But the Sistine Ceiling is a raging tempest in which God is no longer a comforting presence but a surging, disruptive power. Those who participate in or are witnesses to His Creation are tossed about by forces beyond their comprehension; they are whirling dervishes whose experience of the divine is manifested in convulsive movement. Agitated, undone—enlightened, agonized, or ecstatic—revelation courses through their bodies like an electric current.XVIII
The overall structure of the Sistine Ceiling is Talmudic: that is, it consists of a central scriptural text—in this case the story of Genesis—surrounded by commentary in the form of scenes and figures that echo, explicate, and elaborate its core meaning. Michelangelo renders God’s Creation as a seismic event, and those who testify to its miraculous nature are shaken from their complacency, filled with both awe and dread. Even Isaiah, one of the calmer figures on the ceiling, betrays a profound discomfort. He has (literally) been disturbed, or at least interrupted. He looks up from the book he ’s been reading, the finger of his right hand holding his place as he turns toward the cherubic infant over his shoulder who whispers something in his ear and points with his thumb to what’s taking place in the register above them. Isaiah’s eyes are hooded, his lips parted, as if he ’s just awakened from a trance. Understanding comes slowly, rising in a vortex that begins at his feet and spirals upward until it reaches his troubled brow. To glimpse even a fragment of God’s Truth is a disruptive experience, registered across the prophet’s entire body even before his mind stirs to righteous anger.
Seated to his right is the Cumaean Sibyl, the priestess of Apollo who from deep inside her fetid cave, intoxicated by volcanic vapors, mumbles prophecies that foretell Christ’s coming. Michelangelo depicts her once-powerful form ravaged by time, the necessary price of hard-won wisdom. Like Isaiah, she twists in her chair, but her contraposto involves a greater contortion as if her lower limbs and torso were being tugged in opposite directions. Unlike her neighbor, whose book has been put aside so he can listen more attentively to the figure whispering in his ear, she hunches over a massive tome, mouthing the words written as if by fire upon the page.
Michelangelo, Ignudo, Sistine Ceiling, c. 1510.
She too is made uncomfortable by her inspiration, her gargantuan frame at war with itself. Even more agitated are the nude youths—the ignudi—perhaps because they are closer to the summit of the vault, realm of God’s immanence and cauldron of Creation. None of them sits easily in his seat. Some are about to rise, others flail about wildly as if singed in the furnace blast of the divine.
Many have labeled these well-toned athletes angels, but they possess none of the attributes normally associated with celestial beings. Rather than reflecting the world of pure spirit they seem to belong unapologetically to the realm of the flesh, occupants of a lower order responding to the miraculous visions above with awe, fear, hilarity, or even outright incredulity—hardly appropriate behavior for a heavenly choir practiced in singing God’s praises. Michelangelo actually borrowed many of the poses from ancient sculptures, which has encouraged some scholars to posit a Neoplatonic explanation in which the nudes are rebranded as pagan genii, embodiments of the intellect or rational soul.XIX But this label is just as unsatisfactory as that of “wingless angels”; these wanton youths are no more plausible as avatars of rationality than they are models of celestial calm.
It should come as no surprise that these strange creatures cannot be accommodated within a traditional iconographic scheme. Michelangelo often populates his tableaux with nude figures whose presence is at best ambiguous, if not actually incongruous. Their closest cousins are those naked boys haunting the landscape behind the Holy Family in the Doni Tondo. Here, perhaps, they are meant to stand for Man prior to Redemption, supremely beautiful but unenlightened, possessed of only a sensual nature. Male nudes also play a prominent role in Michelangelo’s designs for Julius’s tomb. Described as “slaves” or “captives,” their precise symbolic function is not immediately apparent. The fact that Condivi described them as “the virtues [who] were the prisoners of Death,” while Vasari interpreted them as “the provinces subjugated by th[e] Pontiff and rendered obedient to the Apostolic Church,” reveals that even his contemporaries had to scramble to come up with plausible explanations.
Ultimately, attempts to wedge Michelangelo’s idiosyncratic iconography into a neat theological box miss the point.XX What matters is the expressive function of the nude body. Whatever philosophical or scriptural label we slap on them, the ignudi are there primarily to testify to the disorienting fury of God’s procreative urge. Unlike the prophets and sibyls who experience this force in mediated form—through words inscribed in books and scrolls—the nudes are caught in the very eye of the storm. While the former are cerebral, embodying enlightenment, the latter are creatures of blind instinct. Reacting reflexively to the sacred drama unfolding above them, their eloquent bodies testify to miracles they only dimly comprehend.
• • •
The narrative panels whose potency is proclaimed so vividly by the ignudi consist of nine scenes taken from Genesis laid out like a comic strip along the central spine of the ceiling. Beginning with the three stories of Noah and the Flood, Michelangelo proceeds backward in time. The next three panels are devoted to the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden, while the last three depict God’s Creation before the arrival of humanity. In other words, the series begins in the inadequate present—the broken world that resulted from the Fall and that was only partially healed by the covenant following the catastrophe of the Flood—and proceeds toward greater and greater perfection. St. Augustine sums up this sorry history in a single memorable sentence: “And thus, from the bad use of free will, there originated the whole train of evil, which, with its concatenation of miseries, convoys the human race from its depraved origin, as from a corrupt root, on to the destruction of the second death, which has no end, those only excepted who are freed by the grace of God.” By reversing time ’s arrow, Michelangelo reverses the biblical narrative and even entropy itself. Genesis is a story of decay, a chronicle of the breakdown of God’s perfect universe through Man’s disobedience, but in the natural flow of the chapel from entrance to altar, we move from a world degraded by the sinful creatures who populate it to one dominated by a transcendent, all-powerful Father.XXI
This reverse chronology is built into the structure of the chapel itself, which is divided by an ornate marble screen that separates the portion traditionally open to the laity from that reserved for the clergy. At the time Michelangelo painted the ceiling, the altar wall featured Perugino’s fresco depicting the Assumption of the Virgin, an event symbolizing Mary’s role as mediator between heaven and earth. The trajectory of Michelangelo’s narrative reinforces the message embodied in the actual space, of a spiritual journey that culminates at the altar where, during the performance of Mass, the priest offers the sacrament of the Eucharist. It is through the performance of this sacred rite that the downward spiral of history set in motion by Man’s disobedience is halted, restoring our shattered union with God through the reenactment of Jesus’s death on the Cross.
Though Christ never appears on the ceiling, everything points to him and to his Church as the vehicle of our salvation. The ceiling takes as its point of departure the first book of the Old Testament, but its true subject is the “good news” of the Gospels that tells of our redemption through the Incarnation and Crucifixion. Indeed, the Gospels can be viewed as the story of Genesis told backward, just as Michelangelo presents it, as an ascent toward grace rather than a fall from it. Like other Christians of his time, Michelangelo was taught to view the Old Testament through the New, a methodology first elaborated by St. Augustine in the fifth century. “[W]e all hold confidently to the firm belief that these historical events and the narrative of them have always some foreshadowing of things to come,” he declared, “and are always to be interpreted with reference to Christ and his Church, which is the prophecy from the beginning of t
he human race, and we now see the prophecy being fulfilled in all that happens. . . . Accordingly, the writer of these holy Scriptures (or rather the Spirit of God through his agency) is concerned with those events which not only constitute a narrative of past history but also give a prophecy of things to come.”
Each scene from Genesis, then, not only recounts the story of Creation and the fall of Man, but reaffirms the promise of redemption. Thus The Drunkenness of Noah, the scene closest to the entrance, refers both to the wine of the Eucharist, symbol of Christ’s sacrifice and, through the mocking by Noah’s son Ham, recalls the mocking of Christ before his execution. The first three scenes taken together tell the story of the Flood and its aftermath, a crucial moment in the story of our salvation because it ends when God proclaims His first covenant with Man:
God spoke to Noah and his sons, “See I establish my Covenant with you, and with your descendants after you; also with every living creature to be found with you, birds, cattle and every wild beast with you: everything that came out of the ark, everything that lives on the earth. I establish my Covenant with you: no thing of flesh shall be swept away again by the waters of the flood. There shall be no flood to destroy the earth again.”
To a pious Christian of the sixteenth century, this image would have called to mind Jesus on the Cross, just as The Birth of Eve evoked the drama of the Passion. In the story of Noah, the concluding covenant prefigures the ultimate contract binding God and Man through the incarnation and sacrifice of His Son, while the scene depicting Eve ’s emergence from Adam’s rib recalls the fatal wound Jesus received while on the Cross.
The ceiling is a dense fabric woven together from such metaphorical strands; it is as much allusion as illusion. The sibyls and the prophets, for instance, do double duty as emissaries from the pre-Christian world whose gift of foresight allows them to attest to the divinity of Jesus. Jonah, depicted in a critical spot above the altar, is a precursor of Christ because the three days he spent in the belly of the great fish anticipated the three days between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, while Isaiah’s words, like those of the Cumaean Sibyl, were interpreted by Christians as prophecies of Christ’s suffering and death.
None of this meant that Michelangelo needed help from a trained theologian or that his intent was to pose elaborate riddles indecipherable to all but scholars. As a conventional Christian who was also exposed to the progressive strains of humanist philosophy, he had long been steeped in such analogic thinking. While still a young man, he had been among the crowds spellbound by Savonarola’s sermons. In one famous series, delivered in the autumn of 1494 when it seemed as if the marauding French army was about to engulf Florence, the fiery preacher compared current tribulations to God’s cataclysmic Flood. “He preached in the church of Santa Reparata,” wrote one of those in attendance, “and when, at the moment the King of France entered the city, he announced that the ark was closed, the whole assembly amid terror and dismay and outcries went out into the streets, and wandered up and down, silent and half dead.”
Echoes of Savonarola’s apocalyptic harangues reverberated decades later in Michelangelo’s retelling of the biblical story, but an impulse to look beneath the surface for signs of God’s providence was not confined to religious fundamentalists. Even as he attended sermons by Savonarola in the Cathedral, Michelangelo was being seduced by the mystical Neoplatonic flights of Ficino and Pico, who taught that the world apprehended by the senses was an illusion concealing a dimension of ideal form and pure intellect.
This dual education prepared Michelangelo for the task at hand, not by providing him with a detailed road map but by allowing him to strike out boldly on his own path. His images are unforgettable because he was conceiving new forms and discovering new meanings, not just dutifully illustrating a predetermined text. He works by instinct and analogy, his independence of mind and inventive imagination opening up new expressive possibilities. When he combines the two scenes of the Temptation and the Expulsion—melding serpent and avenging angel so that they appear almost as a single hybrid creature—he is opening up new theological possibilities in the act of creating a striking image.XXII In the panel ostensibly showing the Separation of the Earth from the Water, he has relied so little on the text that scholars have had trouble identifying the scene. But few who see the image of the Almighty hovering above the waters can ever forget His titanic energy and Jove-like majesty. Michelangelo is an artist, not a pedant, a conjurer of sacred mysteries rather than a transcriber of received wisdom. He is a profound but unsystematic and unorthodox reader of Scripture, reveling in the unexpected, flirting with heresy, celebrating his own illicit passions and exploring his morbid pathologies.
• • •
The five bays completed by July 1510 include four of the prophets—Joel, Zechariah, Isaiah, and Ezekiel—accompanied by their three female counterparts—the Delphic, the Erythrean, and the Cumaean Sibyls—as well as twelve of the ignudi and assorted ancestors of Christ. The five scenes from Genesis include the three depicting Noah and the Flood, along with The Creation of Eve and The Temptation and Expulsion from the Garden.
Typically, as Michelangelo prepared to take down the scaffolding and reassemble it on the far side of the chapel, he tried to keep his colleagues and the general public from seeing what he was up to. But once again the pope refused to indulge his penchant for secrecy. Julius not only enjoyed commissioning great works of art but craved the adulation that came with a reputation for munificence. “[H]e insisted on having it uncovered,” Condivi recorded, “although it was still incomplete and had not received the finishing touches. Michael Angelo’s fame, and the expectation they had of him, drew the whole of Rome to the chapel, where the Pope also went, even before the dust raised by taking down the scaffolding had settled.”
The impact on the public mind of seeing the vault laid out for the first time can hardly be overstated, particularly for his fellow artists, who realized their work would be judged timid and old-fashioned by comparison. It was probably at this time that Raphael rushed back to add the figure of Heraclitus to The School of Athens; certainly, all his subsequent work shows a new vigor and muscularity inspired by this opportunity to study Michelangelo’s fresco at length. But Michelangelo feared that Raphael was after something more than mere inspiration, claiming that, with the connivance of Bramante, he was trying to maneuver the pope into assigning him the second half of the ceiling. This farfetched notion, however, was just another paranoid fantasy on the part of an artist who, however much he hated the project, hated even more the prospect of someone else profiting from his labor.
Michelangelo himself was among those taking advantage of the opportunity to survey the ceiling from the chapel floor, rather than with his nose pressed up against the plaster. From 60 feet below, the earliest panels—particularly The Flood with its congested throng—were hard to decipher, and the adjacent nudes and prophets appeared insufficiently majestic. The opportunity to view the ceiling from a distance confirmed a trend, already visible in the scene of the Temptation and the Expulsion, toward greater simplicity and monumentality. If Michelangelo was indifferent to public acclaim and irritated that the pope encouraged his rivals to feast on the fruits of his talent, he had at least overcome the self-doubt that beset him when he began. He was now supremely confident in his own abilities, and the fact that he was covering wide swathes in a few short days was an encouraging sign for the future. If all went well, he would soon be done with the unpleasant task of painting the ceiling and could take up once more the abandoned tomb.
But Michelangelo’s hopes for a speedy conclusion were soon dashed. A month after the unveiling, Julius launched another one of his bloody campaigns, this time to drive the French from Italian soil. Though they had helped him in his war against the Venetian Republic, Julius now viewed his former allies as a threat to his own independence. “[They] are trying to reduce me to nothing but their king’s chaplain,” he rumbled, announcing his intention to drive them
back across the Alps. Louis responded in kind, sneering, “the Rovere are a peasant family. . . . Nothing but the stick at his back will keep this pope in order.”
On August 17, 1510, Julius rode out of the city at the head of the papal army with the cry “Fuori i barbari!” (out with the Barbarians). Unlike the triumphant campaign of 1509 against the Venetians, however, this one began badly. Delayed in Bologna by illness and then by an unusually harsh winter, the papal forces were threatened with annihilation. But even at his lowest ebb, routed on the battlefield and debilitated by fever, Julius remained defiant, at one point strapping on his armor while muttering: “I’ll see if I’ve balls as big as those of the King of France.”
Meanwhile, Michelangelo fretted in Rome, unpaid and unemployed. He had been promised 1,000 ducats to build the new scaffolding but, he complained, the pope “has gone away and has left me no instructions, so that I find myself without any money and do not know what I ought to do,” adding: “I do not want him to be angry if I were to leave, and to lose my due, but to remain is hard.” Late in September, with still no word from Julius and no money from the treasurer, he set out for Bologna. It was the first of two journeys he would make to the city in a desperate bid to persuade the pontiff to make good on his promises.
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