Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel Read online

  The spandrel of David and Goliath is paired with that of Judith and Holofernes, which tells the story of how a beautiful and chaste Jewish heroine saved her people by slaying the general of the Assyrians. The tale is told in the Book of Judith, a text excluded from the Old Testament in Protestant translations, but still to be found in Orthodox and Roman Catholic bibles. Judith was a pious and beautiful woman, in mourning for her dead husband. She dressed plainly and spent all day praying and studying the Torah. When the Assyrians laid siege to her home town of Bethulia, Judith conceived a plan to save her people. She dressed in her finest clothes and went to the Assyrian camp, where she fooled her enemies into believing she wished to defect to their side. Holofernes, the Assyrian general, made advances to her and she agreed to have supper with him in his tent. While he gorged himself on many delicacies and wine, she ate only the humble kosher food that she had brought with her in a bag from Bethulia. When Holofernes fell into a deep, drunken slumber, she took his sword and beheaded him with it. She put his head in the bag that had held her provisions and escaped from the city. Michelangelo painted Judith leaving the tent, entrusting the severed head of the tyrant to her maidservant and looking back, one last time, at the corpse of her enemy.

  It had been traditional to find a parallel between the stories of David and Goliath and Judith and Holofernes since the Middle Ages. Both are tales of the strong brought low by the weak, of evil conquered by good, with the help of God. For centuries it had also been conventional to interpret the stories as allegories of the triumph of particular virtues over particular vices. David’s defeat of Goliath was seen as the victory of Fortitude over Greed. Judith’s defeat of Holofernes was seen as the victory of Humility over Pride and Luxury. Such traditional distinctions were not absolute – Savonarola, for example, associated David instead with Humility – but they underpin Michelangelo’s interpretation of the stories in the Sistine Chapel spandrels.

  Just as the figure of David, stern and resolute, is the embodiment of fortitude, so Judith embodies humility. She is dressed in the fine clothes required by her stratagem, their colours echoing those of the clothes worn by David in the other spandrel. Under a greenish-white dress she wears a light blue bodice with a golden yellow border, as well as a headdress of matching blue and gold. As her maid stoops to allow Judith to cover the head of Holofernes with a cloth, the two figures, mirroring one another in graceful contrapposto, might almost be dancing. The head of the Assyrian general has been placed in a serving dish rather than the bag described in the Bible. Michelangelo may have chosen this detail by analogy with medieval and Renaissance depictions of another story from the Bible, in which John the Baptist’s severed head is presented to Salome on a plate. Perhaps the artist felt that it would look undignified to have Judith cramming Holofernes’s head into a sack, like a thief in the night. Putting the head on a dish is a more elegant solution, which also has the effect of emphasising Judith’s humble, lowly status. She and her maid might be serving women removing the plates from a banquet.

  The poorly preserved figure of a soldier slumbers at the edge of the scene. Judith looks as though she is walking on tiptoe, so as not to rouse the camp. She looks back into the darkness of Holofernes’s tent, which Michelangelo has painted as a marble building, perhaps to emphasise the tyrant’s association with luxury and decadence. Within that dark space, framed by curtains the colour of blood, the nightmare from which she has delivered her people still restlessly lurks. Sprawled on a rumpled white bedsheet, the decapitated body of Holofernes jerks menacingly, even in the last spasm of death. With his right hand the tyrant reaches above and behind him, as though sightlessly groping for the sword with which he has been decapitated. It has sometimes been believed that Michelangelo included his own likeness in the form of the tyrant’s severed head. There is a faint resemblance to the artist as he became in his later years, but since he was only in his early thirties when painting the Sistine Chapel the idea that the wizened, bearded face of Holofernes really is a self-portrait seems fanciful.

  Each of the first pair of spandrels depicts a single moment in time, whereas the later pair compress a multitude of incidents into their congested and convoluted compositions. Their subjects, linked once more by the theme of Israel’s salvation, are The Death of Haman and The Brazen Serpent. In these works, Michelangelo leaves the still and solid world inhabited by Judith and David far behind. Each of the later spandrels is a phantasmagoria, filled with writhing, struggling figures, lit by fickle dapplings of glare. Their colours are acid and disjunct, a riot of sharp yellows and lime greens, of orange and gold, lilac and lavender. Whatever their intended place within the scheme of the ceiling, these are pictures of such eruptive, irregular, expressive force that they go beyond the meanings of their iconography. Symbolism of the type that can readily be applied to the earlier spandrel images of David and of Judith seems quite inadequate as a guide to these works. They give no strong sense of exemplifying any particular virtues and are shot through with a sense of agitation so extreme that it borders on hysteria.

  The Death of Haman is drawn from a story in the Old Testament Book of Esther which defies succinct synopsis. Haman is chief minister to Ahasuerus, king of the Persians. His mortal enemy is Mordecai, a Jew serving in the chancellery, who has won royal favour in the past by foiling a plot hatched by two court chamberlains to assassinate the king. Mordecai has offended Haman by refusing to bow down to him as a mark of respect on his appointment as chief minister. To take his revenge, Haman plans to kill all the Jews in the Persian Empire. Mordecai learns of the plot and warns his cousin Esther, Ahasuerus’s queen. Risking her life by appearing unbidden, she approaches the king, who offers to grant her anything she desires. Esther declines to tell Ahasuerus her wish but invites him, instead, to a banquet she has prepared for him and Haman. When the three meet, she once again demurs but tells the king that all will be revealed at a second banquet that she is preparing for him and Haman for the following day. Meanwhile, Haman, unaware of Esther’s machinations against him, orders a great gallows to be constructed, from which he intends to have Mordecai hanged. That night the chronicles are read to Ahasuerus in his bedroom, reminding him of his old debt to Mordecai for saving his life. The next day, at the second banquet, Esther reveals to Ahasuerus that she is Jewish. She tells him of Haman’s plans for a genocide of the Jews and begs the king to save her people. Soon after this, Haman vengefully attempts to rape Esther, is discovered by the king, and condemned to death. Ahasuerus decrees that he is to be hanged on the same gallows prepared for Mordecai. The king’s will is done, Haman dies and the Jews are saved.

  In squeezing a number of episodes from this breathlessly complicated narrative into the triangular shape of a single spandrel, Michelangelo created a busy and restless image, one so crowded that it is difficult to interpret with any great degree of certainty.

  To the left, at least, there is no ambiguity. Here Michelangelo shows the second banquet, at which Esther tells Ahasuerus of Haman’s plot. The king looks dumbfounded, while Haman reels away in surprise. In the middle, Haman meets his unpleasant end. To the right, matters are more complicated. Here, some kind of compressed version of the start of the tale appears to be illustrated, against the normal convention of narrative chronology unfolding from left to right. At the threshold of the palace, Mordecai, dressed in yellow, urgently gestures to Esther, seated next to him. Inside, Esther appears again at the king’s bedside, together with a scribe and two furtive figures who seem to be trying to sneak away. These scenes are ambiguous. Mordecai might be telling Esther of the plot to assassinate the king. If that is so, the background scenes probably show her warning Ahasuerus of the danger to his life, and the king, in response, passing sentence on the two chamberlains, who try to escape while a court scribe notes down the judgement. Alternatively, Mordecai might be telling Esther of Haman’s plan to kill the Jews, in which case the scene in the background may be meant to show Esther approaching the king unbidden, to seek his help
. Literal interpretation of this part of the painting is further complicated by the fact that the king’s vengeful, pointing gesture seems directed at the figure of Haman in the centre of the painting, doomed to die. Whatever the artist’s precise narrative intentions, this is essentially a painting about wickedness judged, and punished.

  In the bustle and confusion of the scene, figures appear to be scurrying in all directions. Even Haman, whom Michelangelo shows nailed to a cross at the centre of the scene, is represented as a figure in hectic motion, an athlete racing towards his own death. A number of beautiful drawings survive for the agonised, twisting Haman – considered by Giorgio Vasari as the single most beautiful depiction of the human form on the entire Sistine Chapel ceiling – evidence of the sheer difficulty experienced by Michelangelo in depicting a figure in such extreme foreshortening. Later artists would emulate this dramatically telescoped perspective in order to demonstrate their virtuosity, but in Michelangelo’s work it is charged with a deep expressive urgency. The foreshortening compresses and heightens the sense of Haman’s pain. It also enhances the pathos of the hand with which he seems to be groping for something beyond his grasp. He stretches out as if to puncture the membrane of the illusion that constrains him. The gesture is that of one reaching out, in vain, towards the helping hand of another. He looks as though he wants to be pulled out of the shallow space of the painting that is his prison and into the freedom of the world.

  In choosing to depict Haman crucified, Michelangelo departed from tradition. He may have based this innovation on a fragment of scripture, because there is a single phrase in the Book of Esther, in the Vulgate (5: 14), where the word ‘crux’ is used to describe the form of the scaffold – which, everywhere else in the narrative, is unambiguously described as a gallows. However, it seems more likely that Michelangelo drew his inspiration from Dante’s description of Haman, crucified rather than hanged, in The Divine Comedy. In the Purgatorio section of the poem, Haman is implicitly compared to the evil thief who died beside Christ, rebelling against his torments with a mixture of pain and pride: ‘Poi piovve dentro all’alta fantasia / Un crocifisso dispettoso e fiero / Nella sua vista, e cotal si moria.’ (‘Then reigned within my lofty fantasy / One crucified, disdainful and ferocious / In countenance, and even thus was dying.’)

  But why did Dante, the poet most admired by Michelangelo, place Haman on a cross? The answer is probably because he was familiar with an ancient Jewish custom of celebrating the death of Haman and the delivery of Israel by staging a mock-crucifixion. This practice was disliked by the leaders of the Christian Church, who suspected the Jews of expressing their contempt for Christ under cover of this rite. As early as AD 408, the laws of the Theodosian codex had prohibited the Jews from ‘celebrating a certain feast in which they used to express very shrewdly their secret hatred of the crucified Saviour. It was a feast in memory of the fall of their enemy Haman; for they represented him as crucified, and burned his effigy on that day with great shouting and frenzy just as if he were Christ.’ Such beliefs were strengthened by a concordance of dates. The Jews celebrated the death of Haman on the second day of Passover, which also happened to be the day of Christ’s crucifixion. As the art historian Edgar Wind wrote, in a detailed exploration of this web of associations, ‘Owing to this Christian suspicion, the celebration of the fall of Haman, a feast in memory of the successful suppression of the first great persecution of the Jews, became a reason for innumerable new persecutions.’13

  Michelangelo’s decision to place Haman on a cross, following Dante, carries no particular anti-Semitic intent. Rather, the symbolism of his painting revives that of the ancient Jewish ritual in which the crucified Haman is indeed seen as the enemy of the chosen people – but adding to that a layer of Christian meaning, in which Haman also becomes an anti-type of Christ. His death, which saves Israel, is given the same form as the death of Christ, which shall save mankind. Through such patternings, such symmetries and reversals, Michelangelo suggests, the will of God makes itself visible.

  The Death of Haman is meaningfully counterpointed with its pair, the last of the spandrel paintings, The Brazen Serpent, which illustrates a story from the Old Testament long believed to prefigure Christ’s death on the Cross. The juxtaposition confirms the idea that Michelangelo meant Haman’s death, pictured as the crucifixion of an evil man, to be contemplated in contrast to the true Crucifixion, which delivers man from evil. The story of the brazen serpent is told in the Old Testament Book of Numbers. When the Israelites rebelled against the hardship of their life in the desert, God punished them by sending a plague of poisonous snakes into their midst. They repented of their weakness and as an act of clemency God instructed his servant Moses to set up a brass serpent on a pole. All who looked upon it would be cured. Scriptural justification for seeing this episode as a prefiguration of Christ’s Crucifixion was taken from no less venerable a source than the gospel according to Saint John: ‘And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.’ (John III: 14-15)

  Michelangelo indicates the christological dimension of the story by placing the brazen serpent on a pole high up in the centre of his composition, silhouetted against the sky – just as the suffering Christ appears, raised up on Golgotha, in numerous depictions of the Crucifixion. But otherwise, as in The Death of Haman, this is an emphatically dark interpretation of the story. In painting the last two spandrels, it seems that Michelangelo’s imagination seethed with images of rebellion, sinfulness and divine retribution. The relationships of scale, which in both works are dizzyingly odd and dreamlike, express a morbid and disenchanted view of humanity. Those who sin, those who fall into temptation, are viewed as though through a magnifying glass. Their heaving, straining bodies are massively enlarged, all the more so by contrast with the diminutive figures embodying piety and purity.

  In The Death of Haman, Esther and Mordecai have been given the slightest of walk-on parts, seeming almost to fly off like chaff in a centrifuge from the central, dominant, agonised figure of the villain on his cross. Likewise the tumbling figures of the damned in The Brazen Serpent are enormous, whereas the small crowd of the virtuous looks almost as though viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. A woman kneels and prays, helped by her male companion to hold her hand out to be healed. Further back, a baby on a man’s shoulder reaches towards the bronze serpent. Moses is notable by his absence. The Brazen Serpent is like another, more crowded version of The Temptation and Expulsion, with snakes and sinners multiplied. Most of all, though, it resembles a Last Judgement, with the good to the right of the brazen serpent – as they are shown on the right hand of God on the last day – and the damned tumbling away to the left. Many years later Michelangelo would paint a great fresco of The Last Judgement, on the wall that descends from the last two spandrels.

  Pondering how best to paint a biblical plague of snakes, Michelangelo’s thoughts turned inevitably to the famous classical sculpture of the Laocoön, the Trojan priest and his sons wrapped in the coils of serpents. The Brazen Serpent is a painted version of the Laocoön that re-imagines the same grisly death as a weird orgy. Screaming figures in luridly coloured, skintight garments writhe and tumble, forming knots and tangles of humanity bound together by the glistening coils of the serpents. The painting is full of noise as well as colour, with each face twisted into a different cry of anguish. The contours of the spandrel squeeze the struggling forms together, creating a slope against which one figure rests his legs and another cramps his muscular shoulders and back. The crowd of the damned looks as though it is being gradually sucked into the narrowest recess of the spandrel, as into a dark and claustrophobic pit.

  V

  The Imaginary Architecture, the Bronze Figures, the Ignudi

  The nine histories from the Book of Genesis and the four linked spandrels, recounting tales of the salvation of Israel, are themselves just part of an even larger scheme. Below
and to the side of those paintings, in a multitude of other images, the artist treated themes of prophecy and revelation, and the lives of the tribes of Israel, from the time of Abraham to that of Christ. So broad was the historical scope of the Sistine Chapel ceiling that Condivi, the artist’s biographer, felt able to declare that Michelangelo had embraced ‘almost all the Old Testament’.

  In lesser hands, the result might have been a sprawling anthology, a chaotic outpouring of figures, stories and symbols. But Michelangelo formed a work of daunting coherence from this multiplicity of subjects. He transformed the whole of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, an area of more than 12,000 square feet, into a single creation of visual art – a polyphony of forms. He did so by weaving his paintings into a fictive architectural structure that resembles a great temple or monument, open at the top. Only the nine narrative paintings themselves exist above and outside it, floating, as it were, in patches of sky far above the viewer on the floor of the chapel. This makes them harder to see, their details more difficult to discern – but that is appropriate, because they represent the highest truths and the greatest mysteries. Michelangelo was not prone to oversights or accidents. The actual architecture of the chapel, the artist’s painted architecture and his myriad painted illusions – all work perfectly together, to shape the fabric of a vision.