Michelangelo & the Pope S Ceiling : the Sistine Chapel

Michelangelo & the Pope’s Ceiling: The Sistine Chapel

Excerpts from History of Italian Renaissance Art (4th ed., 1994) by Frederick Hartt

After Michelangelo had spent a year of labor bringing marble blocks from Carrara to the Piazza San Pietro and had started carving, the pope [Julius II] suddenly interrupted the commission [for the pope's tomb]. Although the circumstances were narrated several times by Michelangelo himself . . . it is still not clear why the work was stopped. Presumably funds had to be diverted to the rebuilding of St. Peter's by Bramante. In any case the magnificent dream, which was destined to become a nightmare for Michelangelo during the next forty years, was the first instance in which he combined figures and architecture and was, therefore, the germ of his major pictorial work, the Sistine Ceiling. Element after element designed for the 1505 version of the tomb came to fruition on the ceiling, and the ceiling in turn was to act as a crucible for new sculptural ideas to be utilized in later versions of the tomb.

Of the architecture and the more than forty over-life-sized statues that were to have adorned the tomb, Michelangelo had completed only the niches with their rich decorations [i.e., Captives and the Moses] before he left in anger for Florence in 1506 . . .

Although the pope had already envisioned inviting Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Julius instead marched to Bologna in 1506, recaptured the city, and from that vantage point requested the outflanked Florentines to send Michelangelo to him. The sculptor spent the next eighteen months modeling and casting in bronze a colossal portrait of the pope. The finished work enjoyed an existence of little more than three years before anti-papal forces, again in control of Bologna, pushed it from its pedestal . . . melted it down, and cast the bronze into a cannon to fire at the pope . . .

Scarcely back in Florence in the spring of 1508, Michelangelo was called again to Rome when the idea of painting the Sistine Chapel became a definite commission. The program of Sixtus IV stopped with images of the popes at the window level, and the vault had been painted blue with gold stars. Here, according to Michelangelo's own later account, the pope wanted him to paint the twelve apostles, one in each of the spandrels between the arches. The central part of the ceiling was to be filled by "ornaments according to custom," apparently an elaborate network of painted ornamental motifs and geometrical fields. Michelangelo objected that the design would be "a poor thing." "Why?" asked the pope. "Because they [the apostles] were poor too," replied Michelangelo. And then, still according to the artist's own version (written much later, at a time when he was threatened with lawsuits over the non-delivery of the tomb), the pope told him he could paint anything he liked . . .

Now the twelve apostles gave way to Old Testament prophets and sibyls from classical antiquity, all seated on gigantic thrones. They are arranged so that prophets alternate with sibyls around the ceiling and prophets face sibyls across the ceiling . . . The thrones are niches with massive cornices upheld by pairs of putti painted to resemble marble sculpture, and they become part of the simulated architecture of the ceiling . . . At left and right above each throne along the side walls sit two nude youths (twenty in all) . . . Nine scenes from Genesis, alternating between large and small, fill the center of the ceiling . . .

[Michelangelo] set to work at once, producing hundreds of preliminary drawings that had to be made before the large cartoons could be started. Some of the drawings survive, suggesting the labor that went into every detail, but the cartoons have perished. They were laid up against the surface of the moist intonaco, and their outlines traced through with a stylus. The stylus marks in the plaster can even be seen in photographs. Michelangelo designed a new kind of scaffolding that could bring him up to the proper level, without support from either the ceiling or the floor . . . It permitted the artist to walk about as he wished and to paint from a standing position— and not lying down, as is still popularly believed. In a sonnet he described the physical discomfort he experienced while painting continuously from a standing position:

I've got myself a goiter from this strain . . . My beard toward Heaven, I feel the back of my brain Upon my neck, I grow the breast of a Harpy; My brush, above my face continually, Makes it a splendid floor by dripping down . . . Pointless the unseeing steps I go. In front of me, my skin is being stretched While it folds up behind and forms a knot, And I am bending like a Syrian bow.

The scaffolding also aided Michelangelo in creating the measured framework of illusionistic architecture, a delicate procedure since the chapel narrows toward the altar. By September 1508 Michelangelo was already painting, and by January 1509 he was already in difficulties . . .

The course of his work paralleled dramatic events in the pontificate of Julius II. When Michelangelo ran out of money, which happened twice, he had to go up to Bologna and beg from the pope, who was in the midst of the crucial phase of his war against the French . . .

After the first section of the ceiling was completed in September 1510, the planks of the scaffolding were removed, and Michelangelo had his first chance to see how the work looked from the floor. Even within the first section, we can see that his style was changing as he worked and that the figures were growing in size and breadth . . . [488-499]

Excerpts from Renaissance (1999) by Andrew Graham-Dixon

The ceiling is so full of allusions to classical sculpture that it sometimes seems almost like a painted version of a Roman art collection. The figure of Adam is based in part on a fragment of antique art known as the Belvedere Torso, while his pose is derived from that of antique river gods. Many of the other figures on the ceiling contain reminiscences of the Roman marble group of Laocoön and his Sons, which Michelangelo helped to unearth after its discovery in a vineyard on the Esquiline Hill in 1506. This was clearly an inspiration behind one of the most disorienting images on the ceiling, The Brazen Serpent, in which worshippers of the false idol writhe in the coils of serpents.

The Sistine Chapel ceiling was controversial in Michelangelo's own lifetime. Less then ten years after it was completed Pope Hadrian VI condemned it as 'a bathroom of nudes', a crude judgement but one which conveys how startling Michelangelo's work could seem to his contemporaries. The artist had included many elements, both aesthetic and erotic, which seemed to have almost no theological justification.

On each of the twenty pedestals of the imaginary architecture which frames the nine scenes from Genesis, Michelangelo perched a single naked male figure, mysterious in significance and beautiful in form. These, presumably, where Hadrian's nudes in the bathroom. Twisting and turning, sometimes gesturing, sometimes lost in contemplation, they epitomize the artist's boldness and originality. But how these nudes or ignudi were meant to relate to the rest of the cycle is not known . . . Some of them seem simply pagan-decorative. Others seem charged with intent . . .

Together with Giotto's paintings on the walls of the Arena Chapel, Michelangelo's paintings for the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel are the most celebrated frescoes of the Christian painting tradition. Yet they mark a very different moment. A great gulf separates Michelangelo from Giotto . . . [197-202]

Sistine Chapel Ceiling (1508-12) Samples of Michelangelo’s Poetry The Technique of Pouncing