Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel

by Andrew Graham-Dixon

  At the beginning, God commands Jonah to go to the great city of Nineveh ‘and cry against it: for their wickedness is come up before me’ (Jonah 1: 2). Jonah resists, taking flight on a boat bound from the town of Joppa to Tarshish. So God sends down a storm, which so terrifies the mariners who have taken Jonah on board that they cast him into the sea. The prophet is saved from drowning by a great fish, which rises from the deep and swallows him. He spends three days and nights in its belly, praying for forgiveness, after which God orders the fish to vomit Jonah forth on dry land. Once again, Jonah is ordered to preach to the Ninevites. This time he obeys, telling the people of the city that they are doomed and that Nineveh will be overthrown within forty days. They repent of their evil ways. God takes pity on them and relents.

  This displeases the irascible Jonah, who rails against God for sparing the city and making him look like a false prophet. Like a teacher confronted by a refractory schoolchild, God decides to teach him another lesson. By this time, Jonah has left Nineveh in a rage and is camping outside the city, still in the hope of seeing it destroyed. God causes a gourd vine to grow above Jonah’s head, giving him shelter from the fierce sun. But the next day he sends a worm to destroy the vine. When it withers, the sun beats so strongly on Jonah that he wishes he were dead, but still he rages at the heavens. ‘I do well to be angry, even unto death,’ he shouts. God reproves Jonah for his sorrow over the death of a mere plant, scolding him for having felt pity over the gourd vine, but none for the people of Nineveh, ‘wherein are more than six score thousand persons’. The prophet’s response to this shaming lecture is not recorded because the story ends abruptly at this point. Michelangelo may have intended to paint this moment, when Jonah is struggling to absorb the contrast between his own meanspiritedness and God’s infinite mercy. His hands make a gesture associated with dialectical reckoning, with the sifting and weighing of arguments.

  Jonah is the only one of the prophets and sibyls on the ceiling not to carry a book or scroll. He is shown not as scholar or thinker but as a man in action, living out the drama of his story. Michelangelo denies him the sculptural draperies of the other prophets, dressing him instead in a sea-green jerkin and a swathe of white drapery, gathered in awkward knots and folds under his arms, that also serves as a loincloth. Its dishevelled folds look halfsoaked, damply clinging to the architectural ledge on which the prophet is perched. He leans backwards to stare up, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, at the heavens. He is both the cowardly mariner and the sunburned rebel. He is half-naked in the sodden clothes that he was wearing when the great fish vomited him up; his skin is red and raw.

  Behind him Michelangelo has included the biblical whale, which actually looks like a giant monkfish laid out on a fishmonger’s slab, and brings to mind Condivi’s story about how the young Michelangelo had once painted a picture (long since lost) of Saint Anthony tormented by fish-like demons: ‘he would go off to the fish market, where he observed the shape and colouring of the fins of the fish, the colour of the eyes and every other part ... ’21 Perhaps he went to the fish market again before painting this picture.

  Half-obscured by the great fish with its single, staring eye, two genii accompany Jonah and embody his own conflicting emotions. One is a young boy, his face framed by a swag of flying red drapery, who looks troubled and raises a hand as if pleading with God for mercy. The other is a youth with blond hair, whose eyes are cast downwards in an expression that seems to speak of shame or some other state of inward penitential reflection. From behind Jonah’s left shoulder springs the gourd vine, its green leaves turning dry and yellow towards the end of its tendrils.

  According to the New Testament Book of Matthew, Jonah was the clearest Old Testament archetype of Christ. Like Christ, he had been entombed, only to be resurrected: ‘For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth’ (Matthew 12: 40). Because of where it has been placed the figure of Jonah is the very first detail of the entire ceiling to come into view of someone entering the chapel through the door in the entrance wall (an element of the original experience that has been lost by the reconfiguration of entrances and exits made necessary by mass tourism). The largest and most prominent of all the figures on the ceiling, he not only stands for Christ, but also represents a great paradox – namely that the weakest, most absurd and most impertinent of the prophets is also the one who, through his very fallibility, most clearly reveals God’s infinite mercy and justice. Michelangelo must have been moved by this aspect of Jonah’s story, because he lays great emphasis on it.

  Whereas the other prophets and sibyls strive to know God through the word, Jonah is both stunned and blessed by a direct encounter with God himself. The artist emphasises the nakedness of Jonah’s encounter. He is a being in the throes of existential revelation, thrown into a state of utter disequilibrium by his experience. His lack of fine clothing contrasts with the sculptural drapery that dignifies the figures of the other prophets, but it also works as a commentary upon their grandeur, stripping it bare to reveal the truth that lies beneath. Ultimately all must be as naked before God as he is.

  Is it fanciful to detect a profound sense of fellow-feeling in the way that Michelangelo depicted the unruly and turbulent Jonah? There are striking parallels between the story of Jonah, as an unwilling instrument of God’s will, and that of Michelangelo himself.

  Like Jonah, Michelangelo had been instructed to preach the word of God, when Pope Julius II commissioned him to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Like Jonah, he had fled from the burden of that responsibility, running away from Rome in 1506 in a rage because the pope had cancelled the monumental tomb on which he had already done so much work. And like Jonah, he was prone to moments of black despair, when he would rail at the heavens over the perceived injustice of his treatment. His poetry includes a particularly bitter sonnet dedicated to Julius II, in which the artist castigates his patron for giving credence to certain rumours – he does not specify which – that have blackened his name. As the poem reaches its disenchanted conclusion, Michelangelo’s complaints to Julius metamorphose into a more general lament about the injustice of the heavens:

  At first I hoped your height would let me rise;

  The just balance and the powerful sword,

  Not echo’s voice, are fitted to our want.

  But virtue’s what the Heavens must despise,

  Setting it on the earth, seeing they would

  Give us a dry tree to pluck our fruit.22

  The idea of a divine blessing granted only to be withheld, conveyed by the metaphor of a God-given tree that turns out to be ‘dry’, strongly recalls Jonah’s withered gourd vine.

  The prophet’s awkward pose, straining backwards and bending his neck to look up to the heavens, is one that the painter himself knew well. By the time he painted Jonah, one of the last figures to be completed, the artist had spent much of the past three years twisted into a similarly uncomfortable position. As Giorgio Vasari recounts in his life of the artist, ‘The work was executed with very great discomfort to himself, from his having to labour with his face upwards, which so impaired his sight that for a time, which was not less than several months, he was not able to read letters or look at drawings save with his head backwards. ’23 As he reels backwards, Jonah stares upwards at the figure of God the father on the ceiling above him. But in this too he might be a proxy for Michelangelo himself, looking up at the great expanse of the ceiling that he has painted for three years – the work that has put him through such a mixed array of emotions and that he has now, at last, finished.

  PART THREE

  The Last Judgement, and Other Endings

  Less than fifteen years after Michelangelo had completed the painting of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Rome was to be devastated by one of the most traumatic events in its history. Julius II was succeeded by Leo X, who continued his predecessor’s strategy of improving and aggrandising the city, and
was equally happy to resort to simony and the sale of indulgences to achieve his goal. The unintended consequence of these policies was the Lutheran Reformation. Leo X was succeeded by Hadrian VI, whose brief pontificate (1522-3) was followed by that of the ineffective Clement VII (1523-34). His machinations were to bring disaster both to the papacy and to the people of Rome.

  By the time of Clement’s election, the Reformation had shaken Christianity to its core and Italy had been overrun by two great foreign powers, France and Spain. The world of Michelangelo’s youth had been altered beyond recognition. The Italy into which the artist had been born – a place of religious certainty, economic prosperity and relative political stability, for all the ebb and flow of its petty state rivalries and mercenary alliances – was now a thing of the past. Clement VII struggled to reassert the authority of the Church of Rome while pursuing an ill-judged and badly managed strategy of constantly shifting his political alliances. He ran the risk of alienating Francis I, the French king, by giving frequent support to the ruler of Spain, the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. But he also infuriated Charles V with his clumsy attempts to undermine Spanish rule in the north of Italy by seeking to maintain the independence of Milan.

  In the spring of 1527, Charles V’s exasperation finally boiled over. The imperial armies pushed into central Italy and then on to Rome itself. They consisted of three groups. There were 6,000 Spanish tercieros, bent on humiliating the prince of the Church who had been bold enough to challenge their emperor. There was a ragtag troop of Italian irregulars led by hired mercenaries. Most fearsome of all, there were some 14,000 German landsknechts, all of them rabidly anti-papal Lutherans. None had been paid for months. By the time they arrived, in early May, they had degenerated into a rabble. But they broke through Rome’s feeble defences with ease and immediately set about laying waste to the city.

  As Clement VII retreated to the heavily fortified Castel Sant’Angelo, churches and convents were pillaged and their contents flung into the street. Holy relics were used as target practice and sacred manuscripts torn up for horse litter. Nuns were raped and murdered. Priests were stripped naked and forced to participate in obscene parodies of the Mass. Luther’s name was scratched into Raphael’s fresco of the Disputa in the Vatican apartments (under raking light, the graffito is still visible today). A troop of landsknechts gathered beneath the pope’s window and loudly threatened to eat him. On the first day alone, some 8,000 citizens of Rome lost their lives. By the end of the siege 23,000 had died, out of a total population of 53,000.1

  Michelangelo was safe in Florence during the Sack of Rome. In its aftermath, Clement VII belatedly made his peace with Emperor Charles V, who was himself shocked at the extent of the horror he had unleashed, an event that was soon being compared to the ancient destructions of Jerusalem, Carthage and Babylon. In penitential mood, the pope commissioned Michelangelo to paint a Fall of the Rebel Angels, an allegory of Promethean hubris punished by God, but the picture was never painted. During the pontificate of Clement VII’s successor, Paul III (1534-49), that commission became The Last Judgement, an enormous fresco that was to be Michelangelo’s final contribution to the decoration of the Sistine Chapel.

  The pope gave Michelangelo the entire altar wall to paint, destroying an important part of the decoration of the lower part of the chapel – including Perugino’s altarpiece of The Assumption of the Virgin – to make space for the work. The artist began The Last Judgement in 1535 and only finished it in 1541. There are various explanations for the delay. He had other projects in hand, having been given the unprecedented title of Chief Architect, Sculptor and Painter to the Vatican palace. In addition, the pace at which he could work had slowed with advancing age. Vasari tells the story that the artist fell from his scaffolding in the course of painting the fresco, injuring his leg so badly that he was reduced to ‘a desperate state’.2 His wounds were tended by ‘an ingenious physician’ from Florence, and the artist was eventually able to return to work. But time had taken its toll. Twenty-seven years had passed since he had accepted the commission to paint the vault of the Sistine Chapel. He was sixty-one years old when he started The Last Judgement and sixty-seven when he completed it. Michelangelo was no longer a young man.

  The Last Judgement

  It was traditional to depict Christ on the Last Day seated on a throne like a judge, but the artist ignored precedent and looked directly to the Gospel of Matthew:

  Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken: And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other. (Matthew 24: 29-31)

  The figure of Michelangelo’s Christ appears in the centre of a dark blue sky, the vault of heaven. He is beardless, in a striking departure from Italian Renaissance convention. This apparent innovation seems to have disconcerted one or two churchmen among Michelangelo’s contemporaries, but there was a venerable precedent for it. The artists of early Christian Rome and Byzantium had represented Christ without a beard, making him resemble earlier, classical representations of the youthful sun god, Apollo. Perhaps Michelangelo was inspired to revert to that ancient archetype by Matthew’s reference to the darkening of the sun. His Christ too resembles Apollo, whose powers are incorporated in his omnipotence. Supported on a cloud, he blocks out the light of the sun so that its rays halo him with light.

  The gestures with which he separates the good from the evil are forbiddingly solemn. His left or sinister arm is turned against the damned, whom he consigns to an eternity of torment in the fires of hell, the mouth of which beckons far below. With his raised right arm, he summons the blessed to heaven, although Michelangelo makes even this act of apparent benediction look punitively severe. The hand that blesses might also be poised to strike. Christ looks down to his left, which indicates that his thoughts are absorbed by those who have sinned. He is the embodiment of retributive anger. The saints gathered around him, who include the wizened St Peter holding a pair of massive keys, and St Bartholomew clutching the flayed skin of his own martyrdom, seem daunted and awestruck rather than joyful. Even the Virgin Mary, seated beside her son, cowers and looks away.

  The vengeful figure of Christ from The Last Judgement

  Below the vengeful figure of Christ, angels sound the last trump to awaken the dead. Michelangelo has arranged this group so that it resembles a kind of bouquet of figures from which long and spike-like trumpets protrude like thorns. The artist’s source, here, was not the gospel of Matthew but the Book of Revelation. Condivi points this out in his biography of Michelangelo, adding a revealing gloss on the other figures in this group, who hold up a great book and peer into its pages: ‘In the central part of the air, near the earth, are the seven angels described by St John in the Apocalypse . . . Amongst these are two other angels holding an open book in which everyone reads and recognises his past life, so that he must almost be his own judge.’3 The idea that each man must ultimately pass judgement on himself was surely Michelangelo’s own. It is typical of the sombre, self-reflective thoughts that preoccupied him in his later years.

  To Christ’s left, the lower part of the painting is crammed with writhing and tormented figures. The air is choked with a throng of entangled nudes, a wriggling crowd that recalls the snakeentwined multitude of The Brazen Serpent, which Michelangelo had painted many years earlier on the ceiling of the chapel. Below, in a detail drawn from Dante’s Inferno, Charon delivers a boatload of the despairing damned into the clutches of devils. This too calls to mind one of the scenes on the ceiling, being a convulsive variation on the theme of doomed figures in a boat, which had first appeared in The Deluge. As if to e
mphasise such echoes, Michelangelo has even twined a serpent around Minos, the judge of the underworld, who appears in the bottom right-hand corner of the painting. The figure grimaces as the snake bites his genitals.

  Detail from The Last Judgement, showing Minos, bottom right

  According to Vasari, Minos is the only portrait in The Last Judgement.4 The figure was apparently Michelangelo’s revenge on Pope Paul III’s master of ceremonies, a man named Biagio da Cesena, who had dared to protest that the artist was violating the sanctity of the chapel with painted obscenities – a complaint, presumably, about the picture’s large cast of nudes and many scenes of violence. Vasari also says that when Biagio complained to the pope about the portrait, the pontiff merely shrugged his shoulders and declared that it was beyond even his power to release anyone from hell.

  To Christ’s right, the dead struggle from the ground with what seems like a weary reluctance to be reborn. Some of these figures remain buried to their waists in the ground, while others have emerged as skeletons waiting to be clothed in the flesh of their resurrection.5 Angels wrestle with demons to drag and hoist the blessed up towards their salvation. But the overwhelming impression is one of arduous, precarious struggle. The whole composition is overbearingly top-heavy, so that even the teetering pile of nudes scrambling heavenwards looks as though it might at any moment come crashing down to earth. The figures whirled round in the vortex of the painting have none of the grace and beauty of the newly created Adam or the soaring airborne God on the chapel’s ceiling. They are heavy, lumpen beings, formed from a coarser mould. Even the Apollonian Christ is comparatively ungainly, his torso broadened to such an extent that it has become nearly square.