Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel

by Andrew Graham-Dixon

  I’m not in a good place, and I’m no painter.48

  The rest of this book is about the paintings created by the man who thought he was no painter.

  PART TWO

  The Sistine Chapel Ceiling

  The nine narrative paintings that run the length of the ceiling, from above the altar to above the main entrance of the chapel, tell stories drawn from the Book of Genesis. Their subjects are all-encompassing: the origin of the universe; the origin of Man; the origin of evil and the nature of life, as it must be lived, in the world after the Fall. They are arranged by Michelangelo into three triads, or groups of three. The first triad shows God creating the universe and the world. The second shows the creation of Adam and Eve, their falling into temptation in the garden of Eden, and their expulsion from paradise. The third tells the story of Noah, recounting the dark story of the deluge and giving an equally dark account of the beginnings of human history. Between them, these works go to the heart of Michelangelo’s intensely powerful, idiosyncratic spirituality and reveal the full extent of his genius as a painter.

  The nine narrative paintings are like nine vertebrae forming a single spine. But Michelangelo’s fresco cycle does not only tell stories from Genesis. It also shows images of the prophets, the sibyls and the Saviour’s ancestors. Taken in its entirety, it amounts to a synthesis of all biblical history before the advent of Christ.

  It is an obvious fact, but one worth re-emphasising, that Michelangelo’s paintings frame this great span of pre-Christian history from a Christian perspective. The assertion of Christ’s central salvific role in God’s plan for erring humanity is explicit in the very nature of the Sistine Chapel as a grand arena for ceremonial papal masses — a place where the pope himself, and his cardinals, mystically partake of the flesh and blood of the Saviour. Christ is directly represented only once in the paintings of the ceiling, as an infant pre-existing in the mind of God, among the group clustered together within God’s mantle in The Creation of Adam. But Christ’s life and death are prefigured throughout Michelangelo’s nine Genesis narratives. Several of the scenes have been carefully designed to allude to Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross, the wounding of his flesh and the spilling of his blood. It is a general truth about Michelangelo’s painting that the forms and figures within it are constantly shadowed by their own potential for metamorphosis, so that stories that seem to be about one thing may also be about another.

  Such prefigurings of Christ take many forms on the ceiling, some of which would have been obvious to Michelangelo’s contemporaries. It was a commonplace of medieval and Renaissance theology, for example, to refer to Christ as ‘a second Adam’ — expressing the symmetry by which God’s incarnation as a mortal man, in the person of Jesus Christ, held out the possibility of mankind’s ultimate salvation from the consequences of Adam’s original sin. So it is that the sleeping figure of Adam, in Michelangelo’s depiction of The Creation of Eve, anticipates the crumpled figure of the dead Christ awaiting entombment; and so it is that the cruciform shape made by the Tree of Knowledge and the arm of the avenging angel, in The Temptation and Expulsion, prefigures that of the Cross on which Christ would be crucified.

  By finding such foreshadowings of the New Testament in the stories of the Old Testament, Michelangelo and those who may have helped him in the design of his fresco cycle were doing something that Christians had done since the dawn of their faith. In the first century of the Christian era, as a result of Paul’s mission to the Gentiles, Paul and the early Church fathers had reinterpreted the entire Jewish tradition in the light of their own beliefs. It was their contention that all of the scattered stories of the Hebraic biblical tradition might be drawn together within a single concept of universal history. The heroes of the Old Testament were recast as a succession of figures whose actions and legends prognosticated the appearance of Christ. The words of the texts telling their stories were interrogated by generation on generation of patristic commentators for any sign that might be read as a concealed, secret portent of the coming of Christ.

  The credo that underpinned this ancient tradition of interpretation is summed up by the words of an inscription placed by a master theologian of the French Middle Ages, Abbot Denis Suger, on the Concordance Window of the abbey of Saint Denis: ‘Quod Moses velat Christi doctrina revelat’, ‘What Moses veils, the doctrine of Christ reveals’. In other words, the Old Testament contains the truth as revealed to Moses and the prophets, but partially hidden, as by a veil. Only through the revelation of Christ’s words and deeds can the full truth of God’s plan for mankind begin to be grasped.

  Even before Michelangelo ever worked there, this same structure of belief was written into the Sistine Chapel, just as it had been into the window of Suger’s Norman abbey. The series of frescoes at ground level, painted in the late fifteenth century by a number of masters including Botticelli and Perugino, compare and contrast the life of Moses with that of Christ. The message is the same: Quod Moses velat Christi doctrina revelat.1

  The notion of a mystical concordance between the Old and the New Testaments, so strongly emphasised by the earlier paintings in the Sistine Chapel, is also integral to Michelangelo’s fresco cycle. This is made clear by the presence of the prophets and the sibyls, those individuals from Judaic and pagan history who were held to have foretold the birth of Christ. These figures all appear in the lower register of his design for the ceiling, with the nine Old Testament narratives seeming to float above them. Both literally and figuratively, the painter’s telling of the Genesis stories is sustained by belief in a vision of universal history that has, at its centre and as its climax, the redemptive sacrifice of Christ.

  It is important to understand and to respect the Christian beliefs and traditions which Michelangelo strove to express for three long years of his life. But it is equally important to remember that the Sistine Chapel ceiling is a great work of art precisely because it does much more than give visible form to a particular set of religious orthodoxies. The pictures of the ceiling stunned and impressed the artist’s contemporaries not only because they were so accomplished but also because they were so deeply unorthodox and original.

  In almost every one of the Sistine ceiling’s many compositions, Michelangelo departed from tried and trusted pictorial convention. He told the stories in his own way and embodied them in his own particular language, a form of painting in which representation has been pared down to almost nothing but the figure, nude or clothed (but most frequently nude). He used the human form, in action and reaction, to express a vast range of feelings and ideas and spiritual aspirations. Many of those feelings and ideas can be explained, to a certain extent, by reference to Christian theology. But throughout the ceiling’s rich weave of imagery there are subtleties of allusion, visual echoes and rhymes, suggestions and half-suggestions that go beyond the straightforward expression of Christian doctrine.

  I

  The Genesis Cycle, first triad: The Separation of Light and Darkness; The Creation of the Sun, Moon and Plants; The Creation of Life in the Waters

  Michelangelo begins at the beginning, with a depiction of The Separation of Light and Darkness. He shows the Almighty God of the Old Testament as a heroic male figure with grey beard and hair, dressed in lilac robes that swirl about him, twisting upwards through the heavens to separate light from darkness. He embodies male strength but also the fecundity of the female principle, in that Michelangelo has given him pectoral muscles nearly as rounded as a woman’s breasts. The figure rises into space amid rays of light. The picture is at once the sparest and the most austere of the ceiling’s scenes of Creation.

  The subject is drawn from the Book of Genesis:

  In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the da
rkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. (Genesis 1: 1-5)

  There was no precedent in earlier Christian art for Michelangelo’s dynamic airborne deity swooping through an implied infinity of space. The artists of the Byzantine and medieval traditions had expressed their own sense of the ineffable mystery of God the Creator by removing the scenes so elliptically described at the start of Genesis to a pictorial world of abstract geometrical perfection. The Italo-Byzantine craftsmen who had created the thirteenth-century mosaics of the dome of the Baptistry in Florence — a famous and much venerated building at the heart of the town where Michelangelo spent his formative years — had represented the God of the Creation scenes as a solemn, hieratic figure floating on a ground of gold, enclosed by the celestial spheres, making a stiff gesture of benediction. The artists of the early Renaissance had humanised God the Father, to the extent that he could appear in Masaccio’s celebrated fresco of The Trinity, of the 1420s, in the Florentine church of Santa Maria Novella, as a doughty ancient with a forbiddingly solemn expression on his face. But Michelangelo energised this still recently anthropomorphised figure in a way that was both new and revolutionary.

  His reinvention of the all-creating deity as a figure flying through space under the unseen impulse of divine will, was to prove enormously influential. Artists of the High Renaissance such as Raphael, followed by the painters of the Baroque and Rococo periods, would follow Michelangelo in embodying God as a being with human form endowed with a superhuman, cosmic thrust and energy. Romantic painters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would impart something of his twisting, irrepressible force to the Promethean heroes of their own disenchanted mythologies. Michelangelo’s influence can even be discerned in the popular art of the twentieth century. Inventors of the American superhero comic-strip adapted his style to their own ends. The character of Superman has his origins, as a graphic creation, in the airborne God who flies majestically across the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

  Although The Separation of Light and Darkness is the first of the nine narrative scenes from the Book of Genesis, Michelangelo painted it last of all, along with the other two scenes of primal creation. Having gradually worked his way along the ceiling, starting at the chapel’s entrance with the painted histories of fallen humanity, he finished above the altar with images of the all-powerful God. So while the momentum of his narrative moves, as in the Old Testament, from the acts of God to the life of man, Michelangelo actually painted that narrative in reverse order. There could have been purely practical reasons for this, but the artist’s piety may also have played a part. Michelangelo must have known that, as he proceeded with the project, he would become more technically accomplished in the medium of fresco. Perhaps he wanted to be at his best when painting the scenes that involved God alone.

  To create the image of the deity reaching up to separate light from darkness, night from day, Michelangelo used the difficult technique known as sotto in sù. The figure is seen, from beneath, as though soaring up and away from the viewer. Practical methods had been devised by earlier generations of artists for accomplishing this particular type of illusion. The architect and theorist Leon Battista Alberti, in his treatise on painting of the 1430s, had described a perspective ‘veil’ — a grid of threads strung on a wooden frame, through which a painter might study a subject seen at an extreme angle of foreshortening, transcribing each element of what he saw on to the corresponding sections of a squared-up piece of paper. If Michelangelo used a device of that kind, he did not do so slavishly. Such was his self-assurance that he departed in many details from the carefully calculated sketch for this scene produced in his workshop, to help him realise this difficult perspectival illusion. The outlines of that sketch were incised into the wet plaster before Michelangelo began work, so the evidence still survives of just how freely he improvised from it. Minute study of the picture’s surface during conservation has revealed that the artist changed the angle and position of both of God’s hands and arms, and even shifted the entire figure so as to set it more firmly on a diagonal — increasing its torsion and intensifying the sense of God’s upwardly spiralling energy.

  The difficulty of making off-the-cuff changes to such a challenging composition should not be underestimated. It is a tribute to Michelangelo’s exceptional ability to think threedimensionally, even when working in two dimensions, that he managed to carry it off. It is as if, in painting The Separation of Light and Darkness, he conceived the rectangular panel to be painted not as a flat surface but as a block of stone extending upwards through the vault of the ceiling. Into that block, he imagined himself carving the figure of God, painting a form he could almost feel with his hands.

  God’s act of creation is simultaneously an act of division. He reaches into the air as though separating bright swirls of lightly tinted steam from a mass of heavy grey stormclouds. Michelangelo, as well as the more theologically learned among his audience, may have associated the separation of light from darkness with ideas about the Creation expressed by the venerable Saint Augustine (354-430). In The City of God, the influence of which had been all-pervasive in medieval Christendom, Augustine had compared God’s separation of day from night to his division of the angels into two communities, the good and the bad. A number of traditions told of the rebel angels rising against God, under the leadership of Lucifer, and being cast down into darkness by the host of good angels, led by the Archangel Michael. Augustine explicitly identified the good angels with heaven and the light that God called ‘Day’ in Genesis 1: 1 and 1: 3-5. The all-creating God is also God the judge. Just as, in the beginning, he divided dark from light, good from evil, so on the last day will he divide mankind into the saved and the damned.

  There are numerous stories of Julius’s growing impatience with the length of time it took to finish the ceiling. On one occasion, he is even said to have struck Michelangelo in a fit of frustrated rage.2 The pope’s importunity may explain the great speed with which the artist finished the scenes of the Creation. Not only were they among the last to be completed, they were by some distance the most rapidly painted. Analysis of its surface has revealed that The Separation of Light and Darkness was painted in a single giornata — just one working day of about eight hours, a period determined by the rapid drying-time of the wet plaster into which the painter of true fresco is obliged to work his images. The artist worked quickly and instinctively, using particularly dilute pigment so that in places the figure of God seems as though dissolving into — or condensing out of — the circumambient air.

  As a measure of the painter’s acceleration, the time taken three years earlier to paint The Deluge, at the other end of the chapel, had been no fewer than twenty-nine separate giornate. Admittedly, the subjects are hardly comparable, in that The Deluge occupies a larger area of ceiling and contains many different figures, all of whom had to be depicted in some detail for the story to make its impact. The broad, summary style in which Michelangelo painted the soaring figure of God was well adapted to the contrasting grandeur of the opening of Genesis — a metaphor, itself, for the sweeping, flowing, creative powers of divinity.

  Michelangelo also worked with great rapidity on the second of the three scenes of primal Creation. This was a larger and more complicated composition than The Separation of Light and Darkness, but one that still took him only seven giornate to complete. Its subject is The Creation of the Sun, Moon and Plants. This time the figure of God appears twice, to indicate that two different moments in the narrative have been telescoped together.

  To the right, frowning with concentration, he divides the heavens with a sweeping gesture of his arms, creating both sun and moon. The wingless angels in his broad cape express a mixture of admiration and awe, bordering on terror. This part of the composition is drawn from Genesis 1: 14-18: ‘And God said let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night . . . And God made two great lights; th
e greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night...’

  To the left he is seen from behind. Here, the contours and delicate colouring of God’s lilac robe give it the look of a conch shell flying unexpectedly through the sky. He is shown in the act of bringing forth vegetation from the hitherto barren earth, in the form of a few wisps of grass and fronds of fern, silhouetted against the white air. Michelangelo’s source here was Genesis 1: 11: ‘And God said let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself...’

  There is a pointed lack of emphasis on the actual creation of the earth, a part of the story that the artist has not quite left out but has certainly abbreviated to a bare minimum. It is implied, so to speak, as something that must necessarily have happened, in the gesture with which the receding figure of God calls forth the grasses and other plants. But even that gesture is given relatively little prominence, enacted as it is by a Creator whose mighty back — and even mightier posterior — is turned to the spectator. Far greater prominence is given to the formation of the sun and moon. Both were drawn with the aid of a compass — the imprint made by its point is still minutely visible in the centre of each sphere — and coloured in flat thin layers of golden yellow and silvery grey. Michelangelo has contrived matters so that his entire composition revolves around sun and moon and the divine gesture that links them.

  According to an ancient tradition going back at least as far as to the writings of the fourth-century St Ambrose, the sun was held to be a mystic symbol of Christ, while the moon, reflecting back the sun’s radiance, was equated with the Virgin Mary, mother of Christ and embodiment of the Church. In creating the sun and moon, therefore, God was also pre-ordaining Christ’s Incarnation and the institution of the Church. His outflung arms are a visual anticipation of Christ’s arms, stretched upon the Cross. The expression of solemnity on his face suggests that even at this moment, so close to the beginning of time, he is gazing ahead and seeing, in his mind’s eye, the betrayal and death of his son.