by Ross King
As he prepared to assemble the scaffold over the western half of the chapel and begin painting The Creation of Adam, Michelangelo suddenly found himself faced with new uncertainties. He had already lost one ally and protector when Cardinal Alidosi was murdered in Ravenna. The death of the Pope would present even more grave obstacles to his work. Not only, he knew, would a conclave in the Sistine Chapel delay his work on the fresco, but the election of a new pope might end the project altogether. Lippomano reported a consensus among the cardinals that victory was likely to come the way of the ‘French party’, that is, to a cardinal sympathetic to Louis XII. Any such election could have spelled disaster for the fresco, since a pope friendly to the King of France would hardly have wished to see the Sistine Chapel become a monument to the two Rovere popes. Julius had declined to scrape Pinturicchio’s propaganda for Alexander VI from the walls of the Borgia apartments, but the new pope might not be quite so restrained.
In the midst of so much chaos, Julius, incredibly, started showing signs of recovery. As usual, he had been a disobedient patient, ignoring his doctors’ orders by demanding — on the rare occasions when he could eat — such forbidden fare as sardines, salted meat, olives and, of course, wine. His doctors indulged him, assuming he would die no matter what he ate or drank. He also ordered fruit — plums, peaches, grapes and strawberries. Unable to swallow, he chewed the flesh and sucked the juices before spitting out mouthful after mouthful.
His condition improved under this strange regimen, but his doctors still prescribed a blander diet, a thin broth which he refused to touch unless it was served to him by Federico Gonzaga. ‘At Rome everybody is saying that if the Pope recovers, it will be due to Signor Federico,’ the Mantuan envoy proudly informed the boy’s mother, Isabella Gonzaga.6 He also boasted to her that the Pope had asked Raphael to portray Signor Federico in one of his frescoes.7
By the end of the month, barely a week after receiving last rites, the Pope was well enough to listen to musicians in his room and play tric-trac, a board game similar to backgammon, with Federico. He also began planning how to chastise the republican rabble on the Capitol. Learning of this astonishing and unexpected improvement, the rebels melted swiftly away. Pompeo Colonna fled the city, and the remainder of the conspirators hastily denied any intention of subverting the authority of the Pope. Peace was restored almost overnight. The mere thought of Julius, alive and well, was enough, it seemed, to quell the violence of even the unruliest Roman mob.
The Pope’s recovery must have been a relief to Michelangelo, who was now permitted to continue his work. The scaffold was assembled over the second half of the vault during the month of September, and on 1 October he received his fifth instalment, a payment of four hundred ducats, which brought his total earnings to 2,400 ducats. With the scaffold rebuilt, the men resumed painting on 4 October, a full fourteen months after downing their brushes.
The Feast of the Assumption had not merely been the first chance for the people of Rome to see the new fresco in the Sistine Chapel. The removal of the scaffolding also gave Michelangelo his first real opportunity to appraise the fresco from the floor. If everyone else in Rome seemed impressed with the work, its author had some reservations about his approach, for he began painting the vault’s second half in a conspicuously different manner.
Michelangelo’s basic misgiving seems to have been the small size of many of his figures, especially those in cluttered scenes such as The Flood, which he now realised were difficult to see from the floor. He therefore decided to increase the size of the figures in the Genesis scenes. This new strategy was to hold for the prophets and sibyls as well, since those on the second half of the vault are, on average, some four feet taller than the ones painted earlier. The figures on the lunettes and spandrels likewise swelled in size and decreased in number: as they advanced towards the altar wall, the Ancestors of Christ were destined to have fewer squirming babies.
The Creation of Adam was the first scene to benefit from this new approach. The entire panel took sixteen giornate, or two to three weeks of work. Since Michelangelo worked on the scene from left to right, the first figure painted was Adam himself. This most famous and easily recognisable of all the figures on the vault was executed in only four giornate. One day was spent on Adam’s head and the surrounding sky, a second on his torso and arms, while his legs took a giornata each. At this rate, the figure took Michelangelo about the same amount of time as each of the Ignudi, whom the nude, straining Adam so closely resembles.
The cartoon for the figure of Adam was transferred on to the plaster entirely by incision, a departure from Michelangelo’s practice in the previous Genesis scenes, where spolvero was always reserved for the finer details of the face and hair. Michelangelo simply incised the outlines of Adam’s head in the wet plaster and then deftly modelled the features with his brush, a technique perfected on the lunettes.
Forced to abandon his fresco for more than a year, Michelangelo was therefore approaching his work with a new sense of urgency underscored by both Julius’s precarious health and the political uncertainties raised by the Pope’s failed military campaign against the French. Further testament of the furious pace is found in one of the lunettes painted soon after The Creation of Adam. While the lunettes in the first half were all executed in three days, that inscribed ROBOAM ABIAS was completed in a single giornata, making for a day’s work of almost mind-boggling velocity.
The pose of Michelangelo’s Adam is similar to that of the slumped, drunken Noah a few yards along the vault. But while the sozzled Noah in Michelangelo’s scene is an example of debased humankind, the newly created Adam is, in keeping with theological interpretation, a flawless physical specimen. Two and a half centuries earlier, St Bonaventure, a Franciscan renowned for his purple prose, rhapsodised over the physical beauty that God gave the first man: ‘For his body is most glorious, subtle, agile and immortal, clothed with the glory of such brightness that verily it must be more radiant than the sun.’8 An admiring Vasari found all of these qualities brilliantly captured in Michelangelo’s Adam, ‘a figure of such a kind in its beauty, in the attitude, and in the outlines, that it appears as if newly fashioned by the first and supreme Creator rather than by the brush and design of mortal man’.9
There was no higher goal for an artist during the Renaissance than to make his figures seem alive. What separated Giotto from all painters before him, according to Boccaccio, was the fact that ‘whatever he depicted had the appearance, not of a reproduction, but of the thing itself’, so that viewers of his paintings ‘mistake the picture for the real thing’.10 But Vasari’s comments about Michelangelo’s rendering of Adam involved something more than praise for a skilful painter who can make a two-dimensional image look truly alive. He drew a direct comparison between Michelangelo’s creative work with his brush and God’s divine fiat (‘Let us make man in our own image’) by suggesting that the artist’s fresco appears to re-enact, and not simply portray, the Creation of Man. If Michelangelo’s Adam is indistinguishable from the version created by God, it follows that Michelangelo is himself a kind of god. Higher praise is difficult to imagine, but then the opening premise of Vasari’s biography is that Michelangelo was God’s representative on earth, sent down from heaven to show mankind ‘the perfection of the art of design’.11
Michelangelo’s own God was painted, like the figure of Adam, in a total of four giornate. Though the outlines were transferred to the plaster mainly through incision, both the head and the left hand (though not the hand that reaches out to Adam) show signs of pouncing. The Almighty’s airborne pose as He flutters towards Adam is a complex one, but the pigments used by Michelangelo were basic: morellone for the gown, bianco Sangiovanni and a few touches of ivory black — a pigment made from charred pieces of ivory — for the hair and beard.
Michelangelo’s conception of God had changed since he painted The Creation of Eve over a year earlier. There, wrapped in heavy robes, God stood firmly on the ground and conjured
Eve from Adam’s side with a gesture of His supine hand. Here, dressed in a much skimpier costume, He soars through the air surrounded by a billowing cape that enfolds ten tumbling cherubs and a wide-eyed young woman identified by a number of art historians as the as yet uncreated Eve.12 And His simple summons to Eve is replaced, of course, by the fingertip touch that has become a shorthand for the entire fresco.
The sheer iconic value of this image of God, five centuries on, tends to blind modern viewers to its novelty. In the 1520s, Paolo Giovio noted among the figures in the fresco ‘one of an old man, in the middle of the ceiling, who is represented in the act of flying through the air’.13 The Lord God in full length, complete with bare toes and kneecaps, was a rare and unaccustomed sight, even to the bishop of Nocera. While the Second Commandment’s prohibition against images of ‘anything that is in heaven above’ (Exodus 20:4) led the Byzantine emperors in the eighth and ninth centuries to order the destruction of all religious art, depictions of God were never officially banned in Europe. However, Creation scenes in Early Christian art usually ventured to show nothing more of the Creator than a giant hand emerging from the heavens14 — a synecdoche that Michelangelo’s straining digits almost seem to reprise.
God steadily acquired more bodily attributes through the Middle Ages, though most often He was portrayed as a young man.15 The now familiar image of an old man with a beard and long robes did not actually start to develop until the fourteenth century. There is, of course, no biblical authority whatsoever for this grandfatherly image; it was inspired instead by the many antique statues and reliefs of Jupiter and Zeus that could be seen in Rome. But the portrayal was still enough of a rarity early in the sixteenth century that no less an authority than Bishop Giovio — a cultivated historian who later opened a museum of famous men in his villa near Lake Como — failed to identify the ‘old man’ flying through the air.
Nor is there any scriptural authority for God creating Adam with a touch of His finger. The Bible clearly described how Adam was fashioned: ‘The Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being’ (Genesis 2:7). Early versions of the scene, such as a thirteenth-century mosaic in San Marco in Venice, stayed faithful to this account by showing God in the act of modelling the body of Adam from clay, thereby depicting Him as a kind of divine sculptor. Others, concentrating on the ‘breath of life’, showed a ray passing between God’s lips and Adam’s nose. However, artists soon came up with their own ways of illustrating the encounter. On the Porta del Paradiso, Ghiberti’s cast-bronze God simply clasped Adam’s hand as if helping him to his feet, a motif also used by Paolo Uccello in his Creation of Adam in the Chiostro Verde of Santa Maria Novella, painted in the 1420s. Meanwhile, in Bologna, Jacopo della Quercia’s God gathered His voluminous robes with one hand and offered the naked Adam a benediction with the other.
All of these illustrations showed God upright on the ground, and none featured the index finger as a point of contact.16 Thus, while many of the images in the fresco were recycled from various statues and reliefs that Michelangelo had come across in his travels and studies, there was really no precedent for his conception of the finger-to-finger transmission of the spark of life from God to Adam.
41. Uccello’s Creation of Adam in Santa Maria Novella, Florence.
42. Quercia’s Creation of Adam on the Porta Magna, San Petronio, Bologna.
This unique image did not always enjoy its iconic status. Condivi interpreted the famous gesture not as an infusion of life so much as — bizarrely — an admonishing wag of an autocrat’s finger. ‘God is seen with arm and hand outstretched,’ he wrote, ‘as if to impart to Adam the precepts as to what he must and must not do.’17 The simple touch really only became a keynote in the second half of the twentieth century. A turning point seems to have come in 1951, when the publishers Albert Skira, in their three-volume, colour-plated ‘Painting-Colour-History’ series, introduced Michelangelo to their numerous readers in Europe and America by cropping the bodies of Adam and God and featuring only their outstretched hands.18 The image, since then, has almost become a cliché.
It is a fine irony, then, that an important component of Michelangelo’s signature piece — Adam’s left hand — was restored in the 1560s and is therefore not actually his own work. The name Domenico Carnevale does not loom large in encyclopaedias or art galleries, yet he is the one who painted the index finger that featured so prominently and influentially in the Albert Skira colour plate. By the 1560s, the structural flaws that had destroyed parts of Piermatteo d’Amelia’s fresco reasserted themselves, and cracks once more appeared in the vault. In 1565, the year after Michelangelo’s death, Pope Pius IV ordered that repairs be made, and over the next four years the chapel’s foundations were strengthened and the south wall buttressed. With the structure finally stabilised, Carnevale, a painter from Modena, was allotted the task of plastering over the cracks and repainting the missing bits of fresco. As well as taking his trowel and brush to a substantial section of The Sacrifice of Noah, Carnevale touched up The Creation of Adam, since one of the cracks had travelled longitudinally down the vault and amputated the tips of Adam’s index and middle fingers.
The fact that the job of repainting the fingertips fell to an unspectacular artist such as Carnevale is yet another indication of how The Creation of Adam was not always regarded as the centrepiece of the fresco, as a masterpiece within a masterpiece. Even Vasari, despite his praise for Adam, did not consider this reclining nude to represent Michelangelo’s finest moment on the vault. Nor did Condivi. Instead, each biographer would single out a different figure – two masterstrokes of design and execution that Michelangelo had yet to paint.
25
The Expulsion of Heliodorus
THE CREATION OF Adam was probably finished by the beginning of November 1511, by which time events outside the Sistine Chapel had once again begun menacing the project. On 5 October, the day after work resumed in the chapel, the convalescing Pope had announced the formation of the Holy League. This was an alliance by which Julius and the Venetians aimed to enlist the help of both Henry VIII of England and the Holy Roman Emperor to drive the French from Italy ‘with the mightiest armies’.1 The Pope wanted, most of all, the return of Bologna, and he aimed to reclaim it by all means possible. Besides hiring the services of 10,000 Spanish soldiers under the command of the viceroy of Naples, Ramón Cardona, he was counting on his Swiss soldiers, who had let him down so badly the year before, to march back across the Alps and attack the French at Milan. Yet again, it seemed, a long military campaign beckoned — one that, like the failed expedition of 1510—11, was guaranteed to draw the Pope’s resources and attentions away from the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel.
The Pope’s enemies were also organising themselves. At the beginning of November, the schismatic cardinals and archbishops — the vast majority of them French — finally arrived in Pisa, after a two-month delay, to begin their council. The Pope had taken action by excommunicating four of them and threatening two others with similar punishment if they persisted in their course of action, which he claimed was unlawful given the fact that only a pope could summon a council. He also placed an interdict on Florence as punishment for Piero Soderini’s having allowed this rebel council to convene in Florentine territory. Since this interdict suspended most ecclesiastical functions and privileges for the republic and its people, and since these privileges included both christenings and the sacraments of death, Julius was in effect damning to hell the souls of all Florentines who died while the interdict was in place.
As winter descended, the battle lines were drawn. The Spaniards marched north from Naples, the Swiss south through the icy passes of the Alps. Henry VIII, meanwhile, prepared his ships for an assault on the coast of Normandy. Julius had managed to persuade him to join the Holy League by sending to England a ship laden with Parmesan cheese and Greek wine, two of his own favourite comestibles. The ploy worked like a cha
rm. When the ship arrived on the Thames, Londoners swarmed to see the rare and wonderful sight of a pontifical banner fluttering on the mast, while Henry — who shared Julius’s love of food — gratefully accepted the gifts and then signed up to the Holy League before November was out.
However, for a second time the Swiss soldiers proved a disappointment. After crossing the Alps and reaching the gates of Milan, these fabled warriors in whom the Pope placed so much faith were bribed by Louis to turn round and go home to Switzerland — which they did at the end of December, making lame complaints about the bad weather and the frightful state of the Italian roads.
More ominous tidings soon reached Rome. On 30 December, in a show of defiance against the Pope, Michelangelo’s bronze statue of Julius on San Petronio was destroyed by an angry mob, supporters of the Bentivogli, who slung a rope round its neck and pulled it from its pedestal above the porch. At some 14,000 pounds, the giant statue made a deep crater in the ground and broke into a number of pieces. The bronze was given to Alfonso d’Este, who proceeded to melt the statue’s body in one of his foundries and then cast it as a massive cannon. He christened this mighty weapon ‘La Giulia’ — an insolent play on the Pope’s name.2