Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel

by Andrew Graham-Dixon

  Michelangelo draws attention to these small details but does so in a way devoid of all compassion. The objects that these people have stored against their ruin are not intended to evoke pathos; they are items of incriminatory evidence. These men and women are doomed precisely because they have taken too much pleasure in the things of this world, while paying too little heed to the state of their souls. The objects depicted are themselves pointedly symbolic. One group has loaves of bread; the other has wine. To Michelangelo’s audience, bread and wine would inevitably have evoked the Eucharist, the mystical body of Christ consumed by the faithful during communion. But the bread and wine in The Deluge are unsanctified remains of impious feasts, symbolising the sins of an irredeemable multitude.

  The painting contains numerous pointed inversions of this kind, parodies of the language of high and sacred art that serve to underline the cursed state of this antediluvian multitude. The naked young man curled against the wine keg resembles a Roman river god – in antique art, the gods of the rivers were conventionally depicted leaning on upturned, gushing water vessels. But instead of presiding over a life-giving flow of water, Michelangelo’s youth prepares to die a watery death. The reclining woman in the other group, to the far left of the composition, also resembles a Roman river deity. But she too is a symbol of death and aridity, rather than fertile life. Her breasts are empty and will bear no more milk, as the weeping infant at her shoulder makes clear.

  This pattern of inversion is carried through to several other figures to the left of the painting, which seem calculated to evoke sacred associations, only for those associations to be simultaneously denied. A young man bearing his wife on his back recalls St Christopher carrying the Christ child across the waters. A young woman, who is haloed by a wind-blown arc of plum-coloured drapery, and who holds her smiling and oblivious baby close to her, calls to mind innumerable images of the Madonna and Child. A group truncated by the edge of the frame, to the extreme left, includes another woman with a baby, next to whom patiently stands a donkey – imagery that evokes the Holy Family’s rest on the flight to Egypt. But there is to be no rest for these people, no blessing, no salvation. Michelangelo takes a particular and even cruel relish in forcing the message home, by filling his work with such echoes of other, happier themes. He imparts a brutish, crude quality to these figures, that makes them seem both primitive and irredeemably earthbound. The standing mother is confirmed as an anti-Madonna by the set, sullen, stupid expression on her face. Not one of the doomed titans looks up, or makes time to pray.

  Michelangelo was personally inclined to asceticism, to the point of flaunting his own frugality. His letters home to Florence, to the family whom he subsidised (despite their pretensions to high social rank), are peppered with self-righteous references to the poverty of his own existence. Giorgio Vasari, in his life of Michelangelo, remarks both on the simplicity of his clothes and on his reluctance to change them. ‘In his latter years he wore buskins of dogskin on the legs, next to the skin, constantly for whole months together, so that afterwards, when he came to take them off, on drawing them off the skin often came away with them. Over the stockings he wore boots of cordwain fastened on the inside, as a protection against the damp.’8

  Ascanio Condivi, in his own biography of Michelangelo – much of which was probably written under dictation from the artist himself – stresses that he often worked so hard that he went without food and sleep. Condivi also links Michelangelo’s religious thought to that of the most notoriously ascetic preacher of the late fifteenth century, Girolamo Savonarola (1452-98). In Condivi’s words, the artist ‘read the Holy Scriptures with great application and study, both the Old Testament and the New, as well as the writings of those who have studied them, such as Savonarola, for whom he has always had great affection and whose voice still lives in his memory’.9

  Michelangelo’s older brother, Leonardo, had become a member of the Dominican order and a follower of Savonarola when the artist was sixteen years old. Michelangelo clearly harboured vivid memories of the sermons with which Savonarola had electrified the population of Florence in the late 1480s and 1490s – apocalyptic prophecies of doom that had urged the people of the city into orgies of mass repentance. ‘Rethink you well, O ye rich, for affliction shall smite ye,’ Savonarola had preached, in one of his many hellfire sermons. ‘This city shall no more be Florence, but a den of thieves, of turpitude and bloodshed. Then shall ye all be poverty-stricken, all wretched, and your name, O priests, shall be changed into a terror . . . know that unheard-of times are at hand.’ Savonarola’s followers, known as the Weepers – i Piagnoni – piled their worldly possessions into ‘bonfires of the vanities’, burning books, ‘lascivious paintings’ and other such symbols of luxury and decadence. The Deluge is a picture shadowed by the apocalyptic terrors conjured up by Savonarola’s sermons. Those who have clung on to the vanities of this worldly life are receiving their punishment – not by fire but by water.

  In 1494, Savonarola had delivered the most famous of all his series of sermons, on the theme of Noah’s Ark. He had prophesied a second flood, a prediction soon fulfilled, at least in the lively metaphorical imaginings of his Florentine followers, in the form of the invading armies of France, led by King Charles VIII. The preacher had warned his listeners to pray and take refuge in Florence cathedral, which he compared to the mystical Ark of Christ’s mercy. In comparing the redemptive role of the Ark to that of Christ, Savonarola was drawing on a long tradition of Christian allegory, in which the stories of the Old Testament were recast as prophetic prefigurations of the teachings of the New. In the allegorical exegeses of the Old Testament expounded by medieval theologians, Noah had always been treated as one of the precursors of the Saviour. The waters of the flood were compared to the purifying waters of baptism, the wood of the Ark to the wood of the cross, and the door in the Ark to the wound in Christ’s side.

  Such ideas had determined the conventions for depicting the story of Noah for many centuries. For generations the Ark itself – representing, as in Savonarola’s rhetoric, the Christian Church afloat in the sea of the world – dominated most depictions of the subject of the Deluge. By contrast, Michelangelo gives it relatively scant pictorial prominence, making it little more than a background detail – although he does give it symbolic weight, by placing it directly between his two refuges of the doomed. He paints it very much as a metaphor for the Church, making it resemble a religious building more than a boat. Under siege from a desperate group of antediluvian giants equipped with a ladder, it remains impregnable, a fortress of true faith. Oblivious to the fracas taking place below him, Noah leans out of an upper window to salute the heavens.

  The building Michelangelo’s Ark most closely resembles is none other than the heavily fortified Sistine Chapel itself; and it is tempting to suppose that the artist, as he painted the great vault of the chapel, may even have felt a sense of kinship with Noah. Michelangelo too was a man far above the teeming multitude, doing his best to serve God’s obscure purpose and follow the path of righteousness. A solitary individual, he had a barely concealed contempt for the herd-like masses (such as the young women, monks, nuns and tasteless rich whom he lumped together in his diatribe on Flemish art). He may well have thought of the Sistine Chapel – the isolation chamber in which he lived, and worked, for almost four years – as his own Ark. Looked at from beneath, the wooden scaffold that he had devised for painting the ceiling – a series of arches on cantilevers wedged into holes drilled above the cornice, each one supporting a painting deck – must have somewhat resembled an upturned boat.

  The Deluge was a profoundly original painting, however, precisely because Michelangelo relegated the Ark to the background – something no artist before him had done. He had decided to tell his story principally through the depiction of a crowd of struggling humanity. A convulsive, intermittent energy courses through the whole scene. This rhythm of anguish and despair connects the outstretched arms of the woman and the bearded p
atriarch on the island to the angular boughs and branches of the blasted tree on the other side, which itself resembles a hand desperately reaching out for help. These energies reach a pitch in the flat-bottomed boat at the centre of the composition, where fighting has broken out between those already embarked, in a desperate attempt to reach the Ark, and those wanting to climb on board to save themselves. Here all the desperation of the story is distilled to a series of violent, doomed struggles taking place in a watery void.

  When Michelangelo painted this scene, he may well have had in mind Dante’s description of travelling to the cursed City of Dis, in the eighth canto of the Inferno, in which the poet finds himself on a boat that is attacked by would-be boarders from the depths of a river of the damned. Three centuries later, when the French Romantic Eugène Delacroix painted a celebrated picture inspired by that same passage from Dante, to which he gave the title The Barque of Dante, it was to the example of Michelangelo’s boatload of the doomed that he would turn for visual inspiration. Delacroix sensed intuitively the kinship that existed between Dante and Michelangelo, and recognised that it was particularly strong in The Deluge. Michelangelo admired Dante more than any other Italian writer. His vision of the flood is a Dantean vision of hell, realised in painting rather than poetry.

  ‘Is disproportion one of the conditions that compel admiration? ’ Delacroix asked this rhetorical question in his journal entry of 8 May 1853. He had Michelangelo on his mind again: ‘If Mozart, Cimarosa and Racine are less striking because of the perfect proportion in their works, do not Shakespeare, Michelangelo and Beethoven owe something of their effect to the opposite quality?’10 Once more, the French painter may have been thinking of The Deluge, a picture long regarded as a great example of Michelangelo’s sublime irregularity. It is one of the most vigorously muscular of all his compositions, but it could hardly be described as a work of perfect proportion. It is singularly lacking in pictorial grace and harmony – a discordant, fragmented creation, which is almost impossible to contemplate as a unified whole. The multitude of figures within it can easily appear, to the eye straining upward to discern the logic of their organisation, like separate groups of sculptures on display in a museum.

  The conventional explanation for this is that Michelangelo was still grappling with the challenge of painting the chapel’s immense ceiling when he planned the composition of The Deluge. According to this frequently repeated argument, he made a fatal misjudgement of scale, overloading the work with such a surfeit of figures as to make it barely legible from the floor of the chapel beneath – a mistake that he did not repeat when he painted the other narrative works, in which the figures are both fewer and more monumental in scale.

  But such a view involves a serious misreading of the coherence of the Sistine Chapel ceiling as a whole. The cycle of frescoes begins with the creation of the universe, of the world and of man within it. It hymns the immeasurable, illimitable unity of God the Creator and celebrates the moment when the spark of life is imparted to Adam, the first of men. Henceforth, its rhythms implacably express the view of human existence implicit in the story of the Fall. Unity with God becomes disunity and separation. As Man departs Eden and enters the world of history, the human race both multiplies and fragments, taking on a myriad of forms – all of which represent, from different angles, so to speak, the condition of having fallen from grace. This process reaches its climax in The Deluge. The disconnected figures thronging the picture look like leaves scattered in the wind by comparison with the more monumental figures on the ceiling, such as God the Creator or the languorous Adam. But that is no error on the part of Michelangelo. It is a device that exactly expresses the severe world view of the Old Testament.

  That severity is, however, tempered by a significant detail. Two figures are set apart from the rest in The Deluge: an aged father struggling to support the body of his dead son. These are the only figures calculated to evoke genuine sympathy, and the only ones who seem tragic rather than merely unregenerate. They are also unique in that they alone elicit a sympathetic response from those around them.

  Placed in isolation near the centre of the painting, this group may have been intended as a symbol of hope, an allusion to the future coming of Christ, and the redemption of mankind. The old man recalls Joseph or Nicodemus lowering the body of Christ from the Cross in scenes of the Deposition. The association was certainly made by the artist himself. Much later in life, Michelangelo would adapt this same group to create a number of images of Christ in the arms of Nicodemus. The most famous of these is the celebrated late sculpture of the Pietà now in Florence’s Museo del Duomo, in which he gave the anguished Nicodemus his own face as an old man (see p. 172).

  It is part of Michelangelo’s unruly greatness as an artist that the meanings of his work cannot be easily confined. It is impossible to say exactly what he intended by including that statuesque father bearing his dead son through the blasted world of The Deluge. But it is an image that complicates this otherwise ruthlessly ascetic, apocalyptic vision of sinful humanity punished by the God of Genesis. It does so by introducing into it a pathos and ambiguity that amount, themselves, to a lament on behalf of suffering humanity. Life is pain and life is mystery. Faith may be the only path but it is not an easy one. The sons of Adam must suffer the inscrutability of their God, like powerless children.

  The Deluge is flanked by two other paintings representing scenes from the biblical story of Noah. The first of these, which can be identified as The Sacrifice of Noah, appears to be the only one of the Sistine ceiling’s narrative pictures to have been placed out of chronological sequence. It precedes The Deluge, although logic dictates that it should come afterwards, given that its subject is Noah’s sacrifice to God for having spared him and his family from the Flood. The subject is described in Genesis 8: 20-1: ‘And Noah builded an altar unto the Lord; and took of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt offerings on the altar. And the Lord smelled a sweet savour; and the Lord said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more everything living, as I have done.’

  Michelangelo’s decision to place this scene first has been the cause of some confusion. The artist’s early biographers, Giorgio Vasari and Ascanio Condivi, assumed that the picture did not illustrate the life of Noah at all, but must represent the sacrifice of Cain and Abel. Their explanation, which has been followed by some modern scholars, has the virtue of restoring chronological integrity to Michelangelo’s fresco cycle (since Cain and Abel’s sacrifice occurs well before the Flood in the Book of Genesis). But it is contradicted by the visual evidence of the fresco itself. There are no obvious candidates for the figures of Cain and Abel, while Abel’s offering, ‘the fruit of the ground’ (Genesis 4: 3), is nowhere to be seen. The congested queue of animals awaiting sacrifice, which include an elephant, is surely intended to suggest the multitude of living creatures disgorged from the Ark.

  Comparison with the other frescoes definitively confirms the subject as The Sacrifice of Noah. The patriarch may only appear as a diminutive figure in The Deluge, but his principal attributes are unmistakable. He wears red, and he has a long white beard. So too does the figure at the centre of Michelangelo’s scene of sacrifice. The altar over which he presides stands next to a structure resembling part of the Ark in The Deluge. There is further supporting evidence, if any were needed, in the distinct similarity between Noah’s three sons in the nearby Drunkenness of Noah and three of the youths assisting at the rite in The Sacrifice – the boy bearing logs for the fire, the boy kneeling astride the dead ram, and the boy peering into the altar flames. They are the same figures in different poses.

  So the chronological conundrum remains, but Michelangelo’s apparently puzzling decision to place the scene out of sequence is most plausibly explained as a victory for expressive power over strict narrative coherence. The Deluge, a subject that invo
lved multitudes fleeing a rising flood, clearly called out for the largest of the three fields dictated by the structure of the ceiling’s design. The artist must have been reluctant to relegate it to the first of his two smaller panels, so, instead, he placed The Sacrifice there.

  Michelangelo was the first artist of the Italian Renaissance to create an image of The Sacrifice of Noah that evokes the pagan sacrifices depicted on sarcophagi and other works of antique art. His predecessors, such as Jacopo della Quercia, who had depicted the life of Noah in his bas-reliefs on the doors of San Petronio in Bologna, represented the episode as a comparatively inert act of devotion, showing the patriarch and his family joined in prayer around a simple altar – a far cry from Michelangelo’s dynamic frieze of turning, twisting figures.

  In deciding to treat the subject in this way, Michelangelo was looking back in time, past the early Renaissance and the Middle Ages to the distant traditions of Greece and Rome. The artists of antiquity had dwelt in much detail on the material preparations for acts of sacrifice to their many gods – the preparation of offerings, the lighting of fires – and Michelangelo drew direct inspiration from such classical sources in planning his own composition. Noah’s daughter-in-law, who shields her face from the heat as she places a brand of wood in the sacrificial fire, is directly derived from a figure representing Althea in a frieze on a Roman sarcophagus. The youth seen from behind, crouching to peer into the flames, may have been based in part on a similar figure on a sarcophagus in the museum of antiquities at Naples. He bears an even closer resemblance to the lower, struggling figure in one of the most celebrated surviving classical statues, the pair of marble wrestlers preserved in the Uffizi Galleries at Florence. Since this work was only excavated in 1583, Michelangelo cannot have known it directly. But it seems probable that he was familiar with a similar sculpture, subsequently lost to the ravages of time.