both convincing and thoroughly disorienting. Ultimately, Michelangelo’s visionary masterpiece aims for transcendence rather than mere plausibility. Filled with Escher-like conundrums, Michelangelo’s ceiling provides us a glimpse of a truth “which passeth all understanding.”
• • •
Michelangelo began work on the ceiling in the spring of 1508, marking the occas
ion with a laconic entry in his account book: “I record how today, the tenth of May in 1508, I Michelangelo, sculptor, received from His Holiness, our Lord Pope Julius II, 500 duchati di camera, which were given to me by messer Charlino, chamberlain, and messer Charlo degli Albizzi for the purpose of painting the ceiling of the chapel of Pope Sixtus,XI which I shall begin working on today under the conditions and according to the agreements that appear in a document made by Monsignore Remolo di Pavia and signed by me.”
This did not mean that he actually picked up his brushes at this date. There was an enormous amount of work to be done before he actually began to paint. Among countless other tasks, assistants had to be hired, scaffolding erected, and the old plaster removed. And at the same time as he was tending to these logistical matters, he had to grapple with the creative challenges posed by the vast, awkward space, working out the overall scheme and the individual poses in hundreds of studies made from the live model.XII For all his mercurial genius, Michelangelo was a consummate craftsman, heir to a centuries-long workshop tradition that valued perspiration over inspiration. Janus-like, he looked back to the artisan practices of his forebears, even as he looked to a new age in which artists were treated as temperamental demigods. He regarded himself as a visionary genius, but at the same time he was too respectful of his craft to assume that his brilliance would compensate for slipshod execution.
Despite the legend (promoted by Michelangelo himself) that he completed the ceiling almost single-handedly, he knew from his experience in Ghirlandaio’s workshop that such a large-scale undertaking demanded a team of competent assistants. As a jingoistic Florentine, he naturally turned to his compatriots for help. He began by writing to his old friend Francesco Granacci, offering him the job as foreman of the crew. The loyal Granacci accepted and set about hiring a team of five experienced assistants who would travel with him to Rome.
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