Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel (25 page)

The very last drawings that Michelangelo ever touched are shot through with a profound tremulous humility. Each shows Christ suffering on the Cross, with the Virgin and St John agonising over his miseries. They have a strange and ghostly quality. The faces are smudged and the forms seem to struggle into recognisability, each one haloed by a multitude of lines, showing that Michelangelo – who kept them and worked on them for many years – went over them repeatedly with his pencil and with his fingers. They are less like drawings than repeated prayers, every line like a bead told on the rosary. They preserve the artist’s attempts to bring the dying Christ before his eyes, to feel his presence and comprehend the mystery of the divine made flesh – and to do so, obsessively, time and time again, as he felt his own death approaching. They call to mind one of his last recorded statements, made while pacing the streets of Rome in the rain one day in 1564: ‘I can find peace nowhere.’ Looking at them feels almost like a form of trespass, like eavesdropping on ‘the divine Michelangelo’ at the moment when he felt least divine, and most human – the moment when he was readying himself to meet his maker.

The Crucifixion with two mourners, one of Michelangelo’s last drawings

T
he brooding presence of
The Last Judgement
on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel inevitably complicates the experience of looking at the ceiling above. The work casts a long shadow. It projects the penitential sense of spiritual mission that Michelangelo developed in later life on to the frescoes that he had painted while still a young man. Turning from
The Last Judgement
to the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the viewer is apt to pay greater attention to the more severe and apocalyptic elements of the earlier frescoes – to find in scenes such as
The Deluge
, with its helpless throng of the doomed, or
The Brazen Serpent
, with its tumble of agonised bodies, vivid foreshadowings of Michelangelo’s later, darker, vision. The paintings of the Sistine Chapel ceiling certainly express a severe and deeply pious Christian conception of the pattern of universal history, and of mankind’s place within it. But
The Last Judgement
is liable to make that conception, that vision, seem rather more bleak than it was originally intended to be.

The fact that Michelangelo himself reshaped the meanings of his own great fresco cycle in later life raises larger questions of interpretation. How do the ceiling’s many images relate to one another? In what order or hierarchy should they be viewed? What is the nature of the plan according to which those images are arranged, and what exactly is the vision that underlies it? Was the plan Michelangelo’s own, or was he painting to a theological programme devised by others? If he
did
receive instructions, to what extent did he follow them, and to what extent did he exercise creative licence? These issues are fiercely debated in the existing literature about the Sistine ceiling.

No documentary evidence has been found to settle such questions. But it seems improbable that Michelangelo was allowed total freedom in his choice of scenes and subjects for such an important commission. It is likely that he discussed his ideas, that he sought advice and that he needed approval of some kind before going ahead with the actual painting. But a number of scholars go considerably further than that modest set of assumptions. They argue that Michelangelo must have worked to a specific and theologically demanding programme – a document, perhaps augmented by a diagram, which not only dictated the subject matter of every one of the images on the ceiling, but also composed them into a pattern of cross-references and allusions designed to convey a particular set of complex and arcane theological propositions.

Such scholars have gone to great lengths to reconstruct that hypothetical document, to identify its author and explain the ways in which his theology shaped Michelangelo’s frescoes. The leading theologian of Julius II’s pontificate, Giles of Viterbo, has often been proposed as the author of such a text. One author has suggested that Giles wrote a complex programme based on the venerable theology of St Augustine’s
City of God
, and that concealed within Michelangelo’s frescoes there lies an allegory of Augustine’s two cities, the earthly and the heavenly. A forcefully argued counter-suggestion also has Giles as the author of the programme, but asserts that his source of inspiration lay not in St Augustine but in the writings of a twelfth-century Franciscan mystic named Joachim of Fiore, whose writings were the focus of renewed interest in early sixteenth-century Rome. Other candidates proposed for the authorship of a programme for the ceiling include another papal theologian by the name of Marco Vigerio, as well as Cardinal Alidosi – with whom Michelangelo agreed the contract to paint the ceiling – and a disciple of Savonarola’s by the name of Sante Pagnini. Each solution is different, but all are inspired by the same dream, that of finding a single code or key to unlock the totality of meaning embodied in the pictures.

Theologically totalitarian interpretations of the ceiling all have major flaws. This is not only because they are marred by numerous demonstrable failures of fit with the actual paintings of the chapel (as critics of each hypothesis have been swift to point out). It is because they all represent what in philosophy might be termed a ‘category mistake’ – a fundamental error about the very nature of that which they seek to describe. There is little point in debating the respective merits of different attempts to find a key to the Sistine ceiling, precisely because it is the very idea of a complete explanation, in the form of an underlying text that might magically explain all, that is itself at fault. There is no good reason to suppose that Michelangelo was ever required to paint in accordance with an all-encompassing programme. It was not common practice to devise such programmes. No such text has been found for the Sistine Chapel ceiling, despite years of archival research undertaken in the hope of finding such a thing. In fact no equivalent document, nor any reference to one, has been found for any major fresco cycle, painted anywhere in Italy, at any time during the Renaissance. So while it is reasonable to assume that Michelangelo discussed his ideas with people whose opinions he respected, it is highly unlikely that he allowed himself to be enslaved by any single, rigid theological framework.

It is well worth remembering that the
visual
structure of the Sistine Chapel ceiling – namely, the monumental imaginary architecture that contains all of its imagery – also plays a vital part in determining how that imagery is seen and felt and understood. It dictates the scale relationships of the various parts – making, say, the prophets and sibyls loom large and the ancestors seem less important. Such discrepancies of scale are integral to the semantics of the ceiling. They ensure that the figure of Jonah, for example, is much more prominent – more significant, more
meaningful
– than that of any of the figures below him. Moreover, it seems certain that the imaginary architectural fabric, which plays such a crucial role both in the arrangement of the images and in the shaping of their meaning, was a structure Michelangelo himself both invented and insisted on. It is, as stated earlier, a painted version of the tomb for Julius II, which the artist had been planning for years. It was a form that he passionately wanted to create, whether in sculpture or painting. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, it must be assumed that he chose it for the ceiling – and that he found most of the solutions that made it work.

It is clear from looking at the pictures themselves, which owe so little to the traditions of medieval and Renaissance art, and so much to the naked words of scripture itself, that Michelangelo read and reread the Old Testament continually while he was painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Condivi pointedly reports the fact in his biography, so it can be assumed that Michelangelo wanted it to be known. Between them, the biographies of Condivi and Vasari reveal a great deal about how Michelangelo wanted posterity to judge his achievements in the Sistine Chapel. Some of this information takes the form of direct assertion. Vasari’s story about Michelangelo locking all his assistants out of the chapel makes it fairly clear that the artist wanted to be seen as the sole author of the work. Admittedly, it is not a story that has much bearing on the question of whether he was given theological guidance – but Michelangelo had already answered that question with his letter to a friend, written in 1523, in which he recalled telling the pope that his first idea for the ceiling was a ‘poor thing’, and Julius II replying that Michelangelo could do whatever he wanted.

The texts of the artist’s biographers contain numerous stories that obliquely touch on questions of authorship and originality. Vasari says that Michelangelo ‘would not allow any of his works to be seen’ until they were finished and that he even resorted to violence to escape supervision – and, by implication, potential meddling. ‘On one occasion,’ writes Vasari, ‘when the pope had bribed his assistants to admit him to see the chapel . . . Michelangelo, having waited in hiding because he suspected the treachery of his assistants, threw planks down at the pope when he entered the chapel, not considering who he might be, and drove him forth in a fury.’
¹

Several other stories carry the same essential thrust of meaning – asserting in essence that Michelangelo knew what he wanted to create, that he was the best judge of what was appropriate, and that ultimately he would not brook interference from anyone with the temerity to think they knew better. This is the moral of the story of Piero Soderini, who dared to criticise the nose of the
David
and was then fooled by the artist into accepting the work without alteration. It is also the moral of another of Vasari’s stories about the Sistine Chapel, according to which the pope – showing an old-fashioned taste for gold and glitter – foolishly asked Michelangelo to add touches of gilding to the ceiling after it was finished in order to give it a more splendid effect. Vasari recounts that Michelangelo dissuaded him from such vulgarity by saying, ‘Holy father, in those times men did not bedeck themselves with gold ...’ The ceiling, Michelangelo’s ceiling, remained as it was.

One of the most revealing stories in Condivi’s biography does not directly concern the Sistine Chapel ceiling – although it surely has a bearing on it – but relates to the statue of the
Pietà
that he had created several years earlier. Condivi recalls a conversation with the artist in which the subject of the Virgin’s unusually young appearance, in that work, had come up; and he recorded the artist’s own explanation of it:

What is really striking about the story is that it presents Michelangelo thinking out loud about the ways in which art can express the subtleties of meaning implicit in the story of Christ’s incarnation, God’s manifestation in the body of a man. He thinks as a theologian might think, and asks himself theological questions. How would Mary have looked? What form would God have given her, to express his purposes? He plainly regards himself as independently equipped – and entitled – to find those answers within himself, within his own intuitions. Condivi was sufficiently struck by the remarks to make his own comment on Michelangelo’s unusual grasp of such matters: ‘This consideration would be most worthy of any theologian and perhaps extraordinary coming from others, but not from him whom God and nature formed not only to do unique work with his hands but also be a worthy recipient of the most sublime concepts.’
²
One of the most fascinating aspects of the whole passage is the way in which it conveys Michelangelo’s sense that it is entirely appropriate for him to rethink a particular religious theme, to treat it afresh, rather than to rely on established authorities and conventions.

Many authors have chosen to disbelieve Michelangelo’s insistence that he was allowed to do whatever he liked in the Sistine Chapel. But while he may have exaggerated his freedom, the balance of probabilities suggests that he did indeed take the licence to reinvent and reconceive the meaning of the stories from the Old Testament that were his subject, filtering and refracting them through the lens of his own intellect, his own reading, his own sensibility. That is not to say that he was given no advice, and neither is it to say that he did not on occasion modify what he painted on the basis of that advice. But Michelangelo insisted so often and in so many ways on his own ultimate autonomy – in his correspondence, in the stories that he fed to his biographers – that it would seem peculiarly patronising to question the essential truth of what he so clearly attempted to communicate. He was a pious man and a brilliant painter. The chances are that he was indeed trusted to paint the ceiling as he liked once his basic themes had been established and approved.