Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel Read online

  The figure of God in The Creation of Eve is distinctly less awe-inspiring than the airborne, cosmic creator of the earlier Genesis scenes. Dressed in a voluminous mantle, he has here the aspect of a patriarch or priest. He does not fly, but stands and even stoops slightly in the act of creating woman. His weight upon the earth is suggested by the single mighty foot shown protruding from his robes, toes splayed on the bare grey ground. His hair and beard are a lank, dullish blond, painted with far less energy and animation than the swirling grey locks of God in the other scenes.

  How can these differences be explained? Partly, perhaps, as a result of the evolution of Michelangelo’s ideas between one phase of painting and the next. The artist was to break off from painting the ceiling for several months after finishing The Creation of Eve. This pause for thought might well account for the great difference between the figure of God the Father as he appears in this picture, and as he would appear in the three scenes of the creation of the universe and The Creation of Adam.

  It may simply be that Michelangelo, recognising that God would have to become dynamically more active for the earlier scenes of creation, took the chance offered by a break in his work to reconceive his personification of the deity. But one of the great (and relatively underrated) aspects of the artist’s achievement in painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling was that he managed to preserve the total unity of the scheme despite the evolution of his own style during the course of the four years that it took him to complete it. And the fact remains that the character of God, as he appears in The Creation of Eve, powerfully contributes to the particular expressive twist that Michelangelo gives to this episode in the Genesis story.

  The position of the fresco on the ceiling of the chapel is significant. It is the central image of the nine narrative scenes, occupying a place directly above the screen that once divided the area closest to the altar — reserved for the pope and his court — from that occupied by less exalted worshippers. It marks a corresponding separation within the overall scheme of the Genesis narrative, dividing the stories of creation from those of fallen humanity. So it makes sense that the figure of God should suddenly, in this image, seem so much more grounded. This is the moment when the story itself comes decisively to earth. The transition is not a joyful one. The action takes place on a lonely stretch of coast. The line of the horizon, where sea meets sky, neatly bisects Eve’s body at the midriff.

  The overt symbolism of the picture restates the ultimate beneficence of God’s plan for mankind. The sleeping Adam, beneath a dead tree stump suggestive of a truncated cross, is once more a prefiguration of Christ, while Eve, springing from his side, calls to mind the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist, in that water and blood ran from the side of the crucified Christ (associations reinforced by the water behind her, and by the way in which she holds her hands up to the priest-like figure of God, like a worshipper at Mass preparing to receive the wafer). But the pious complacency inherent in such typologies is disturbed by the raw emotion with which the painting is charged. A current of intense, troubled feeling courses from Eve to the Almighty. She looks at God with an expression of pained and pleading mystery that lends this already cramped and claustrophobic act of creation an ominous, menacing atmosphere.

  Eve, placed dead centre of the entire Sistine Chapel ceiling, is given a unique privilege. She is the only figure on the whole ceiling who is allowed to look into the eyes of God. Does she already feel sinfulness stirring within her breast? Could she be asking God why he has made her, why he has squeezed her into being, imperfect as she is? These are among the oldest and most intractable questions that Christians have asked themselves about their God. If all was foreknown, all foreordained, by a perfectly benevolent deity, why create the possibility of evil at all? But in Michelangelo’s painting, she receives no answer. The solemn God stares back at Eve with eyes as hard, as unyielding, as stones.

  The last scene in the central triad of images on the ceiling is The Temptation and Expulsion. Here Michelangelo tells the story of the Fall of Man, giving his own narrative interpretation to the events recounted in the Book of Genesis, Chapter 3.

  First, Adam and Eve fall into temptation in the Garden of Eden, and are punished for their sin:

  Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. (Genesis 3: 1-6)

  Then, God discovers Adam’s transgression and condemns him and Eve to suffer the pains, labour and discord of mortal life. To ensure that Adam does not take fruit also from the tree of life, and become immortal, God exiles him for ever from Eden:

  Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life. (Genesis 3: 23-4)

  Generations of artists before Michelangelo had depicted these two scenes separately. Going against convention, he joined them in a single image, framed with such fearful symmetry that it links the crime with its punishment in a pattern of stark inevitability. The two halves of the painting mirror one another to the extent that, seen through half-closed eyes, they resemble shapes made by folding a piece of inked blotting paper in half.

  This is apt, because the picture itself is a kind of hinge – a hinge on which the whole grand narrative of the ceiling turns. It is here that man sins, here that his fate is sealed. Adam and Eve break with God’s commands and are separated from God for ever. Unity gives way to alienation, harmony gives way to discord, oneness becomes fragmentation. The three scenes that follow this one — all tracing the subsequent life of man on earth, through the story of Noah — are characterised by a busy brokenness, a mood of nightmare, a deliberate compositional disharmony, entirely at odds with the breadth and the sweeping simplicity that characterise the earlier scenes depicting the Creation. In this way, the very rhythms and formal structure of the paintings of the Sistine ceiling conspire to define mortal life — the life that follows the Fall — as disharmony, disconnection, alienation.

  On the left, Adam and Eve are depicted as youthful, energetic figures. The semi-reclining Eve is flushed with excitement, anticipation sparkling in her eyes, as she reaches round to take the fruit offered by the serpent — a creature depicted by Michelangelo as half-woman, half-snake, the long coils of its serpentine tail twined round the trunk of the tree. The face of the creature resembles those of the maenads and furies in ancient art. There is a resemblance, too, to the face of Adam. The two figures have the same flowing yellow hair. Their gestures even seem to flow towards one another in a convergence of erotic energy.

  The Fall of Man had often been interpreted as a surrender to impure desire, and its sexual aspect is strongly emphasised by Michelangelo. The tree of knowledge bears not apples but figs, which have a traditional sexual significance. Eve kneels, not to pray, but to seduce. Her left hand is suggestively entwined in that of the serpent, from whose fist several fruit protrude. Adam reaches greedily, with a claw-like hand, towards a bunch of figs in the shadowy leaves next to the mouth of the snake-woman, while his own genitals hang like fruit beside the mouth of Eve. The middle finger of Eve’s right hand is emphatically extended in a crude gesture and points down towards her own sex. Adam has turned into shadow, his f
ace half-hidden in profile, to indicate that he has chosen the way of darkness. Eve’s outstretched arm is rhymed by the shape of the dead tree stump against which she reclines, to show that in reaching towards temptation she has embraced the world of mortality and forsaken eternal life. Both are depicted against an outcrop of barren rock, another stark symbol of death.

  In making Adam such an active figure, one who does not blindly follow Eve but vigorously reaches into the tree to pick the fruit himself, Michelangelo emphasises that the couple are implicated in a partnership of sin. The artist also stresses, by this means, that Adam has acted out of his own free will. Adam’s energies are Promethean in their unruly vigour. He does not only reach into the tree but also pulls its main branch down towards him. The gesture that he makes with the arm closest to the serpent, both stretching out and groping for the figs with the index finger of his right hand, is a graceless parody of the gesture with which God brought him into being in The Creation of Adam. This is the moment in the narrative of the ceiling when man seeks to take control of his own destiny, when he sets out to become, as the guileful serpent suggests, a god himself. The result is disaster. God’s pointing finger conjures life from nothing. But Adam, in reaching for divinity, conjures only the spectres of death and hardship, and condemns Man to a world of pain.

  In suggesting the complexity of Adam and Eve’s motives in this moment of Original Sin, Michelangelo indicates the multitude of evils encompassed within it – greed, treachery, God-defying insolence, a whole Pandora’s box of ill intentions. John Milton, who retold the story of the Fall of Man a century later in his epic poem Paradise Lost, never saw The Temptation and Expulsion. But Milton’s puritanically severe reflections on the nature of Original Sin, in a prose work entitled De Doctrina Christiana, set forth a view of the subject very close to that expressed in Michelangelo’s painting:

  If the circumstances of this crime are duly considered, it will be acknowledged to have been a most heinous offence, and a transgression of the whole law. For what sin can be named, that was not included in this one act? It comprehended at once distrust in the divine veracity, and a proportionate credulity in the assurances of Satan; unbelief; ingratitude; disobedience; gluttony; in the man excessive uxoriousness, in the woman a want of proper regard for her husband, in both an insensibility for the welfare of their offspring, and that offspring the whole human race; parricide, theft, invasion of the rights of others, sacrilege, deceit, presumption in aspiring to divine attributes, fraud in the means employed to attain the object, pride, and arrogance . . .6

  The other side of the painting, the bleak mirror image of Adam and Eve choosing sin, represents the moment of their punishment and belated remorse. An angel reaches out with a sword — a punitive gesture that rhymes cruelly with the enticing gesture of the serpent offering fruit — to expel the couple from the Garden of Eden. Adam’s face is twisted into a rictus of anguish, and he looks instantly older and more wizened, as though mortality has already begun to work its effects on his flesh. Eve has metamorphosed into a hideous caricature of her former seductive self, a lumpen, lumbering being — a member of the same crude tribe of antediluvian giants that will soon be encountered, stumbling to their destruction, in Michelangelo’s depiction of The Deluge.

  As she takes her first steps into the world, the mother of mankind scowls and covers her breasts in shame, looking around over her shoulder, one last time, at paradise lost. She might be looking back at her own image beneath the tree, seeing the memory of the happy self she once was, but can never be again.

  III

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

  The nine narrative paintings that span the vault of the Sistine Chapel climax in a catastrophic scene of universal destruction illustrating the events of The Deluge. Although it comes near the end of the sequence, it was the very first picture to be painted. The fresco is the largest of the three images in the cycle telling the story of Noah. Its theme is human sinfulness punished by the omnipotent Almighty, the moment when the vengeful and unpredictable God of the Old Testament ‘saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination in the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually . . . And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them . . .’ (Genesis 6: 5-7).

  Noah alone is exempt, for God finds that he is ‘righteous’. He is told to build an ark from gopher wood, and to take on board all of his family. He must also give shelter to every species of animal, ‘to keep seed alive on all the face of the earth’, for God intends to send a great flood to cleanse the wicked world. As the waters rise, Noah and his family board the ark; ‘the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened ... And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground . . .’ (Genesis 7).

  Michelangelo fleshed out this starkly told tale, transforming it into a panorama of human misery. A disjointed crowd of refugees seek their last haven in a drowning world. The floods of divine vengeance, which despite a raging tempest are not storm-tossed but eerily still, stretch to the horizon, forming a blue-grey field of watery nothingness that will, inexorably, engulf and erase all. In places, especially on the right-hand side of the composition, this dull-coloured void is so extensive that the artist might almost have left the fresco bare. This effect has been accidentally exaggerated by a patch of actual paint loss, caused by an explosion in the nearby Castel Sant’Angelo in 1797, which made a section of painted plaster fall to the ground. But a contrast between emptiness and fullness was, in any case, certainly part of Michelangelo’s intention. It is an apt pictorial metaphor for his subject — which is, itself, a great unmaking. A vigorous crowd of the damned is being encroached upon by an expanse so blank as to be virtually abstract. Seen through half-closed eyes The Deluge resembles a picture that has been partly whitewashed. The world is a picture that God can unpaint at any moment.

  Michelangelo envisages a moment when the flood has risen so high that only two mountainous outcrops protrude above the waters. To these precarious points of refuge the last remnants of humanity cling, as if washed up by the tides like so much flotsam and jetsam. On the right-hand side of the picture, a group of lamenting figures takes shelter beneath a makeshift tent strung between two tree trunks. To the left, a tribe of antediluvian humanity winds its way up towards the cramped, plateau-like summit of a mountain. Scale is hard to determine in this blasted, almost empty place, but the considerable height of these stunned unfortunates, measured against the single leafless tree that fails to offer them shelter, suggests they are beings of gargantuan stature. ‘There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bear children to them, the same became mighty men, which were of old . . .’ (Genesis 6: 4). Forming a procession of the damned, these doomed titans concentrate on carrying their possessions – pots and pans, articles of clothing and furniture – to safety.

  Michelangelo rarely descends to such detail, being one of the least circumstantial artists of the Italian Renaissance. His principal instrument of self-expression is the nude, on which he plays innumerable variations, the corollary of which is that as an artist he shows little interest in the mundane details of day-to-day existence. For him, painting and sculpture, like poetry, were essentially means by which spiritual ideas might be expressed. Francisco de Holanda, a Portuguese illuminator who made his acquaintance in Rome in the 1540s, recorded a conversation in which Michelangelo expressed a revealing level of disdain for the the oil painters of the Flemish tradition. ‘They paint in Flanders,’ he said to de Holanda, ‘only to deceive the external eye, things that gladden you and of which you cannot speak ill. Their painting is of stuffs, bricks and mortar, the grass of the fields, the shadows of trees, and bridges and river
s, which they call landscapes, and little figures here and there. And all this, though it may appear good to some eyes, is in truth done without reason, without symmetry or proportion, without care in selecting or rejecting.’ He added, dismissively, that such an art was capable of pleasing only ‘young women, monks and nuns, or certain noble persons who have no ear for true harmony’.7

  By Michelangelo’s own stern standards, The Deluge pays an unparalleled degree of attention to the minutiae of ordinary life. At the back of the group of hapless figures hurrying uphill away from the waters, the artist includes an impassive woman in a simple turban. She balances an upturned kitchen stool on her head, on which are poised a conical clay soup jar – inventories reveal that Michelangelo’s own kitchen contained a similar vessel – some loaves of unleavened bread, a stack of crockery, a knife and a spit for turning meat. Painted in muted tones of earth and off-white, this is the artist’s only recorded still-life. The woman carrying it is preceded, in the headlong rush to safety, by two male figures who are similarly laden. The first, a youth whose long tresses of blond hair are blown sideways by the gale-force wind that courses through the whole scene, carries in his left hand a roll of salmon-pink cloth and a long-handled frying pan. The second bears a heavy bundle wrapped in a blanket, stooping under his load like Atlas carrying the world on his shoulders. On the island to the right, the group of sheltering figures has managed to salvage a keg of wine. One slumped and almost comatose figure, supported by two others, has clearly drunk deeply from it, in an attempt to anaesthetise himself from the terror of imminent death. Another fearful young man, his body curled up in a foetus-like position, lies across that same, presumably emptied, keg. Staring out across the waters with a blank-eyed expression, he seems petrified by fear.