Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel (15 page)

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 face 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:

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.

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 rivers, 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.

Michelangelo draws attention to these small details but does so in a way devoid of all compassion. The objects that these people have stored against their ruin are not intended to evoke pathos; they are items of incriminatory evidence. These men and women are doomed precisely because they have taken too much pleasure in the things of this world, while paying too little heed to the state of their souls. The objects depicted are themselves pointedly symbolic. One group has loaves of bread; the other has wine. To Michelangelo’s audience, bread and wine would inevitably have evoked the Eucharist, the mystical body of Christ consumed by the faithful during communion. But the bread and wine in
The Deluge
are unsanctified remains of impious feasts, symbolising the sins of an irredeemable multitude.

The painting contains numerous pointed inversions of this kind, parodies of the language of high and sacred art that serve to underline the cursed state of this antediluvian multitude. The naked young man curled against the wine keg resembles a Roman river god – in antique art, the gods of the rivers were conventionally depicted leaning on upturned, gushing water vessels. But instead of presiding over a life-giving flow of water, Michelangelo’s youth prepares to die a watery death. The reclining woman in the other group, to the far left of the composition, also resembles a Roman river deity. But she too is a symbol of death and aridity, rather than fertile life. Her breasts are empty and will bear no more milk, as the weeping infant at her shoulder makes clear.

This pattern of inversion is carried through to several other figures to the left of the painting, which seem calculated to evoke sacred associations, only for those associations to be simultaneously denied. A young man bearing his wife on his back recalls St Christopher carrying the Christ child across the waters. A young woman, who is haloed by a wind-blown arc of plum-coloured drapery, and who holds her smiling and oblivious baby close to her, calls to mind innumerable images of the Madonna and Child. A group truncated by the edge of the frame, to the extreme left, includes another woman with a baby, next to whom patiently stands a donkey – imagery that evokes the Holy Family’s rest on the flight to Egypt. But there is to be no rest for these people, no blessing, no salvation. Michelangelo takes a particular and even cruel relish in forcing the message home, by filling his work with such echoes of other, happier themes. He imparts a brutish, crude quality to these figures, that makes them seem both primitive and irredeemably earthbound. The standing mother is confirmed as an anti-Madonna by the set, sullen, stupid expression on her face. Not one of the doomed titans looks up, or makes time to pray.

Michelangelo was personally inclined to asceticism, to the point of flaunting his own frugality. His letters home to Florence, to the family whom he subsidised (despite their pretensions to high social rank), are peppered with self-righteous references to the poverty of his own existence. Giorgio Vasari, in his life of Michelangelo, remarks both on the simplicity of his clothes and on his reluctance to change them. ‘In his latter years he wore buskins of dogskin on the legs, next to the skin, constantly for whole months together, so that afterwards, when he came to take them off, on drawing them off the skin often came away with them. Over the stockings he wore boots of cordwain fastened on the inside, as a protection against the damp.’
⁸

Ascanio Condivi, in his own biography of Michelangelo – much of which was probably written under dictation from the artist himself – stresses that he often worked so hard that he went without food and sleep. Condivi also links Michelangelo’s religious thought to that of the most notoriously ascetic preacher of the late fifteenth century, Girolamo Savonarola (1452-98). In Condivi’s words, the artist ‘read the Holy Scriptures with great application and study, both the Old Testament and the New, as well as the writings of those who have studied them, such as Savonarola, for whom he has always had great affection and whose voice still lives in his memory’.
⁹

Michelangelo’s older brother, Leonardo, had become a member of the Dominican order and a follower of Savonarola when the artist was sixteen years old. Michelangelo clearly harboured vivid memories of the sermons with which Savonarola had electrified the population of Florence in the late 1480s and 1490s – apocalyptic prophecies of doom that had urged the people of the city into orgies of mass repentance. ‘Rethink you well, O ye rich, for affliction shall smite ye,’ Savonarola had preached, in one of his many hellfire sermons. ‘This city shall no more be Florence, but a den of thieves, of turpitude and bloodshed. Then shall ye all be poverty-stricken, all wretched, and your name, O priests, shall be changed into a terror . . . know that unheard-of times are at hand.’ Savonarola’s followers, known as the Weepers –
i Piagnoni
– piled their worldly possessions into ‘bonfires of the vanities’, burning books, ‘lascivious paintings’ and other such symbols of luxury and decadence.
The Deluge
is a picture shadowed by the apocalyptic terrors conjured up by Savonarola’s sermons. Those who have clung on to the vanities of this worldly life are receiving their punishment – not by fire but by water.

In 1494, Savonarola had delivered the most famous of all his series of sermons, on the theme of Noah’s Ark. He had prophesied a second flood, a prediction soon fulfilled, at least in the lively metaphorical imaginings of his Florentine followers, in the form of the invading armies of France, led by King Charles VIII. The preacher had warned his listeners to pray and take refuge in Florence cathedral, which he compared to the mystical Ark of Christ’s mercy. In comparing the redemptive role of the Ark to that of Christ, Savonarola was drawing on a long tradition of Christian allegory, in which the stories of the Old Testament were recast as prophetic prefigurations of the teachings of the New. In the allegorical exegeses of the Old Testament expounded by medieval theologians, Noah had always been treated as one of the precursors of the Saviour. The waters of the flood were compared to the purifying waters of baptism, the wood of the Ark to the wood of the cross, and the door in the Ark to the wound in Christ’s side.

Such ideas had determined the conventions for depicting the story of Noah for many centuries. For generations the Ark itself – representing, as in Savonarola’s rhetoric, the Christian Church afloat in the sea of the world – dominated most depictions of the subject of the Deluge. By contrast, Michelangelo gives it relatively scant pictorial prominence, making it little more than a background detail – although he does give it symbolic weight, by placing it directly between his two refuges of the doomed. He paints it very much as a metaphor for the Church, making it resemble a religious building more than a boat. Under siege from a desperate group of antediluvian giants equipped with a ladder, it remains impregnable, a fortress of true faith. Oblivious to the fracas taking place below him, Noah leans out of an upper window to salute the heavens.

The building Michelangelo’s Ark most closely resembles is none other than the heavily fortified Sistine Chapel itself; and it is tempting to suppose that the artist, as he painted the great vault of the chapel, may even have felt a sense of kinship with Noah. Michelangelo too was a man far above the teeming multitude, doing his best to serve God’s obscure purpose and follow the path of righteousness. A solitary individual, he had a barely concealed contempt for the herd-like masses (such as the young women, monks, nuns and tasteless rich whom he lumped together in his diatribe on Flemish art). He may well have thought of the Sistine Chapel – the isolation chamber in which he lived, and worked, for almost four years – as his own Ark. Looked at from beneath, the wooden scaffold that he had devised for painting the ceiling – a series of arches on cantilevers wedged into holes drilled above the cornice, each one supporting a painting deck – must have somewhat resembled an upturned boat.