Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel Read online

  ‘. . . come to the rescue / Of my dead painting now, and of my honour; / I’m not in a good place, and I’m no painter.’ A sonnet by Michelangelo about the experience of painting the chapel ceiling, with self-portrait (see p.65 for a full translation).

  Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel

  Andrew Graham-Dixon

  Copyright © 2009 by Andrew Graham-Dixon

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 555 Eighth Avenue, Suite 903, New York, NY 10018.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Graham-Dixon, Andrew.

  Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel / Andrew Graham-Dixon.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  9781602393684

  1. Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1475-1564--Criticism and interpretation. 2. Mural painting and decoration, Italian--Vatican City. 3. Mural painting and decoration, Renaissance--Vatican City. 4. Bible. O.T.--Illustrations. 5. Cappella Sistina (Vatican Palace,Vatican City) I. Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1475-1564. II.Title.

  ND623.B9G66 2008

  759.5--dc22

  2008036409

  Printed in the United States of America

  Per Silvia

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION

  PART ONE - Michelangelo Buonarroti and His World

  PART TWO - The Sistine Chapel Ceiling

  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

  II - The Genesis Cycle, second triad: The Creation of Adam; The Creation of Eve; The Temptation and Expulsion from Paradise

  III - The Genesis Cycle, last triad: The Deluge; The Sacrifice of Noah; The Drunkenness of Noah

  IV - The Four Spandrel Paintings: David and Goliath; Judith and Holofernes; The Death of Haman; The Brazen Serpent

  V - The Imaginary Architecture, the Bronze Figures, the Ignudi

  VI - The Ancestors of Christ

  VII - The Prophets and Sibyls

  PART THREE - The Last Judgement, and Other Endings

  CONCLUSION

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ILLUSTRATION ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  INDEX

  The Genesis Cycle

  1. The Separation of Light and Darkness

  2. The Creation of the Sun, Moon and Plants

  3. The Creation of Life in the Waters

  4. The Creation of Adam

  5. The Creation of Eve

  6. The Temptation and Expulsion from Paradise

  7. The Deluge

  8. The Sacrifice of Noah

  9. The Drunkenness of Noah

  The Spandrel Paintings

  10. David and Goliath

  11. Judith and Holofernes

  12. The Death of Haman

  13. The Brazen Serpent

  The Prophets and Sibyls

  14. Libyan Sibyl

  15. Daniel

  16. Cumaean Sibyl

  17. Isaiah

  18. Delphic Sibyl

  19. Zechariah

  20. Joel

  21. Erythraean Sibyl

  22. Ezekiel

  23. Persian Sibyl

  24. Jeremiah

  25. Jonah

  Shaded areas: The Ancestors of Christ

  26. The Last Judgement

  This book celebrates the five-hundredth anniversary of Michelangelo’s commencement of work on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. It marks the cinquecentennial, as it were, of his very first brushstroke. My aim, in writing it, was to provide an informative and approachable introduction to one of the world’s most rewarding works of art – and, in doing so, to fill a somewhat surprising gap.

  While the existing literature on Michelangelo is vast, the sum total of commentary on the Sistine Chapel ceiling is smaller than might be supposed. It is certainly dwarfed by the literature on any single one of Shakespeare’s major plays – Hamlet, or King Lear, for example. Furthermore, much of what has been written takes the form of specialised art historical enquiry.

  Certain issues have tended to dominate scholarly discussion of the ceiling. In what order were the various pictures on the ceiling painted? To what extent was Michelangelo responsible for each particular image, and to what extent did he rely on the contributions of assistants? Was the iconography of the ceiling influenced by one or more of the theologians in the intimate circles of Michelangelo’s patron, Pope Julius II, and can such influence – Joachite or perhaps Augustinian – be detected in the paintings? How did the architecture of the Sistine Chapel itself, and the sacred rituals performed there, shape Michelangelo’s thinking? To what degree has his work survived the vicissitudes of time, and should the extensive late twentieth-century programme of restoration that so transformed the appearance of the paintings be applauded or condemned? Such questions have been extensively addressed, although often in rather piecemeal and partisan fashion, and mostly in learned articles published in art historical journals and periodicals. But there have been relatively few attempts to navigate between the various interpretations – to synthesise the existing knowledge and present it, in accessible form, to the general reader.

  That is the primary purpose of this book, which is basically intended to be a user’s guide to the Sistine Chapel ceiling. But I should say at the start that certain of the questions on which much ink has been spilled seem more interesting, to me, than others.

  While various forms and figures in the minor parts of the ceiling were almost certainly carried out by the painter’s assistants, it seems obvious, to my eye, that the vast majority of the work is Michelangelo’s own. Such is the symphonic unity of the ceiling as a whole that it demand’s to be regarded as, essentially, the creation of one man. Likewise, I consider much of the debate about the restoration of the ceiling to be fundamentally arid. The colours that emerged from beneath centuries of grime may have seemed disconcertingly sharp to those who had become accustomed to the layers of dirt with which time had smoked Michelangelo’s paintings. But I believe that comparison of the ceiling with the works of Michelangelo’s known admirers – the chromatically vivid Deposition of Pontormo in the small church of Santa Maria Felicità, in Florence, or Domenico Beccafumi’s dazzlingly bright ceiling in Siena’s Palazzo Communale – proves beyond doubt that the restoration did indeed allow us to see his frescoes in their true colours. To put the matter simply, it makes perfect sense that the Sistine Chapel ceiling as we now see it should have been a catalyst for the paintings of Michelangelo’s followers; whereas the same thing could not have been said about the ceiling as it was before. The restoration was, in my opinion, both justified and brave. If only the authorities at the Louvre would be as bold in doing away with the murk of time that befogs Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.

  Leaving such questions aside, I have chosen to focus on what I regard as the essence of the Sistine Chapel ceiling – what Michelangelo meant by it, how its meanings unfold, the subtle ways thr
ough which he gave expressive life to its many interlinked compositions. Because it is impossible to understand or appreciate any work of art without an understanding of its context, I begin by telling the eventful story of the artist’s own life, from birth to the moment when — reluctantly — he agreed to paint the ceiling for Julius II. I consider the nature of his early work and explore his unique, fiercely independent and often refractory personality, while also attempting to give the reader some sense of the world in which the painter lived and worked — its religion, its politics, its social conventions.

  The heart of the book is my interpretation of the ceiling itself. This takes the form of an extended analysis of the work, both as a whole and also part by part, picture by picture. In addition, I briefly consider Michelangelo’s subsequent contribution to the Sistine Chapel, The Last Judgement, and examine just a few of his later works in sculpture and drawing. This is because I believe those later works were themselves fruits of the same spiritual journey that produced the Sistine Chapel ceiling — and might therefore, among other things, be legitimately regarded as the older artist’s reflections on his own younger self.

  As a general rule, I have tried to give the greatest possible respect to Michelangelo’s own attempts to influence posterity’s perceptions of his life and work. This means that I often quote from the two early biographies of the artist, by his contemporaries Giorgio Vasari and Ascanio Condivi. It is my belief that these texts, although not written directly by Michelangelo himself, were so shaped by him that they reveal a great deal about his intentions, his beliefs, and his sense of his own significance. The problem is that they reveal those things often obliquely, through codes or parables or exaggerations. There are things in them, certainly, that are not literally true and may even be downright lies. But many of those falsehoods were, I believe, Michelangelo’s way of expressing truths about himself for which he had no other language. More than any of the critical and art historical literature on the artist, Condivi and Vasari have been my touchstones.

  I end by drawing the various threads of my argument about the ceiling together – and by attempting to spell out what I believe its central message to be. I do not expect everyone to agree with me. But I hope at least that the curious general reader who gets to the end of the book will feel better equipped to form their own conclusions.

  I have been helped in numerous ways by numerous different people in the course of my work. I have benefited from conversations with Hugo Chapman and David Ekserdjian, experts both on Michelangelo’s drawings (and much else besides). Anche, grazie mille to Giuliano Sacco, who kindly allowed me to print his fine Latin poem about Michelangelo. As ever, I feel guiltily indebted to my long-suffering family, who on this occasion put up both with my Michelangelo-induced moods and my Michelangelo-induced absences. Many thanks to the administration and staff of the Vatican Museums, who saved me countless hours by graciously allowing me to bypass the snaking line of pilgrims to the Sistine Chapel. Many thanks, as well, to Bea Hemming, Tomas Graves and the rest of the team at Weidenfeld & Nicolson for all their hard work and commitment in getting the book into shape and to press. I am also extremely grateful to my commissioning editor, Alan Samson, for persuading me to take the book on in the first place. But my greatest debt of all is to Silvia Sacco, my formidable researcher, without whom this book could certainly never have been written and to whom it is therefore dedicated.

  INTRODUCTION

  Michelangelo never wanted to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling. He was daunted by the difficulty of the task and made it clear from the start that he resented the commission, which had been imposed upon him by the imperious and demanding ‘warrior pope’, Julius II. The artist persisted in the paranoid suspicion that the whole scheme had been cooked up by his enemies and rivals, to give him an opportunity to fail on the grandest scale and in the most embarrassing way. As they well knew, he was a sculptor, not a painter, and would be bound to make a fool of himself.

  Besides, he had better things to do. The decoration of the ceiling of the chapel of the papal conclaves — all twelve thousand square feet of it – clearly struck Julius II as a fittingly grand scheme on which to employ the most prodigiously gifted artist of Renaissance Italy. But Michelangelo did not see it like that. For him it was a distraction from the yet more ambitious project, of a great monument sculpted from marble, to which he had already devoted years of his life, and on which his heart was set.

  He reluctantly noted down the details of the contract for work on the ceiling in a memorandum written to himself — the earliest document confirming his acceptance of the commission — phrased with apparently heavy irony. ‘Today, 10 May 1508, I, Michelangelo sculptor, have received from His Holiness our Lord Pope Julius II five hundred papal chamber ducats ... on account of the painting of the vault of the chapel of Pope Sixtus for which I began work today under the conditions and agreements which appear in a document written by the Most Reverend Monsignor of Pavia and under my own hand.’1 Michelangelo, sculptor, had reluctantly agreed to paint.

  The ‘Monsignor of Pavia’ with whom he had made the agreement was Cardinal Alidosi, a favourite of Julius II who was soon to meet with a bloody death. The pope appointed him as legate of Bologna but Alidosi governed the city so ineffectively that he provoked a successful uprising against papal rule. Called upon to explain his failure, he made the mistake of heaping the blame on Duke Francesco della Rovere, the pope’s nephew, and shortly afterwards the enraged duke stabbed Cardinal Alidosi to death in broad daylight on a street in Ravenna — a murder which went unpunished and largely unlamented.2 Michelangelo was a superstitious man and this may have strengthened his gloomy conviction that the contract he had signed with Alidosi was an ill-omened deal. The murder took place in the summer of 1511, when after three years of back-breaking toil the artist was still wrestling with the decoration of the ceiling.

  A year later, with the end at last in sight, he addressed a stoical letter from Rome to his home town of Florence, telling one of his brothers that the work was almost finished. He was plainly exhausted. But what shines through, despite the wearily laconic tone of the letter, is Michelangelo’s belated, dawning sense of how much he had achieved, despite his own worst fears: ‘I shall be home in September . . . I work harder than anyone who ever lived. I am not well and worn out with this stupendous labour and yet I am patient in order to achieve the desired end.’3

  Posterity has rarely regretted Michelangelo’s grudging acquiescence in taking on his ‘stupendous labour’, although there have been occasional dissenting voices. Barely ten years after the artist had finished his work, the newly elected, notoriously ascetic and — much to Rome’s relief — short-lived Pope Hadrian VI is said to have turned a baleful eye up to the ceiling, and to have curtly dismissed it as ‘a bathroom of nudes’.4 The most prolific and influential art critic of nineteenth-century England, John Ruskin, was similarly disconcerted by the ceiling’s many nude figures. He regarded it as a work of retrograde genius, which replaced the innocent piety of early Renaissance Christian art with the turbulent energies of a dangerous sensualism. Ruskin even went so far, in a lecture given in Oxford in 1871, to describe Michelangelo as ‘the chief captain of evil’ of the Italian Renaissance.

  Despite such outbreaks of misplaced prudishness, there has otherwise been broad consensus about the quality and importance of Michelangelo’s paintings for the Sistine Chapel. Collectively they represent one of the highest pinnacles of creative achievement — an equivalent, in the visual arts, to the poetry of Dante and Milton, or the music of Bach. The most fervent admirers of the fresco cycle go further, arguing that it is the single greatest work of painting in the entire history of Western civilisation.

  That was certainly the opinion of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the founding president of the Royal Academy, who dedicated the last and most emotional of his Discourses on Art to the subject of Michelangelo, the only artist whom he considered to have been ‘truly divine’. Speaking to his students for t
he final time, on 10 December 1788, Reynolds regretted that he had spent his life painting portraits and imagined what he might do if he were a student once more: ‘were I now to begin the world again, I would tread in the steps of that great master: to kiss the hem of his garment, to catch the slightest of his perfections, would be glory enough for an ambitious man.’5

  Michelangelo occasionally seems in danger of disappearing behind the myths that have circulated about him, the many stories about his superhuman abilities, his ‘divine’ nature and talents. What is sometimes forgotten is that most of the elements of Michelangelo’s legend were in place while he was still alive. For example, Reynolds’s reference to the artist’s supposed divinity has its origins in a flattering pun on the two parts of the artist’s name, composed by Michelangelo’s contemporary, the poet Ludovico Ariosto — ‘Michael, more than human, Angel divine’.6 This was then turned into a commonplace by the artist’s friend and biographer, Giorgio Vasari. Vasari used the phrase ‘the divine Michelangelo’ so frequently as to turn it into a kind of Homeric epithet.

  Novels and plays have been written about Michelangelo. Films have sought to dramatise his volatile personality and to tell the story of a life that was, for sure, anything but ordinary.7 Such attempts to reanimate the artist have for the most part whittled him down to the wooden caricature of a tortured genius. But however they may have distorted the man, the very existence of such productions says something important about the nature of his achievement, and the nature of his originality. Michelangelo was one of the first artists to call forth intense speculation about his own identity and motives. It is no accident that people have wanted to flesh him out in fictions. His art made them want to do that. Perhaps the single most radical and revolutionary aspect of his work — and this is particularly true of the paintings he created for the Sistine Chapel ceiling — was the fact that it so strongly insisted on, and inflamed, precisely that kind of curiosity.