Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel (20 page)

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.

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.

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.