Within the scheme of the ceiling as a whole, the ancestors represent a phase of human history and an aspect of the human condition decreed by divine plan. They may carry within them the physical seed of Christ but they are themselves spiritually unenlightened. They live in a time of waiting and receive no word from God, no sign or revelation. Condemned to a vacuity symbolised by the bare and shallow spaces they occupy, they are kept company only by each other, and by their shadows, cast prominently on the blank walls behind them. They are like the inhabitants of Plato’s cave, who see only the dancing shadows of truth but are blind to truth itself.
Michelangelo includes more images of Christ’s ancestors in the eight spandrels above the lunettes on the chapel’s north and south walls. Here once more they are shown in small family groups, sitting or lying on bare ground. The compositions of these scenes strongly recall traditional representations of the Holy Family on the Flight to Egypt. Like Mary and Joseph fleeing with their child, the ancestors in the spandrels are people on the run. Many of them look exhausted and several have fallen into a deep sleep. They are shown not in rooms, like their cousins in the lunettes, but outdoors, sometimes against dark backgrounds that suggest the night sky. Some of them recline on bags or sacks, which reinforces the impression that they are refugees or fugitives. They call to mind the archetypal image of the wandering Jew, as well as embodying the biblical idea that life on earth is merely transient, an act of passing through – a journey through ‘the land of the shadow of death’ (Isaiah 9: 2). They are the ‘strangers and pilgrims on the earth’ (Hebrews 11: 13). They also evoke the words of David’s blessing of the Lord (I Chronicles 29: 15): ‘For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers; our days on the earth are as a shadow.’
VII
The Prophets and Sibyls
One level above the ancestors in the lunettes, and next to the ancestors in the spandrels, sit the Hebrew prophets and the sibyls of pagan antiquity. These are the largest figures on the Sistine ceiling. They were always intended to be imposing but the artist made them progressively bigger as he worked his way along the chapel. The earliest to be painted are about thirteen feet tall, the last just a few inches short of fifteen feet – well over twice the height of the average man in Rome today, and nearly three times the height of men in the time of Michelangelo. Their height is equalled by their bulk, which is further emphasised by the sculptural folds and flashing chromatic brilliance of the robes that drape them – salmon-pink, lemon-yellow, moss-green, sky-blue.
Each of the figures is a monument. Their stony draperies surge about them in frozen billows, so that they resemble a group of brightly painted monumental statues. But they also have the Pygmalion quality, of statues come to life. Their gestures and expressions are charged with emotion. They emanate a powerful psychological complexity. The curvature of the ceiling imparts a teetering quality to the perspective of the scenes at this level, so the prophets and sibyls loom over the chapel floor, seeming to project forwards precipitously from the wall. As a result, they feel closer to the real world – in both body and mind – than any of the other figures on the ceiling.
Human conduits of divine intention, the bearers of prophecy and vision, they are mediators between God and the world of man. Whereas the ancestors of Christ carry his seed, unknowingly, from generation to generation, the prophets of the Old Testament actively foretell Christ’s advent. They are lightning conductors for the flash of divine revelation.
The prophets are accompanied by the sibyls, female seers of ancient times whose visions and oracular sayings were also held to have prophesied the coming of Christ. The utterances of the sibyls had first been collected by the Roman Christian author Lactantius in the early fourth century AD. The sibyls themselves had been represented in the art of the Middle Ages and the earlier Renaissance but had never loomed as large as they do in the vault of the Sistine Chapel, where they are given equal status with the prophets. Michelangelo’s innovation reflects the shifting theology of his times. In fifteenth-century Italy, humanist scholars had pioneered a revival of interest in the writings of the classical and early Christian periods, as a result of which the sibyls had become the focus of renewed attention. The culmination of this process was the publication of a treatise on I Vaticini delle Sibille – the oracles of the sibyls – by the Dominican friar Filippo Barbieri, in 1481. The attributes which Michelangelo gave to some of the five sibyls whom he chose to represent suggest that he, or somebody advising him, was familiar with this book.18
Michelangelo painted the Cumaean, Delphic, Erythraean, Persian and Libyan sibyls. Why he chose these five, from a possible ten, is not known for certain. The Cumaean Sibyl appears in Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, where she prophesies a golden age to come. This was interpreted by Christians as a veiled prophecy of the coming of Christ, given to the pagans of Greco-Roman antiquity. The Delphic, Erythraean, Persian and Libyan Sibyls – who hailed from Greece, Ionia, Asia and Africa – may have been selected to indicate the broad geographical reach of Christian prophecy within the pagan world.
To Michelangelo’s more learned contemporaries, they might have contained a message for the present too, symbolising the evangelical duty of the modern Church. The Sistine Chapel ceiling was painted at the dawn of the great age of exploration, the age of Columbus and Vasco da Gama. The scope of the known world was rapidly expanding. The discovery of new continents and new races of people gave rise to the hope that Christianity would now fulfil its destiny to reach to ‘the ends of the earth’ (Psalms 18: 5). The sibyls had spread the message of Christ to the peoples of the whole world in times long past. As it was once, so must it continue to be. The presence of these figures on the ceiling anticipates the zeal that would soon dispatch Christian missionaries to the Americas, to the Pacific islands, to all corners of the world.
The act of putting the sibyls at the heart of the Vatican – a word etymologically derived from vaticino, meaning prophecy or oracle – was also a statement of Messianic belief. A golden age, such as that described in the visions of the Cumaean Sibyl, was also foretold by the apocalyptic preachers of early sixteenth-century Christianity – and explicitly associated by Giles of Viterbo, among other preachers close to the papacy, with the reign of the warlike Julius II. The idea of a Julian ‘golden age’, symbolised already on the Sistine ceiling by the figures of the ignudi, is given another dimension by the presence of the sibyls. In the eschatological thinking of the time, a renewal of Christian mission was to be the prelude to the last days, the Final Conflict between Christ and Anti-Christ that would herald the end of the world. So the sibyls stand not only for the universalism of the Church but for the imminence of the end of time.
This pattern of meaning is forcefully implied in the figure of The Libyan Sibyl, who has been placed at the end of the line of prophets and sibyls on the south wall of the chapel, directly above the altar. She is lit from below, which may have been Michelangelo’s way of suggesting the light of God mystically emanating from the altar itself. In Barbieri’s treatise of 1481, the Libyan Sibyl’s prophecies of Christian illumination were given particular emphasis: ‘Behold the day shall come, and the Lord shall lighten the thick darkness.’ She twists away from the book that she holds in her two hands – a graceful gesture imbued with a sense of finality. She is closing the prophetic text, having seen the future. As she turns, she looks to her left, as if to contemplate the writhing figures, harbingers of the Last Judgement, wrapped in the coils of serpents in the spandrel of The Brazen Serpent. Fate and destiny have almost run their course. Judgement is nigh.
The Persian Sibyl is another figure with apocalyptic associations. In Christian theology she was held to have prophesied the beasts of the Apocalypse, heralds of the Last Judgement. Michelangelo depicted her as an old woman, poring myopically over the pages of a book that she holds so close it is almost pressed up to her face. She is shown in what is known as ‘profil perdu’, turned away from the viewer to the point where her pro
file is so oblique it is almost lost. Her mouth is slightly open, as if she is muttering to herself the words of a prophecy she does not yet fully understand.
By contrast, The Erythraean Sibyl is younger and more composed. She sits relaxed, her right arm by her side while with her left she turns the pages of a book. She is accompanied by two genii, who resemble children or putti but are metaphorically the spirits of her inspiration. One, half asleep, drowsily rubs his eyes, while the other lights a lamp, signifying the flame of divine revelation – and perhaps indicating that moments of insight are apt to occur late at night, when the midnight oil is being burned.
The Delphic Sibyl is a figure of Grecian elegance, who turns away from the scroll she has been contemplating to gaze wide-eyed into the distance. The artist may have intended to suggest the moment just before revelation occurs. Her attention has been caught, she is aware that something is about to be disclosed to her, but she does not yet know exactly what it is.
The most sharply individuated of all the female seers is The Cumaean Sibyl. She is a wizened, doughty old woman, who sits hunched in concentration over a weighty tome. She is ancient in accordance with her legend, which tells that she was loved, in her youth, by the sun god Apollo. Apollo had promised her as many years of life as the grains of sand she could hold in her fist, but when she refused his advances he doomed her to age and infirmity. Her face is as leathery as parchment, her immense, sinewy arms burned by the sun. She frowns, clutching her book so earnestly that she might be trying to squeeze the meanings out of it.
The figures of the prophets are as carefully varied as those of the sibyls. Jeremiah, who sits opposite The Libyan Sibyl, is every inch the author of the Book of Lamentations, mourning the sins of the Jews and the captivity of Palestine. A brooding figure with a long and unkempt white beard, he is turned in upon himself in an attitude of unshakeable melancholy. Like some mythological giant on whom a spell has been cast, he looks as though he has been turned to ice or stone by the profundity of his own sorrowful thoughts. The long white strands of his beard resemble icicles, or stalactites. He rests the weight of his head on his great right hand – a pose that would be borrowed, centuries later, by Auguste Rodin for his celebrated sculpture The Thinker.
All of Michelangelo’s prophets are thinkers, although Jeremiah is unusual in having been characterised precisely as he appears in the Old Testament. Of the others, the same can only be said of Jonah. As a group they seem to have been designed as generic embodiments of the gifts and burdens of prophetic thought. Their role has sometimes been compared to that of the chorus in Greek drama but they are too introverted for that. They do not comment on the story of God’s plan for mankind but struggle, within themselves, to understand it.
Collectively, they dramatise an inner turbulence, a form of mental experience so extreme that it is transmitted through every nuance of gesture and expression. Isaiah is caught at a moment of reverie, while the bookish Zechariah has the air of an ancient librarian, lost in concentration. Daniel is depicted in the wrenching throes of intellectual struggle. As he reads from one great book, held up for him by one of his attendant genii, he writes furiously in another. The wild tresses of his blond hair, mysteriously wind-blown even in the solitude of his private study, crackle with the electrical energy of his thoughts. Joel appears puzzled by the text that he studies, holding it up close as though he is not just reading, but rereading, its difficult words. For his part, Ezekiel almost drops his scroll in distraction. One of the two genii accompanying him has called his attention to something unseen, something outside the painting. He starts in surprise, wheeling through space to gaze out at whatever his vision might be.
Attempts have been made to allegorise each of the prophets and sibyls as the embodiment of a sacred gift, such as Wisdom or Understanding. But each one seems too complex, too divided, to be so simplified. The sense that these figures stand for the conflicts of prophetic thought, rather than particular prophetic gifts or qualities, is enhanced by the genii who accompany them. These occasionally mischievous, entertaining little figures are external representations of the prophets’ ideas and inspirations. They are busy, not still, and each prophet is attended by more than one of them, which itself suggests the way in which their minds are teeming.
The prophets cannot be described as masters of their own thoughts. The revelations that come to them are mystic gifts that arrive from outside, often unbidden. They are sent from heaven, by the grace of God. It is the role of the pre-Christian seers and visionaries to understand those ideas, to grasp their significance and to transmit them to the rest of mankind. But the prophets and sibyls are granted only partial revelations, glimpses and fragments that foreshadow the coming of Christ and the illumination of his teachings. They gain access to divine truth but the processes by which they do so are obstructed and mysterious – as mysterious as the ways of God to man. What they see, they see as through a glass, darkly.
The School of Athens by Raphael
An instructive contrast to the figures of the prophets and sibyls is to be found in the most celebrated work of Michelangelo’s younger rival, Raphael: The School of Athens, of 1510-11 (above), exactly contemporary with the creation of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Painted for the Stanza della Segnatura, in Pope Julius II’s private apartments within the Vatican, the fresco shows an idealised representation of the progress of human knowledge. In a large and airy classical basilica, the wise men of all times are gathered. At the centre of the group, Plato points upwards to indicate the realm of Ideas, while beside him Aristotle points to the ground, to indicate his contrasting belief in the empirical basis of true knowledge. Wisdom emanates from these two figures to the crowd surrounding them on both sides, spreading in a ripple effect among the learned of all times. Man’s intellectual progress is symbolised as a dynamic continuum, an extended conversation taking place across the millennia.
Only one figure seems excluded from this sociable parable of human advancement. He sits in isolated introspection, head propped on one hand, lost in his own thoughts. He is the classical philosopher Heraclitus (below). As legend would have it, he is also Raphael’s portrait of the solitary and introspective Michel-angelo. The identification is by no means certain, although the broad face does seem close to that revealed in Michelangelo’s own self-portraits, with its distinctive flattened nose (the result of a fight in his youth with the sculptor Pietro Torrigiano, who punched him in the nose so hard that, in Torrigiano’s own words, he felt the bone crunch ‘like a biscuit’). The lonely Heraclitus is also the one figure in The School of Athens to have been painted in apparent imitation of Michelangelo’s own style. He is more monumental than the other figures, and considerably more melancholic. His pose closely resembles that of Jeremiah and he might almost be one of the Sistine ceiling’s prophets displaced to an alien setting. His jarring presence, in a painting to which he does not seem to belong, may well have been Raphael’s sardonic commentary on Michelangelo’s dour sensibility. The contrast between the two painters, one sociable and courtly, the other very much the loner, is reflected in the story that tells of their meeting one day in the Piazza San Pietro outside the Vatican. Raphael, as usual, was surrounded by a large entourage of pupils, admirers and hangers-on; Michelangelo, as usual, was on his own. ‘You with your band, like a bravo,’ he wryly remarked; to which Raphael shot back, ‘And you alone, like the hangman.’19
Detail from Raphael’s School of Athens showing Heraclitus
Knowledge does not come to the seers on the Sistine vault as it comes to the crowd of easily conversing intellectuals in The School of Athens. Divine inspiration is nothing like the advance of secular wisdom. It comes effortfully, unpredictably – not in fluid ripples, but in spasms of revelation decreed by the mystery of divine will.
The most vividly troubled of Michelangelo’s prophets is Jonah. Placed directly above the altar, he brings the progression of male and female seers to an uneasy climax. Condivi, who was perhaps reflecting Michelangelo�
��s own sense of the importance of this figure within the overall scheme of the ceiling, described it in terms of breathless admiration: ‘most remarkable of all is the prophet Jonah, situated at the head of the vault, because, contrary to the curve of the vault and by means of the play of light and shadow, the torso which is foreshortened backward is in the part nearest the eye, and the legs which project forward are in the part which is farthest. A stupendous work, and one which proclaims the magnitude of this man’s knowledge, in his handling of lines, in foreshortening, and in perspective.’20
Condivi was struck by the skill with which Michelangelo had handled such a difficult composition. But Jonah is also a masterpiece of characterisation. It is Michelangelo’s heartfelt depiction of the prophet to whom he himself, perhaps, felt closest.
To appreciate the subtleties of the painting, it is necessary to consider the Old Testament text that inspired it. The tale is told in the four laconic chapters of the Book of Jonah. It is a parable of divine mercy and justice, in which God’s goodness is thrown all the more sharply into relief by the failings of the man chosen to execute his purposes. The biblical Jonah is as Michelangelo shows him: unruly, disobedient and perpetually baffled by God’s intentions.
Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel Page 14