Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel (23 page)

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. ’
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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.

L
ess 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.
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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’.
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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:

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.’
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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.