The Sistine Chapel looks like an enormous drawing by Daumier.
—Pablo Picasso
A marvelous draughtsman but a poor painter.
—Jean Cocteau
These judgments—that the Sistine ceiling was basically a drawing and that it was essentially monochrome, like the sepia panels painted by Daumier—are reports from the past that tell us how the ceiling looked in the 1930s, when the two men spent time in Rome with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. They tell us what the ceiling looked like before the most recent cleaning, which was approved in 1994. I visited Rome in 1996 as a guest of the American master Cy Twombly, who was enthusiastic about the restoration, which, he argued, proved that Michelangelo was truly a great painter. Before I left New York I had been persuaded by my colleague James Beck that the restoration was a catastrophic failure. I had seen it when it looked much as Picasso and Cocteau described, except that I felt it was sublime. Until I discussed it with Twombly and his associate, Nicola Del Roscio, I had resolved to give it a pass.
The former director general of the Vatican Museums, Carlo Pietrangeli, writes in the preface to a publication about the restoration: “It is like opening a window in a dark room and seeing it flooded with light.” But what if it changed the meaning of what was seen before the presumably dirty window was opened? Then there is a possibility that we had for centuries been deceived regarding what Michelangelo’s intentions actually were. Some of the arguments connected with the restoration were scientific, some were art historical. But I nowhere saw a philosophical argument. Since my definition is intended as a piece of philosophy, I want to address the restoration from the perspective of what art is, understood philosophically.
A few years after the heavily controverted cleansing of the Sistine ceiling was completed, a book so opulently expensive that review copies were merely lent to reviewers, and delivered by what the publishers boasted were “bonded messengers,” undertook definitively to answer the criticisms by reproducing the beauty Michelangelo’s contemporaries allegedly beheld. The publicity flyer for the book shows the famous face of Michelangelo’s Eve both pre- and postcleaning, comically like those before-and-after juxtapositions which prey on our secret hopes and agonies—frog to left, prince to the right; ninety-pound weakling to the left, Mr. Universe to the right, confident in his superb muscularity; mortifyingly beaky nose to the left, perky turned up Miss American Pie nose to the right, as in Andy Warhol’s great Before and After of 1961. Eve Before differs from Eve After primarily because a coating of animal glue, injudiciously applied around 1710—roughly two centuries after the great vault was completed—left a triangular patch down Eve Before’s cheek.
The differences, including the patch, seem hardly dramatic enough to justify the before-after format: it is not as though Eve After shows us anything not already visible in Eve Before, and the patch itself would be largely invisible to those standing sixty-eight feet below, on the chapel’s floor. A cannon shell went through the ceiling at the time of the War for Unification, removing a fairly large segment from the Deluge, but this is hardly noticed by those caught up in the great epic above their heads. If what was removed from Sistine ceiling Before to yield Sistine ceiling After is illustrated by the two faces of Eve, there could scarcely have been grounds for controversy. No one’s perceptions of that face could have been greatly changed by the cleaning. Nothing of substance to the interpretation of the work could have been greatly changed, if this is the evidence. The faces do differ in tonality and warmth—but aesthetics can hardly discriminate them as better and worse. The earlier would best correspond to what we suppose were Michelangelo’s intentions—but is Eve After so divergent from those intentions to justify the immense risks to which restoration exposed this irreplaceable work? There was no simple answer. What one group perceived as soil of time on the ceiling before it was cleaned, another saw as a kind of metaphysical twilight central to Michelangelo’s expression: figures seemed to struggle out of and sink into the darkness the way the bound slaves struggle out of and sink into the stone in certain of the sculptures meant for the Julian Tomb, and the ceiling as a whole had in consequence a heroic dimension now quite washed away, a loss for which the recovery of the original colors is not even imaginably worth the risk, especially if, with Plato, we think of ourselves as imprisoned in a cave, from which a fortunate few escape into the light. But if what seemed like metaphysical transfiguration was merely an artifact of candle soot and incense smoke, the work may have lost the sublimity long incorrectly ascribed to it.
So the expensive picture book’s before-and-after shot of the ceiling in mid-cleaning is inconclusive. It looks like a contrast between rotogravure and the color pages, but that may be a category mistake of the first order. Certainly much of what the book showed were stiff and awkward figures in almost lurid Mannerist colors, stripped, mostly, of any sense of cosmic struggle. It feels much as if, if this is what Michelangelo painted, he was far less great an artist than we had believed; rather he was indebted, as it were, to time and grime as benign collaborators. But suppose what had been washed away was the metaphoric shadow of the human condition as emblematized by Plato’s cave, so that the intensification of color was purchased at a terrible expenditure of now lost meaning? Often the figures look crude at close range—so crude that it is easy to agree, on the basis of the book, with those who claim the work was ruined. I have to concede that I was enough convinced by critics of the restoration, one of whom described the restoration as an artistic Chernobyl, to refuse to visit the chapel on principle, preferring my memory to a panorama of terrible loss. And I was deeply suspicious of the evidence that the ceiling was in serious danger of falling, based upon a small piece of painted plaster found on the chapel floor. How difficult would it have been to have planted that, preying on the fears—and cupidity—of those anxious to clean this masterpiece at any cost?
So we are left with a choice of whether what has been taken away is dirt or meaning. It is here, I suppose, that the bound slaves become so important, since they provide an analogy to the figures in the ceiling—these struggling to free themselves from matter, those from darkness, if the engulfing darkness corresponded to the uncarved stone of the sculptures—integral, in either case, to the meaning of the works. There are two ways of thinking of restoration with the sculptures, one far more radical than the other. Their patination could be scrubbed away, leaving them bright and somewhat raw, and just as Michelangelo’s contemporaries saw them. With this there would be no loss of meaning, and it would be a mere matter of taste which was the preferred state. Suppose instead that someone decided to carve away the uncarved stone, releasing the figure as Michelangelo intended. He famously declared that his aim as a sculptor was to release the figure from the stone, and our imagined “restorer” might say he was merely helping to realize Michelangelo’s intention. We would certainly not see them as Michelangelo’s contemporaries did. But far more important is the fact that in losing the uncarved block, we might have lost a priceless meaning. The problem with the ceiling is that the darkness can be read as patination, loosely speaking, or as metaphysically analogous to the unremoved stone and hence part of the meaning. I once heard a guard at the Uffizi answer a tourist’s question about the “Unfinished Michelangelo” with “Si Michelangelo è finito, è finito!” The duality of unfinished as against finished is underdetermined by what we see. But so is the duality between dirt and metaphysics underdetermined by what we saw but no longer see. So the question returns: Was the darkness a physical consequence of age and abuse, rightly removed by an advanced science of restoration, or was it part of the artistic intention of the work, to our irremediable loss arrogantly cleansed away?
It may be conceded that one could not wash away something that belonged to true fresco, just because of the chemical interaction between lime and water that creates the crust of calcium carbonate and gives fresco its permanence. It is like washing porcelain. But paint can be applied a secco, over the carbonized pigment. What if Michelangelo added that which gives the metaphysical interpretations their purchase a secco, after the individual frescoes were indelibly fixed? This is not as readily settled by appeal to objective observation as the condition of the stone is in the bound slaves. Indeed, it might be enough an open question that the more conservative course would have been the wiser, leaving it possible that in removing the dirt we were washing away what had been put there by Michelangelo, intending that play of light and dark which serves as metaphor for the strivings of the incarcerated soul. There would then be a question of whether, in removing the grime, we were not removing something more.
How can such a question be closed? In my view, one would have to determine whether such a metaphysical intention is really consistent with, let alone entailed by, the meaning of the actual episodes Michelangelo depicted across the vault. In this I differ from Gianluigi Colalucci, who was responsible for the restoration, and who sought to sidestep interpretation by restricting his focus to the condition of the paint, treating the ceiling as a physical object. “Today in art conservation, objectivity is at the root of a proper working method,” Colalucci insists. Notwithstanding the fact that “the debate over the cleaning of the Sistine ceiling assumed violent and even apocalyptic overtones,” it would only be by proceeding objectively—“Step by step and brushstroke by brushstroke”—that we could arrive at knowledge of “the true nature of Michelangelo’s art.” And Colalucci voices his restorer’s credo: “I believe that the best approach to working on Michelangelo is absolute passivity. . . . If we attempt to interpret a work of art, we end up imposing conditions on the cleaning process.” My view, by contrast, is that interpretation should impose conditions on the cleaning process, and that what Colalucci achieved might have been defended by arguing that nothing internal to the meaning of Michelangelo’s imagery entails an interpretation of the ceiling based on the almost monochrome play of light and dark the Neoplatonic reading of it requires. There is reason to be disturbed by the restorer’s agenda of willed passivity, which seeks to answer questions about the work “objectively,” with reference to the paint alone, especially since secco additions to the painting’s surface could have been placed there by Michelangelo’s hand. But Colalucci declares that “nine and a half years of daily contact with Michelangelo’s frescoes brought me close, if such a thing is possible, to the artist and the man.” And he offers in evidence the way in which (before) “the banal, pale burnt ochre” of the solar disk in the panel in which God lets there be light can now be seen (after) as “bright as a burning furnace with its clear yellow glow, dark reddish core, and imperceptible circular beams of green.” I have little reason to deny that he has in fact gotten closer, through cleaning, to Michelangelo, artist and man, if the artist were primarily a colorist and the man primarily interested in getting the look of objects right—as if Michelangelo were a kind of Impressionist and this were a work by Monet under restoration. How little Colalucci did pay attention to “Michelangelo, artist and man,” emerges when he describes the sequence of famous images that line the central vault. “Michelangelo painted the scenes on the Sistine ceiling in reverse order—that is, he started with the Deluge and finished with the first day of Creation.” In other words, he began with the end of the narrative, and ended with its beginning. But Michelangelo did not start, nor does the sequence end, with the Deluge. He started, and the sequence of nine episodes ends, with the Drunkenness of Noah. The Deluge is second in the order of creation and eighth in the order of the tremendous narrative which Creation begins. It shows how Mannerist an artist Michelangelo was when he began his immense undertaking. Dropping this work from his own narrative, Colalucci makes it difficult to follow Michelangelo’s own stylistic evolution, and even more his own plan—after all, he decided upon what was to be the last panel before he painted any of the other episodes.
Colalucci’s sentence stopped me in my tracks: nine and a half years, brushstroke by brushstroke, and the chief restorer gets the beginning and the ending wrong! It seems to me that if you get the sequence wrong you could get everything wrong, however convincing the sun may now be. And I felt a sense of waste and loss and even tragedy in this victim of a misconceived ideal of objectivity. The misconception lies in the faith that objectivity is a matter of brushstroke by brushstroke, inch by inch. But in fact this agenda is hostage to an interpretation of Michelangelo as a very different kind of painter than there is reason to believe he was. There is a famous reductionist claim by the Nabi painter Maurice Denis that “a picture, before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote—is essentially a plane surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.” My sense is that this defines precisely Colalucci’s attitude toward the painting he pretended to have rescued from “the muddy veil which was suffocating it.” Get back to the spots of color, and the meaning will take care of itself!
I want to pause here and consider the fact that there are no “plane surfaces” in the Sistine ceiling. The space was built to the dimensions of Solomon’s temple as described in 1 Kings—its length twice its height and three times its width. The temple was itself modeled on the tabernacle whose exceedingly exigent architect was God himself, since it was to be his dwelling place; and the tabernacle was a kind of tent, which (in my view) is alluded to in the complex curvatures of Sixtus IV’s vault. It has the complex geometry of a canopy. The original decoration was suitably the blue sky dotted with golden stars, which gives the sense of looking upward through a kind of opening to what Kant called “the starry heavens above.” Pope Julius II wanted a more “modern” decoration, and we know that Michelangelo exploited the curvatures in his articulation of the motifs he painted. He transformed the ceiling from an illusion of the open sky to an illusory piece of architecture, with a mock ceiling, supported by illusory columns. You can’t, after all, hang paintings on the sky! And he found ways to illuminate the curved spaces with images.
To what degree did these curvatures contribute to the images themselves? This would not have been a question for Maurice Denis, who painted on flat canvases. As canvases, purchased at art supply shops in Paris, were invariably flat, flatness was never something with which images could have interacted. Images might interact with edges, but not with surfaces, which were always more or less the same. But this was not the case with curved surfaces, as we shall see—though it took some time for Michelangelo to recognize the possibilities the curvatures presented. His exploitation of these figured prominently in the appreciation of Michelangelo’s achievement by his contemporaries.
Consider the figure of Jonah, which does not belong to the narrative of the ceiling but is painted in the style of the last episodes Michelangelo painted (though the earliest in the narrative order). Jonah is placed just over The Last Judgment, in a space bounded by two pendentives, on what is the concave surface of a truncated spherical triangle. If we think of the space abstractly, it would be a shaped canvas in three dimensions, somewhat similar to certain pieces by Ellsworth Kelly. Michelangelo shows the prophet leaning energetically back in this triangular alcove, and what astonished Michelangelo’s peers, like Condivi, was that “the torso that thrust inward is on the part of the ceiling closest to the eye, and the legs that thrust outward are in the most distant part. A stupendous work, declaring how much knowledge there is in this man in the faculty of drawing lines in foreshortening and in perspective.” There is a contradiction, in effect, between physical surface and the pictorial illusion, which led Vasari to regard the panel with Jonah as the “culmination and epitome” of the great ceiling. Could Jonah be struggling to free himself from the ceiling, to struggle free of the physicality of the ceiling as the bound slaves struggled free from the stone, to come, in effect, to life? I don’t think a brushstroke by brushstroke procedure can answer that question. In my view, it can be answered only with reference to an interpretation—a piece, really, of inferential art criticism. I shall argue that it should be answered negatively.
Meanwhile, I draw attention to the fact that color plays no role to speak of in Condivi’s description. What I mean to underscore is that foreshortening and perspective are attainments of drawing primarily, augmented by the effect of chiaroscuro, the “art of design, dark and light,” which, though certainly attainable in painting by adding amounts of black to a given hue, is in no sense an attainment of color as such, but of values of colors, which goes with shading and highlight. But secondly, Condivi was a sculptor, as Vasari was an architect, and both were sensitive to the handling of real three-dimensional spaces. Would this even be visible from the floor? Maurice Denis’s maxim epitomizes a modernist posture, begun by Manet, whose canvases were described by Zola as “an ensemble of delicate, accurate taches” (House, p. 75). Monet internalized this ideal in 1890, the very year of Denis’s declaration, in his advice to an American student, Lilla Cabot Perry: “When you go out to paint, try to forget what object you have before you, a tree, a house, a field or whatever. Merely think: here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives you your own naive impression of the scene before you.” Zola added to his characterization “from a few steps back, [the taches] give a striking relief to the picture.” Michelangelo had nothing before him. The interplay between surface and image was too intricate and complex to imagine that he could have painted it the way Lilla Perry would have painted a house by a tree, following Monet’s instruction. Contrary to Denis, the painting was first Jonah, and then the brushstrokes. We have to ask what the image meant before we can even think of the pigment.
I draw attention to Jonah mainly because the energy of the figure makes it as good a candidate for someone struggling out of darkness as we are likely to find in the ceiling’s population. Jonah’s proto-Baroque figure really does look as if it is struggling, as indeed it is, since he is being disgorged by the somewhat ornamental fish, and has truly come from the darkness of “the belly of the beast” into the light. As restored, the light feels like the pale light of dawn, not dissimilar to the light into which Christ arises from the dark of the sepulcher in Piero’s Resurrection. The parallel with Christ’s resurrection was intended, and it is why Jonah is represented in the first place. I feel that it would have been inconsistent with the meaning of resurrection to have had Jonah-Christ come into a second darkness—the metaphysical darkness the Neoplatonist reading requires. But if this is true in the case of Jonah, it would be even more true of the other figures in the ceiling, who are not represented as engaged in struggle at all, such as Jonah’s pendant, Zechariah, stationed at the other pole of the axis that bisects the ceiling longitudinally, and shown in profile, reading a book, with a pair of angels reading over his shoulder. We have to pay particular attention to the complex framework within which the figures and scenes depicted are set. The ceiling is divided into spaces by heavy, painted frames—as if the whole ceiling were a sort of picture gallery articulated into distinct if related episodes. An overall darkness would not make sense. It might make sense with The Last Judgment, where there are none of these divisions but masses of figures driven by spiritual winds, and caught up in postures of ecstasy and agony, exultation, and despair, and where light and darkness might signify damnation and salvation. The ceiling implies a uniform illumination which goes with the illusion of an overhead picture gallery, allowing Michelangelo to use darkness and light within the pictures, in whatever way the individual episodes narratively require, without having, in addition, to totalize the episodes into a single feeling which the prerestorational darkness implied. Each picture has its own space. The common space belongs to the pictures, not their subjects. So one feels that a bit of interpretation would have assured S. Colalucci that he might proceed with impunity. It is precisely against an interpretation based on meaning that any argument in favor of retaining the darkness has to collapse. He may not have proceeded any differently, had he understood this, but he could have justified what he had done in ways the procedures themselves were unable to do. In truth, the critics were as positivistic as the restorers. They too treated the work as a physical object. But an artwork is an embodied meaning, and the meaning is as intricately related to the material object as the soul is to the body. Michelangelo created a world as well as an object, and one has to try to enter the world in order to see what parts of the physical objects are relevant. The hole in the roof has a story, but not a meaning that belongs to the work.
The overall sense of the ceiling today is that of a decorated expanse, the color scheme of which is now pretty continuous with what one sees elsewhere in the Vatican, in rooms and corridors surrounding the awesome chapel, and decorated around the same time that it was. My sense is that for just these reasons, the colors were invisible to Michelangelo’s contemporaries, simply because they were the colors anyone would have expected in a “modern” space, and did not stand out. Indeed, had the ceiling looked the way it looked before the recent restoration—looked the way many of us remember it—it would have been remarked upon by those contemporaries. It would have looked like a subtly colored but largely monochrome drawing. But I speculate that just because the colors were consistent with cutting edge interior decoration circa 1508, nobody especially paid them great attention. What they saw, as witness the testimony of Condivi and Vasari, was the powerful drawing and the antinomies between the two modes of being a picture—the one mode physical, and very much what Denis had in mind by colors assembled on a surface, the other pictorial and astonishing—and then the interaction between these modes, as in the great Jonah. Viewers—or the ones Michelangelo would have been concerned about—were perhaps far less interested in color than in the virtuoso way in which image and space were handled, as in the great Jonah. The question for me was what role the color played in their experience of the chapel, and I tentatively conclude: none. And from that perspective, nothing much would have been lost had the ceiling in fact been monochrome, except that its contemporaries, with their decorative expectations, would have been baffled. Goethe, in 1786, stunned by the great work, wrote, “If only there were some means of fixing such pictures in one’s soul! But at least I shall bring with me all the engravings and drawings after his work that I can find.” There were no such things as color reproductions in 1786, but in my view the inevitably monochrome reproductions, in black or sepia or sanguine, would have given Goethe most of what he wanted and needed (there had been three restorations before Goethe was overwhelmed by Michelangelo’s “grandiose vision”). Michelangelo had protested at the time of his commission that he was not really a painter, and I think he probably meant this. Here is how Vasari, his greatest admirer, describes the work in his life of Michelangelo: “Every beholder who can judge of such things, now stands amazed at the excellence of the figures, the perfection of the foreshortenings, the astonishing roundness of the outlines, and the grace and flexibility, with the beautiful truth of proportions which are seen in the exquisite nude forms here exhibited; and the better to display the resources of his art, Michelangelo has given them of every age, with varieties of expression and form as well as of countenance and feature” (Vasari, 259).
Nowhere in Vasari’s expansive commentary is there any mention of the great use of color, though in describing the first sibyl he notes that Michelangelo had been “anxious to show that the blood has been frozen by Time,” which may or may not have required color. So what Goethe wished to remember would have been adequately served by the excellent engravings on sale at the calcographica. This is a striking confirmation of a curious view of Descartes, that so far as objective representation is concerned, engravings can depict “forests, towns, people, and even battles and storms” without resorting to color, regarding the objective reality of which he had great doubts, as did most seventeenth century philosophers. According to Veronique Foti, “The Royal Academy, founded less than two decades after Descartes’s death, remained thoroughly Cartesian in its conviction that, in painting, color, as a purely sensory element, must be subordinated to rational considerations.” I suppose they had in mind perspective and composition—the geometry of space. I am not sure that foreshortening belongs to this list, as it appeals precisely to truths about the eye.
Still, the cleaning did make things more vivid, most especially the complex illusionist architecture that frames the various images, which are, for reasons I shall consider in a moment, really pictures of pictures. I mean that they are doubly illusory: there are the illusions in the pictures, and the illusions of the pictures. It is, in this sense, like those paintings of collections of paintings, commissioned by collectors in the next century. It may strike us as odd that the illusion requires that paintings be hung on the ceiling! But Michelangelo was the most visionary of Mannerist architects. In his Laurentian library, for example, he transferred a volute from ceiling to floor and turned it into a sort of buttress, giving it a giant dimension. So why not treat the ceiling as a wall? The cleaning makes clear the fact that those are pictures of pictures by giving a certain clarity to the framing apparatus.
Whether it was that or the political atmosphere we in the nineties breathed, I noticed certain things that I had never paid attention to before I was prevailed upon to enter the chapel again, and see with my own eyes what had been achieved. In contemplating the nine pictures in the ceiling’s narrative, from the Creation to Noah’s Drunkenness, what struck me was the fact that the central picture—central to the narrative, dividing it in two, and corresponding to the longitudinal center of the chapel itself—is the Creation of Eve. It fits the feminist cast of our vision today that in some way the creation of woman is the controlling event in the great story. God has separated light from darkness, created the heavens, divided the waters from the earth, and fashioned man from a handful of dust. Those are four episodes, and in the fifth God summons woman into being by a gesture of his hand while Adam sleeps. That is the fifth episode. Then there is the Temptation and the Fall, the Sacrifice of Noah, the Deluge, and finally Noah lying stone drunk on the floor, to the consternation of his three sons. What strikes me is that God is in every picture through the creation of woman, and absent from every picture after that. It is as though there is a definite break in the order of things. Once woman is there, history begins. Before that there was simply cosmology, governed by a kind of anthropic principle. After that, sex, moral knowledge, piety, flood, inebriation. Had the narrative ended with the Deluge, it would, as destruction, have corresponded symmetrically to Creation, but that would have seemed pointless, a mere doing and undoing. In some way it is important that it end in Noah’s Drunkenness. That proves the futility of the flood as a way of beginning all over again. A new kind of intervention is required, given the reality of the human material. That has, I think, to be understood if we are to understand the story, which is what alarmed me when Colalucci got the sequence wrong.
I have, I must confess, not seen it anywhere said that the great climactic event, which divided the period of cosmology from the period of history, was the creation of the human female. Mainly this is because scholars read the nine panels in a different way—as a triplet of triplets—with the central triplet the creation of man and mankind’s fall, with three scenes of the creation of matter on one side and, on the other, three scenes of the emergence of—I quote from Howard Hibbard—“a new chosen man, Noah.” Well, it is true that God “chose” Noah—he after all did not choose but made Adam—and he did so because, though “God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5), Noah “found grace in the eyes of the Lord” (Genesis 6:8) because he was “just, and perfect in his generations, and walked with the Lord” (Genesis 6:9). God drowned everyone else as a botched job. So what does it mean that the story ends with Noah dead drunk and naked by the wine barrel? Drunkenness was not in itself sinful, save that it led Noah to expose himself, hence exposing others to the danger of seeing his nakedness—a kind of danger Noah’s sons respond to by backing in and covering it. Nakedness, of course, means specifically genital exposure, which can have a shattering, if ill-understood, significance even today, and it is an interesting question whether this will be dissolved as male frontal nudity becomes more and more commonplace onstage and on-screen. That will certainly obscure for us the shattering significance it has in Genesis, since Ham, the son who sees his father’s penis, even if by accident, knows he is to pay a terrible price: the other two sons back into the paternal presence, eyes averted, bringing Noah’s cloak to cover not his nakedness but the emblem and reality of his power: “Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness” (Genesis 9:23). Lucky for them: Noah cursed Ham—“a servant of servants shall he be to his brethren” (Genesis 9:25). The sight of his nakedness brings inequality into the world, and in consequence the reality of politics in human life. In any case, something crucial would have been lost in ending the story with the Deluge, whatever the meaning of this final panel.
Possibly Noah, drunk and naked, implies the ineradicable weakness of human beings—after all, Noah, who was regarded as the one worth saving, is in the end a bad lot. Catastrophes, if there is to be any human remnant, are insufficiently radical solutions to the problem of human badness, and only the miracle of salvation is capable of overcoming the sins of our endowed substance. So the story that begins with creation ends with the need to intervene in history in a new way, by God himself taking on the attributes of the flesh and being reborn through suffering. Still, there is Eve, midway precisely between creation and the revelation through weakness of humanity’s hopeless condition. She would certainly not have had that central position if there were four episodes before her creation, and only three episodes after, as Colalucci’s description implies. Something as momentous as creation must be entailed by the last episode, and that would be God’s sacrifice of his son as a means to redeem sullied humanity from eternal damnation.
Meyer Schapiro wrote that medieval readers saw the “Ave” uttered by the Angel of the Annunciation as “Eve” written backward, as though Mary reversed the act of her sister. So Mary and Eve would be reverse and obverse of the same moral being. And the coming into being of woman engendering a history in which nothing is finally changed in the human material is reversed by Mary, through whom history is placed on a heretofore unimagined plane. Hibbard writes, “The Creation of Eve is crucial for the whole decoration.” There is another consideration. If Eve is midpoint, this makes the end points especially salient. The first panel is Creation, and the mid-panel Eve, which makes Noah drunk an odd choice for the last panel unless—Noah and Christ are one in the same way Eve and Mary are one. He is sinful humankind. So Noah points to a future which lies outside the narrative panels entirely, reminding us that there has to be some reason why the narrative panels are surrounded by prophets (seven) and sibyls (five), identified through the fact that they foretell the future. And finally, using Eve as midpoint, the last four panels form a certain unity in that Noah’s nakedness is connected to the discovery of nakedness through shame in the Fall and the Expulsion—the first panel after Eve’s creation.
It is just here that the restorer, with his view of objective neutrality, cannot speak, but neither can he pretend to have gotten “close to the artist and the man.” The artist and the man told a story through painting the ceiling, and we have to read the story to know why he painted the ceiling the way he did. Or: we have to seek access to his mind through projecting interpretative hypotheses as to the meaning of the work, since the artist never divulged his program. Which, if either is true, has to be settled in part by art criticism, in part by art history. For my immediate purpose it does not matter how we come out. The main thing is that there is no reading without interpretation, though one can, with the restorer, be passive and simply let one’s eyes register the brushstrokes and take in the fiery sun and the silvery moon. But that is hardly what Michelangelo as “artist and man” is all about.
Saint Augustine argued, on the basis of some curious evidence, that in Paradise there was no such thing as sexual passion. He thought that Adam possessed full control over his body, including the genital apparatus, and that he did not have to be aroused in order to plant a seed in his consort’s womb. There would have been no such thing as sexual temptation in Paradise, so the serpent had to find another path to Eve’s weakness. With the knowledge imparted by the forbidden fruit, passion entered the human mind, and passion caused us to do what reason would have counseled us against. Human history—the history from which God is absent—is the history of passions. The penis is the emblem of that, an unruly member over which we have imperfect control. To perceive Noah’s nakedness is to perceive his all too human weakness. It is that of which Adam and Eve were ashamed. Frederick Hart, an art historian, writes of the “total and explicit male and female nudity” in Michelangelo’s ceiling, “unprecedented and un-followed in Christian visual narrative, thus declaring the essential purpose of the instruments of generation through which the will of the Creator is fulfilled.” I don’t see that, especially, once again, because of the significance of Noah’s genital nakedness and its consequences for history. I cannot see it as connected to divine intention, but as thwarting it, forcing God to have recourse to an entirely new way of dealing with the fateful flaw in his handwork. If Hart were right, there would be as many female ignude in the spaces outside the narrative as there are male ignudi—twenty-two in all.
But there aren’t any females at all.
How are we to deal with this garland of jeunes hommes en fleur? I very tentatively offer the thought that they emblematize a higher form of love than the fleshly love embodied in the panels. It will not perhaps go down easily to claim that homosexual love has deep affinities with Christian love, except that what we call Platonic love, between two men, can have nothing to do with generation, and so allows the possibility of love transacted on a higher moral plane. The ancient conception of friendship, discussed so deeply by Aristotle, was possible only between members of the same sex, and while this has very little to do with gay sex, as we understand it, orgiastically, today, it must be remembered that the humanists of Florentine culture were Platonists through and through—and it was for them that the ceiling was finally painted. It was the story of the rise and transcendence of sexual passion, and the glorification of the kind of love Christ allegedly had for humanity, in which, again, generation played no role. So Platonism comes into the interpretation, after all, but in ways having nothing to do with what was mere dirt—matter confused as meaning.
As a philosopher, I would cherish an argument which demonstrates that the mind cannot be mapped onto the brain any better than the Sistine ceiling can be mapped onto the brushstrokes—and that Eliminativists are as misled as Colalucci. It would be great if the analogy itself were accepted, even if we did not know where to go from there.