Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel

by Andrew Graham-Dixon

  The structure which Michelangelo devised is both magnificent and symmetrically severe. The semicircular areas above the chapel windows, which are called lunettes, contain a host of figures collectively embodying the ancestors of Christ. From every lunette rises what is known as a spandrel or severy. These contain further depictions of the ancestors of Christ. They are similar in form to the four spandrels at the vault’s corners, although they are smaller and spring to a pointed arch rather than rising in a gentle curve. Like all of the structural forms above the level of the lunettes, these arches of white marble, decorated with a motif of shells and acorns, are painted rather than real.

  Between each of the spandrels along the north and south walls of the chapel, and between the two pairs of spandrels at each end, twelve gigantic figures are seated on marble thrones. These are the Old Testament prophets, accompanied by the sibyls of classical antiquity, whose visions and revelations were held to have foretold the coming of Christ. A supporting cast of putti stands beneath them, an army of plump infants – crudely painted, in several cases, by Michelangelo’s assistants – holding up tablets of painted stone inscribed with the prophets’ and sibyls’ names. The sides of the thrones on which these mighty figures sit are formed by square columns interrupted by further supporting pairs of putti, depicted this time not in the colours of flesh and blood but as if they were figures cut from marble.

  Next to these carved putti, squeezed into the spaces between the prophets’ and sibyls’ thrones and the tops of the spandrel arches, are pairs of nude figures painted to resemble burnished bronze statues. They strike comical and often grotesque poses, like the fools or jesters in a Renaissance court entertainment. Each pair is divided by the decorative device of a ram’s skull. Some of them slump in boredom, apparently stultified by their captivity. Others seem driven to the point of insanity by their confinement. The two between Ezekiel and the Persian Sibyl sit back to back, screaming in carnivalesque rage, their windblown hair symbolising the disorder of their emotions. Each nude braces himself against the curve of the arch that contains him on one side, pushing an outstretched foot against the column of the throne that forms the other wall of his prison.

  Various theories have been advanced to explain the bronze figures. Some have seen them as pagan souls trapped in limbo, others as the fallen angels who rebelled against God and were expelled from heaven. But such interpretations burden these variously ludicrous and caricatured figures with a weight of significance that they seem far too slight to carry. They resemble bronze figurines adorning the ceiling’s illusionistic architecture, rather than actors with meaningful parts to play, and should therefore be seen as belonging to the innocent realm of its ornament. They are, so to speak, part of the furniture. They have sometimes been compared to gargoyles, or the babooneries that mischievously lurk in the margins of medieval illuminated manuscripts. But they seem closer in spirit to the symmetrically arranged grotesque figures found in late Roman decorative painting, examples of which were excavated in Rome itself during the artist’s lifetime. Michelangelo certainly knew such images, and it is likely that he not only imitated them but intended the imitation to be noticed.

  More than seventy years earlier, Leon Battista Alberti had trumpeted the achievements of the first generation of Florentine Renaissance artists and architects. In his opinion, the works of Ghiberti, Donatello, Masaccio and Brunelleschi were more than equal to those of ancient Rome. Michelangelo too was an artist in the Florentine Renaissance tradition and, as he had shown with the colossal statue of David, it was one of his manifest ambitions to revive and surpass the art of classical antiquity. In the Sistine Chapel he set out to do so once more, but this time in the field of painting. The fictive architecture of his scheme, decorated with classical putti and bronze nudes like classical grotesques, rises to the apex of the vault like an enormous archaeological fantasy. It is a dream of Roman grandeur, revived at the heart of Christendom.

  Above the entablature that runs along the top of the prophets’ and sibyls’ thrones, perched on the pedestals supported by the carved putti, Michelangelo crowned his architectural structure with one last group of figures. These nudes, or ignudi, as they are called, do not merely allude to the classical past, they bring the world of antiquity back to life with such vividness that it seems to move and breathe. They are far more daring and original – and far more prominent – than the grotesque bronze nudes huddled in the cramped spaces below them. Stretching, twisting and turning in a collective display of grace and elegance, they resemble living sculptures displayed on plinths. Pope Julius II, who was himself a greedily acquisitive collector of classical sculpture, may have appreciated them as a kind of imaginary adjunct to the real museum of antiquities that he himself was assembling on the Capitoline hill.

  Numerous attempts have been made to wrestle these figures into conformity with the religious scheme of the ceiling. They have been allegorised as the ‘animae rationali’ of the prophets and sibyls below them – physical symbols of the seers’ spiritual and intellectual strivings towards God, of their struggles for enlightenment and understanding. They have been described as wingless angels, whose function is to make the vault of the chapel synonymous with the vault of heaven. They have been seen as mysterious mediators between the worlds of heaven and earth. They have been interpreted as images of the human soul, naked before God.14

  There is no strong historical justification for any of these Christian interpretations, although the ignudi do perform the ostensibly religious function of displaying ten pseudo-bronze medallions decorated with scenes from the Old Testament. Condivi refers to these, albeit briefly, as ‘medallions ... which simulate metal, on which, in the manner of reverses, various subjects are depicted, all related, however, to the principal narrative’. Vasari is similarly short: ‘Between them, also, they hold some medallions containing stories in relief in imitation of bronze and gold, taken from the Book of Kings.’15 The images in question were actually taken from more than one Old Testament source, illustrating scenes as various as Abraham and Isaac and The Ascension of Elijah. All are derived from the woodcut illustrations in a popular Italian bible of 1493.16

  It is not hard to understand why Vasari and Condivi pay such cursory attention to the medallions. These may well have been included at the suggestion of a papal theologian and were perhaps once meant to ‘relate’, as Condivi indicates, to the ‘principal narrative’. But Michelangelo gave the images such slight prominence, painting them in a technique, similar to grisaille, which makes them all but illegible from the chapel floor, that they resemble the merest ghosts of a subtext – the half-heartedly preserved relic of a diagram of discarded meanings. What draws the eye instead is the monumental and still mysterious presence of the ignudi.

  What do these figures mean? What might they express? No document has been found to confirm one or other of the various hypotheses that have been advanced about their supposed religious symbolism. The two documents that do exist, the biographies of Vasari and Condivi, explicitly deny the figures themselves any theological content whatsoever. Condivi simply lumps them together with the ‘part which does not appertain to the narrative’, 17 noting their great beauty but otherwise having little to say.

  For his part, Giorgio Vasari was in no doubt about their meaning and their function – namely, that of ‘upholding certain festoons of oak-leaves and acorns, placed there as the arms and device of Pope Julius, and signifying that at that time and under his government was the age of gold; for Italy was not then in the travail and misery that she has since suffered’. The ignudi brandish sprigs of oak and sheaves of acorns, imagery that the pope had appropriated as family emblems. (He had been Giuliano della Rovere before his election as pope, the word ‘rovere’ meaning oak tree.) So there seems no good reason to doubt Vasari. The idealised, classically beautiful ignudi were explicitly intended as a compliment to Michelangelo’s volatile patron.

  Attempts to give them other, deeper meanings are contradicted by
their actual appearance. The ignudi are decoratively varied, disposed in poses that might be occasionally energetic but are invariably devoid of emotional weight or particular significance – all the more so, when their poses are compared with those of the figures in the nine histories, whose every movement and gesture is charged with significance. The ignudi are vacuous, inert. There is absolutely nothing sacred or spiritual about them. They bear no resemblance to angels, who are traditionally sexless beings basking in the radiance of the Almighty. All the evidence suggests that they are indeed simply decoration, drawn from the world of pagan antiquity and designed to pay a compliment to the pope. But as such, they complicate the religious meaning of the ceiling with an assertion of worldly power.

  One of the principal themes of Julius II’s court rhetoric was that of the ‘warrior pope’ as a new Caesar Augustus, whose destiny it was to reunite and re-empower Italy – not, this time, in the name of the Roman empire, but of the universal Church. This parallelism was forced home, not only in the sermons of leading divines in Julius II’s circle, such as Giles of Viterbo, but also in public festivities and celebrations. After one of his several military campaigns, in 1506-7, Julius had entered the streets of Rome in a chariot drawn by four white horses, processing through a triumphal arch inscribed for the occasion with Caesar’s famous words, ‘veni, vidi, vici’.

  In painting a soaring classical monument, crowned with classically inspired figures embodying the idea that Julius had indeed inaugurated a new ‘age of gold’, Michelangelo gave permanent form to the grandiose aspirations behind such ephemeral displays of papal triumphalism. He also staked his own claim to greatness. Like Julius, he too had come, seen and conquered. He had taken on a project as challenging as any described in Pliny the Elder’s stories of the great painters and sculptors of antiquity; and he had produced a result as awe-inspiring as any of the artistic remains of the classical past. The sheer scale and daunting unity of the Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes, their classical grandeur and magnificence, the bold originality of their forms – all these amount to a declaration of Michelangelo’s unswerving confidence in his own unique gifts. The ceiling expresses a profound, reflective piety. But it also reflects an immense and unshakeable sense of pride.

  VI

  The Ancestors of Christ

  The different levels of the ceiling imply different degrees of closeness to God. In the lowest tiers are the fourteen lunettes and eight spandrels containing the ancestors of Christ. Their arrangement has caused much confusion and prompted much unnecessarily ingenious speculation. Michelangelo’s source was the opening of the New Testament Book of Matthew, in which Christ’s male lineage, from Abraham to Joseph, is traced across forty-two generations in a great list of names, strung like pearls on a chain of begettings:

  Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob; and Jacob begat Judas and his brethren; And Judas begat Phares and Zara of Thamar; and Phares begat Esrom; and Esrom begat Aram; And Aram begat Aminadab; and Aminadab begat Naasson; and Naasson begat Salmon ... and Eleazar begat Matthan; and Matthan begat Jacob; And Jacob begat Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ. (Matthew I: 1-16)

  The ancestors of Christ embody his physical lineage, the history of his blood, whereas the popes were held to embody the unbroken line of his spiritual legacy. Michelangelo placed the ancestors directly above the fifteenth-century portraits of the popes that line the walls of the Sistine Chapel at the level of the building’s windows. In this way, he softened the transition between the earlier decorations of the chapel and his own work. The portraits of the popes are arranged in a chronological order that zigzags across the chapel’s north and south walls. This is also ostensibly the arrangement that Michelangelo has chosen for his depictions of the ancestors.

  In the middle of each lunette, just above the window arch, a tablet is inscribed with the names of particular ancestors of Christ. The series originally began with two lunettes high up on the west wall, directly above the altar. But Michelangelo destroyed these when he returned to the Sistine Chapel, more than twenty-five years later, to paint his monumental Last Judgement. So Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Judas; Phares, Esron and Aram have all disappeared into oblivion.

  In its surviving form the sequence begins on the north wall, with the lunette next to The Death of Haman, which carries the single name of Aminadab. It continues in the opposite lunette, on the south wall, next to The Brazen Serpent, inscribed with the name of Naasson. It then continues to cross back and forth across the chapel, reaching its conclusion in the two lunettes on the east wall – above the entrance – which are, in accordance with the end of the list in the Book of Matthew, inscribed with the names of Matthan and Eleazar and those of Jacob and Joseph.

  The inscriptions might seem to suggest that the figures in the lunettes and spandrels should be seen as literal depictions of the individuals named in the biblical succession of Christ. But the paintings themselves make a manifest nonsense of such an approach. Whereas there are forty names in the lunette inscriptions, all of them male, Michelangelo painted over ninety figures in the lunettes and spandrels, including many women and young children. The figures are often vividly realised and occasionally verge on caricatures – such as the hunchbacked greybeard in the ‘Salmon Booz Obed’ lunette, who stares with comical puzzlement at the carved handle of his walking stick, which is decorated with a gurning, gargoyle version of his own face. Many of the paintings of ancestors are of distinctly pedestrian quality, which suggests that Michelangelo’s assistants were allowed to paint a considerable portion of this section of the ceiling. Literal interpretation of the images is made even harder by the paintings in the small spandrels above them. These contain depictions of mothers and fathers sleeping or resting with their children and swell the cast of the ancestors yet further.

  The attempt to put a name to every face is plainly futile. Yet many scholars have insisted – and continue to insist – that Michelangelo’s figures must correspond exactly to the biblical list in the Book of Matthew. This has produced some distinctly perverse interpretations. One example is the final lunette, over the entrance wall, which according to its label is devoted to the subject of Jacob and Joseph. Like all these compositions, it is divided into two halves by the tablet of names. To the left there is a cowed old man huddled within the folds of his yellow cloak. He is flanked by a much younger woman, in green, who seems to be dozing, and a sturdy infant shown in profile. To the right sits another young woman, with an elaborate coiffure and a lively, flirtatious expression on her face, who is flanked by an elderly man. A child perched close to the shoulder of the man receives what appears to be a loaf of bread from another child who stands on the ground. Those seeking a one-to-one correspondence between the names and the painted ancestors are forced to find Jacob, his wife and the infant Joseph in the figures to the left; and to find Mary, Joseph and the Christ child in the figures to the right. This fails to explain why Mary and Joseph, if it really is them, should be accompanied by not one but two children. The idea was mooted that this might be a representation of the infant John the Baptist – an explanation wrecked when the ceiling was cleaned in the 1980s, revealing that the second child is in fact not a boy, but a girl. But iconographers are nothing if not ingenious and a Plan B was swiftly formulated to deal with the awkward problem. The little girl became a female personification of the Church presenting Christ with a symbolic attribute of the Eucharist.

  Such exegeses, positively yogic in their flexibility, fail to answer certain questions. Why should Michelangelo have painted Jacob as a fearful, wizened simpleton? Why depict Mary, the Mother of God, as a skittish coquette? The most likely answer is that the artist never meant the individuals in these paintings to be seen as particular figures from the Bible. Even if these figures were to be regarded as Mary, Joseph and Christ – executed, for the sake of plausibility, by a clumsy assistant with no sense of decorum – there are many other scenes where no amount of iconographical spadework can
excavate the particular identities of the particular figures shown. The best explanation is that Michelangelo, faced with the endless succession of biblical names, treated the ancestors not as individuals but as a collective representation of the peoples of Israel before the coming of Christ. He varied the figures from scene to scene, simply to avoid tedium.

  Not that he eliminated tedium altogether, because the paintings in the lunettes and spandrels are conspicuously shot through with a sense of lassitude. The figures seem oppressed by boredom, weighed down by the mundanity of lives that are going nowhere. It has sometimes been argued that these paintings demonstrate Michelangelo’s humanity, his interest in depicting the ordinary existence of ordinary people. But the truth is that he paints the daily round of merely domestic life as if it were a curse.

  The female ancestors are generally busier than the men. One of them spins, another weaves and another cuts cloth. Others are absorbed in suckling their babies, while the beleaguered mother in ‘Asa Josaphat Joram’ seems almost smothered by a surfeit of attention-hungry children. The men are occasionally drawn into such activities, although not willingly. In ‘Josias Jechonias Salathiel’ a couple is shown seated back to back. The woman holds one struggling child, the man another. As the children reach out towards each other, he looks across angrily towards her – while she does her best to ignore him – as if to say that he has done more than his fair share of babysitting. Another male ancestor is writing in a rather desultory way, but most are shown slumped in attitudes of melancholic lethargy. Several of them doze fitfully, heads lolling, and one – in ‘Aminadab’ – sits bolt upright with an expression of exasperated impatience on his face. They have the stunned and listless air of people travelling on an underground train, or stranded at an airport, or sitting, apprehensively, in a dentist’s waiting room.