Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel (21 page)

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:

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.

Within the scheme of the ceiling as a whole, the ancestors represent a phase of human history and an aspect of the human condition decreed by divine plan. They may carry within them the physical seed of Christ but they are themselves spiritually unenlightened. They live in a time of waiting and receive no word from God, no sign or revelation. Condemned to a vacuity symbolised by the bare and shallow spaces they occupy, they are kept company only by each other, and by their shadows, cast prominently on the blank walls behind them. They are like the inhabitants of Plato’s cave, who see only the dancing shadows of truth but are blind to truth itself.

Michelangelo includes more images of Christ’s ancestors in the eight spandrels above the lunettes on the chapel’s north and south walls. Here once more they are shown in small family groups, sitting or lying on bare ground. The compositions of these scenes strongly recall traditional representations of the Holy Family on the Flight to Egypt. Like Mary and Joseph fleeing with their child, the ancestors in the spandrels are people on the run. Many of them look exhausted and several have fallen into a deep sleep. They are shown not in rooms, like their cousins in the lunettes, but outdoors, sometimes against dark backgrounds that suggest the night sky. Some of them recline on bags or sacks, which reinforces the impression that they are refugees or fugitives. They call to mind the archetypal image of the wandering Jew, as well as embodying the biblical idea that life on earth is merely transient, an act of passing through – a journey through ‘the land of the shadow of death’ (Isaiah 9: 2). They are the ‘strangers and pilgrims on the earth’ (Hebrews 11: 13). They also evoke the words of David’s blessing of the Lord (I Chronicles 29: 15): ‘For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers; our days on the earth are as a shadow.’

One level above the ancestors in the lunettes, and next to the ancestors in the spandrels, sit the Hebrew prophets and the sibyls of pagan antiquity. These are the largest figures on the Sistine ceiling. They were always intended to be imposing but the artist made them progressively bigger as he worked his way along the chapel. The earliest to be painted are about thirteen feet tall, the last just a few inches short of fifteen feet – well over twice the height of the average man in Rome today, and nearly three times the height of men in the time of Michelangelo. Their height is equalled by their bulk, which is further emphasised by the sculptural folds and flashing chromatic brilliance of the robes that drape them – salmon-pink, lemon-yellow, moss-green, sky-blue.

Each of the figures is a monument. Their stony draperies surge about them in frozen billows, so that they resemble a group of brightly painted monumental statues. But they also have the Pygmalion quality, of statues come to life. Their gestures and expressions are charged with emotion. They emanate a powerful psychological complexity. The curvature of the ceiling imparts a teetering quality to the perspective of the scenes at this level, so the prophets and sibyls loom over the chapel floor, seeming to project forwards precipitously from the wall. As a result, they feel closer to the real world – in both body and mind – than any of the other figures on the ceiling.

Human conduits of divine intention, the bearers of prophecy and vision, they are mediators between God and the world of man. Whereas the ancestors of Christ carry his seed, unknowingly, from generation to generation, the prophets of the Old Testament actively foretell Christ’s advent. They are lightning conductors for the flash of divine revelation.

The prophets are accompanied by the sibyls, female seers of ancient times whose visions and oracular sayings were also held to have prophesied the coming of Christ. The utterances of the sibyls had first been collected by the Roman Christian author Lactantius in the early fourth century AD. The sibyls themselves had been represented in the art of the Middle Ages and the earlier Renaissance but had never loomed as large as they do in the vault of the Sistine Chapel, where they are given equal status with the prophets. Michelangelo’s innovation reflects the shifting theology of his times. In fifteenth-century Italy, humanist scholars had pioneered a revival of interest in the writings of the classical and early Christian periods, as a result of which the sibyls had become the focus of renewed attention. The culmination of this process was the publication of a treatise on
I Vaticini delle Sibille –
the oracles of the sibyls – by the Dominican friar Filippo Barbieri, in 1481. The attributes which Michelangelo gave to some of the five sibyls whom he chose to represent suggest that he, or somebody advising him, was familiar with this book.
¹⁸

Michelangelo painted the Cumaean, Delphic, Erythraean, Persian and Libyan sibyls. Why he chose these five, from a possible ten, is not known for certain. The Cumaean Sibyl appears in Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, where she prophesies a golden age to come. This was interpreted by Christians as a veiled prophecy of the coming of Christ, given to the pagans of Greco-Roman antiquity. The Delphic, Erythraean, Persian and Libyan Sibyls – who hailed from Greece, Ionia, Asia and Africa – may have been selected to indicate the broad geographical reach of Christian prophecy within the pagan world.

To Michelangelo’s more learned contemporaries, they might have contained a message for the present too, symbolising the evangelical duty of the modern Church. The Sistine Chapel ceiling was painted at the dawn of the great age of exploration, the age of Columbus and Vasco da Gama. The scope of the known world was rapidly expanding. The discovery of new continents and new races of people gave rise to the hope that Christianity would now fulfil its destiny to reach to ‘the ends of the earth’ (Psalms 18: 5). The sibyls had spread the message of Christ to the peoples of the whole world in times long past. As it was once, so must it continue to be. The presence of these figures on the ceiling anticipates the zeal that would soon dispatch Christian missionaries to the Americas, to the Pacific islands, to all corners of the world.

The act of putting the sibyls at the heart of the Vatican – a word etymologically derived from
vaticino
, meaning prophecy or oracle – was also a statement of Messianic belief. A golden age, such as that described in the visions of the Cumaean Sibyl, was also foretold by the apocalyptic preachers of early sixteenth-century Christianity – and explicitly associated by Giles of Viterbo, among other preachers close to the papacy, with the reign of the warlike Julius II. The idea of a Julian ‘golden age’, symbolised already on the Sistine ceiling by the figures of the
ignudi
, is given another dimension by the presence of the sibyls. In the eschatological thinking of the time, a renewal of Christian mission was to be the prelude to the last days, the Final Conflict between Christ and Anti-Christ that would herald the end of the world. So the sibyls stand not only for the universalism of the Church but for the imminence of the end of time.

This pattern of meaning is forcefully implied in the figure of
The Libyan Sibyl
, who has been placed at the end of the line of prophets and sibyls on the south wall of the chapel, directly above the altar. She is lit from below, which may have been Michelangelo’s way of suggesting the light of God mystically emanating from the altar itself. In Barbieri’s treatise of 1481, the Libyan Sibyl’s prophecies of Christian illumination were given particular emphasis: ‘Behold the day shall come, and the Lord shall lighten the thick darkness.’ She twists away from the book that she holds in her two hands – a graceful gesture imbued with a sense of finality. She is closing the prophetic text, having seen the future. As she turns, she looks to her left, as if to contemplate the writhing figures, harbingers of the Last Judgement, wrapped in the coils of serpents in the spandrel of
The Brazen Serpent
. Fate and destiny have almost run their course. Judgement is nigh.

The Persian Sibyl
is another figure with apocalyptic associations. In Christian theology she was held to have prophesied the beasts of the Apocalypse, heralds of the Last Judgement. Michelangelo depicted her as an old woman, poring myopically over the pages of a book that she holds so close it is almost pressed up to her face. She is shown in what is known as ‘
profil perdu
’, turned away from the viewer to the point where her profile is so oblique it is almost lost. Her mouth is slightly open, as if she is muttering to herself the words of a prophecy she does not yet fully understand.

By contrast,
The Erythraean Sibyl
is younger and more composed. She sits relaxed, her right arm by her side while with her left she turns the pages of a book. She is accompanied by two
genii
, who resemble children or putti but are metaphorically the spirits of her inspiration. One, half asleep, drowsily rubs his eyes, while the other lights a lamp, signifying the flame of divine revelation – and perhaps indicating that moments of insight are apt to occur late at night, when the midnight oil is being burned.

The Delphic Sibyl
is a figure of Grecian elegance, who turns away from the scroll she has been contemplating to gaze wide-eyed into the distance. The artist may have intended to suggest the moment just before revelation occurs. Her attention has been caught, she is aware that something is about to be disclosed to her, but she does not yet know exactly what it is.

The most sharply individuated of all the female seers is
The Cumaean Sibyl
. She is a wizened, doughty old woman, who sits hunched in concentration over a weighty tome. She is ancient in accordance with her legend, which tells that she was loved, in her youth, by the sun god Apollo. Apollo had promised her as many years of life as the grains of sand she could hold in her fist, but when she refused his advances he doomed her to age and infirmity. Her face is as leathery as parchment, her immense, sinewy arms burned by the sun. She frowns, clutching her book so earnestly that she might be trying to squeeze the meanings out of it.

The figures of the prophets are as carefully varied as those of the sibyls.
Jeremiah
, who sits opposite
The Libyan Sibyl
, is every inch the author of the Book of Lamentations, mourning the sins of the Jews and the captivity of Palestine. A brooding figure with a long and unkempt white beard, he is turned in upon himself in an attitude of unshakeable melancholy. Like some mythological giant on whom a spell has been cast, he looks as though he has been turned to ice or stone by the profundity of his own sorrowful thoughts. The long white strands of his beard resemble icicles, or stalactites. He rests the weight of his head on his great right hand – a pose that would be borrowed, centuries later, by Auguste Rodin for his celebrated sculpture
The Thinker.

All of Michelangelo’s prophets are thinkers, although
Jeremiah
is unusual in having been characterised precisely as he appears in the Old Testament. Of the others, the same can only be said of
Jonah
. As a group they seem to have been designed as generic embodiments of the gifts and burdens of prophetic thought. Their role has sometimes been compared to that of the chorus in Greek drama but they are too introverted for that. They do not comment on the story of God’s plan for mankind but struggle, within themselves, to understand it.

Collectively, they dramatise an inner turbulence, a form of mental experience so extreme that it is transmitted through every nuance of gesture and expression.
Isaiah
is caught at a moment of reverie, while the bookish
Zechariah
has the air of an ancient librarian, lost in concentration.
Daniel
is depicted in the wrenching throes of intellectual struggle. As he reads from one great book, held up for him by one of his attendant
genii
, he writes furiously in another. The wild tresses of his blond hair, mysteriously wind-blown even in the solitude of his private study, crackle with the electrical energy of his thoughts.
Joel
appears puzzled by the text that he studies, holding it up close as though he is not just reading, but
rereading
, its difficult words. For his part,
Ezekiel
almost drops his scroll in distraction. One of the two
genii
accompanying him has called his attention to something unseen, something outside the painting. He starts in surprise, wheeling through space to gaze out at whatever his vision might be.

Attempts have been made to allegorise each of the prophets and sibyls as the embodiment of a sacred gift, such as Wisdom or Understanding. But each one seems too complex, too divided, to be so simplified. The sense that these figures stand for the conflicts of prophetic thought, rather than particular prophetic gifts or qualities, is enhanced by the
genii
who accompany them. These occasionally mischievous, entertaining little figures are external representations of the prophets’ ideas and inspirations. They are busy, not still, and each prophet is attended by more than one of them, which itself suggests the way in which their minds are teeming.

The prophets cannot be described as masters of their own thoughts. The revelations that come to them are mystic gifts that arrive from outside, often unbidden. They are sent from heaven, by the grace of God. It is the role of the pre-Christian seers and visionaries to understand those ideas, to grasp their significance and to transmit them to the rest of mankind. But the prophets and sibyls are granted only partial revelations, glimpses and fragments that foreshadow the coming of Christ and the illumination of his teachings. They gain access to divine truth but the processes by which they do so are obstructed and mysterious – as mysterious as the ways of God to man. What they see, they see as through a glass, darkly.

The School of Athens
by Raphael