Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel (22 page)

An instructive contrast to the figures of the prophets and sibyls is to be found in the most celebrated work of Michelangelo’s younger rival, Raphael:
The School of Athens
, of 1510-11 (above), exactly contemporary with the creation of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Painted for the Stanza della Segnatura, in Pope Julius II’s private apartments within the Vatican, the fresco shows an idealised representation of the progress of human knowledge. In a large and airy classical basilica, the wise men of all times are gathered. At the centre of the group, Plato points upwards to indicate the realm of Ideas, while beside him Aristotle points to the ground, to indicate his contrasting belief in the empirical basis of true knowledge. Wisdom emanates from these two figures to the crowd surrounding them on both sides, spreading in a ripple effect among the learned of all times. Man’s intellectual progress is symbolised as a dynamic continuum, an extended conversation taking place across the millennia.

Only one figure seems excluded from this sociable parable of human advancement. He sits in isolated introspection, head propped on one hand, lost in his own thoughts. He is the classical philosopher Heraclitus (below). As legend would have it, he is also Raphael’s portrait of the solitary and introspective Michel-angelo. The identification is by no means certain, although the broad face does seem close to that revealed in Michelangelo’s own self-portraits, with its distinctive flattened nose (the result of a fight in his youth with the sculptor Pietro Torrigiano, who punched him in the nose so hard that, in Torrigiano’s own words, he felt the bone crunch ‘like a biscuit’). The lonely Heraclitus is also the one figure in
The School of Athens
to have been painted in apparent imitation of Michelangelo’s own style. He is more monumental than the other figures, and considerably more melancholic. His pose closely resembles that of
Jeremiah
and he might almost be one of the Sistine ceiling’s prophets displaced to an alien setting. His jarring presence, in a painting to which he does not seem to belong, may well have been Raphael’s sardonic commentary on Michelangelo’s dour sensibility. The contrast between the two painters, one sociable and courtly, the other very much the loner, is reflected in the story that tells of their meeting one day in the Piazza San Pietro outside the Vatican. Raphael, as usual, was surrounded by a large entourage of pupils, admirers and hangers-on; Michelangelo, as usual, was on his own. ‘You with your band, like a bravo,’ he wryly remarked; to which Raphael shot back, ‘And you alone, like the hangman.’
¹⁹

Detail from Raphael’s
School of Athens
showing Heraclitus

Knowledge does not come to the seers on the Sistine vault as it comes to the crowd of easily conversing intellectuals in
The School of Athens
. Divine inspiration is nothing like the advance of secular wisdom. It comes effortfully, unpredictably – not in fluid ripples, but in spasms of revelation decreed by the mystery of divine will.

The most vividly troubled of Michelangelo’s prophets is
Jonah
. Placed directly above the altar, he brings the progression of male and female seers to an uneasy climax. Condivi, who was perhaps reflecting Michelangelo’s own sense of the importance of this figure within the overall scheme of the ceiling, described it in terms of breathless admiration: ‘most remarkable of all is the prophet
Jonah
, situated at the head of the vault, because, contrary to the curve of the vault and by means of the play of light and shadow, the torso which is foreshortened backward is in the part nearest the eye, and the legs which project forward are in the part which is farthest. A stupendous work, and one which proclaims the magnitude of this man’s knowledge, in his handling of lines, in foreshortening, and in perspective.’
²⁰

Condivi was struck by the skill with which Michelangelo had handled such a difficult composition. But
Jonah
is also a masterpiece of characterisation. It is Michelangelo’s heartfelt depiction of the prophet to whom he himself, perhaps, felt closest.

To appreciate the subtleties of the painting, it is necessary to consider the Old Testament text that inspired it. The tale is told in the four laconic chapters of the Book of Jonah. It is a parable of divine mercy and justice, in which God’s goodness is thrown all the more sharply into relief by the failings of the man chosen to execute his purposes. The biblical Jonah is as Michelangelo shows him: unruly, disobedient and perpetually baffled by God’s intentions.

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: