Abstract
The painting of the Sistine Chapel ceiling in Rome by Michelangelo, which was completed exactly five hundred years ago in the autumn of 1512, had two unforseen consequences. The first consequence was that Michelangelo gave up painting for twenty years (only taking up the brush again to paint the Last Judgement on the East wall of the chapel). The second consequence was the Reformation.
I do not, of course, mean to suggest that Michelangelo Buonarroti’s frescoes led Luther to nail his ninety-five theses to the cathedral door at Wittenberg five years after the last brush stroke had dried; Luther certainly never saw them, and was probably ignorant of their existence. But the cost of rebuilding St Peter’s, of which Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling was an important part, brought about a financial crisis for the Papal States comparable to that of Greece today. The books were balanced by selling indulgences, a project led by the colourful preaching of the Dominican Tetzel: ‘As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, / The soul from purgatory springs’. He travelled the length and breadth of the German states, with the burden falling unduly on the peasantry, until Luther could stand it no longer. I exaggerate for effect – humanism, the printing press, church–state tensions etc., all played a part; but the extravagance of Rome’s renovation makes the 2012 Olympic park look like a few big sheds built on the cheap.
The commission was undertaken reluctantly. Beneath his signature on the contract Michelangelo writes ‘Sculptor’ to make plain where his real vocation lay – but ‘Il Papa Guerriero’, Pope Julius II, wasn’t a man you said no to. The work was physically tough. Michelangelo wrote a comic poem describing the effects:
My beard towards Heaven, I feel the back of my brain Upon my neck, I grow the breast of a Harpy; My brush, above my face continually, Makes it a splendid floor by dripping down.
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But the results are astonishing artistically – and theologically – and there is evidence that Michelangelo was more than basically literate in sacra doctrina. The central panels of the ceiling picture a sequence of nine events taken from the book of Genesis, beginning with the separation of light and darkness, moving through the creation of the Universe and on to the creation of, first, Adam and then of Eve. Next, Michelangelo turns to the story of the fall and its consequences, including the expulsion of Eve and Adam from Paradise. The final three central panels show the story of the flood, the covenant agreed between humankind and God by Noah after the flood abated, and ending with Noah’s drunkenness and nakedness, shamefully seen by his sons.
The decision to extend the panels beyond the end of the creation narratives and even beyond the Noachic covenant to Noah’s disgrace was theologically intentional. The sequence makes clear that Noah’s ‘fall’ continues the pattern of sin established by Adam, a pattern that will go on repeating in human history, unless and until the coming of the Christ. To emphasize the point made in the central panels, the side panels contain three kinds of people: biblical prophets who foretell Jesus’ coming; classical seers who also (albeit in Pagan form) foretell the fulfilment of hope for salvation; and Jesus’ ancestors, who carry hope for him, as it were, in their loins.
The most memorable of all the panels, though, is surely the fourth, that of the creation of Adam. Instantly recognizable, as much from parodies of it as in earnest copies, we see God, grey-bearded but fizzing with creative energy, hanging in the clouds, suspended in his own cloak. In the folds of his cloak are several faces: angelic beings, certainly, some of them; but also two lovely female faces; one, surely, the figure of ‘Wisdom’, another sharing the features Eve will have in the following panel along, suggesting that the creation of Eve is always part of the divine plan. God’s hand stretches out to meet the slumbering naked form of Adam reclining, as the biblical etymology of his name would suggest, on the earth. The fingers of God and Man ‘alter ad alteram’, maker and made, clothed and naked, almost touch in the moment of the giving of life. A few decades later, as artistic tastes changed in response to the Tridentine call for greater piety to combat the growth of Protestantism, many of Michelangelo’s nude figures in the Sistine chapel had braghettoni, folds of cloth, added to cover their ‘private parts’. But no such modesty was imposed on Adam who came into the world naked and must leave it naked as he came, as Ecclesiastes tells us we all must.
A poem (in Latin) by Giuliano Sacco about Michelangelo links the artist to this panel and is a fitting memorial to the painting’s Cinquecentennial:
This is the will of God And that is the destiny of man, This is what, to mankind, I want to signify Through the art Given to me By this most beautiful God.