The different levels of the ceiling imply different degrees of closeness to God. In the lowest tiers are the fourteen lunettes and eight spandrels containing the ancestors of Christ. Their arrangement has caused much confusion and prompted much unnecessarily ingenious speculation. Michelangelo’s source was the opening of the New Testament Book of Matthew, in which Christ’s male lineage, from Abraham to Joseph, is traced across forty-two generations in a great list of names, strung like pearls on a chain of begettings:
Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob; and Jacob begat Judas and his brethren; And Judas begat Phares and Zara of Thamar; and Phares begat Esrom; and Esrom begat Aram; And Aram begat Aminadab; and Aminadab begat Naasson; and Naasson begat Salmon ... and Eleazar begat Matthan; and Matthan begat Jacob; And Jacob begat Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ. (Matthew I: 1-16)
The ancestors of Christ embody his physical lineage, the history of his blood, whereas the popes were held to embody the unbroken line of his spiritual legacy. Michelangelo placed the ancestors directly above the fifteenth-century portraits of the popes that line the walls of the Sistine Chapel at the level of the building’s windows. In this way, he softened the transition between the earlier decorations of the chapel and his own work. The portraits of the popes are arranged in a chronological order that zigzags across the chapel’s north and south walls. This is also ostensibly the arrangement that Michelangelo has chosen for his depictions of the ancestors.
In the middle of each lunette, just above the window arch, a tablet is inscribed with the names of particular ancestors of Christ. The series originally began with two lunettes high up on the west wall, directly above the altar. But Michelangelo destroyed these when he returned to the Sistine Chapel, more than twenty-five years later, to paint his monumental Last Judgement. So Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Judas; Phares, Esron and Aram have all disappeared into oblivion.
In its surviving form the sequence begins on the north wall, with the lunette next to The Death of Haman, which carries the single name of Aminadab. It continues in the opposite lunette, on the south wall, next to The Brazen Serpent, inscribed with the name of Naasson. It then continues to cross back and forth across the chapel, reaching its conclusion in the two lunettes on the east wall – above the entrance – which are, in accordance with the end of the list in the Book of Matthew, inscribed with the names of Matthan and Eleazar and those of Jacob and Joseph.
The inscriptions might seem to suggest that the figures in the lunettes and spandrels should be seen as literal depictions of the individuals named in the biblical succession of Christ. But the paintings themselves make a manifest nonsense of such an approach. Whereas there are forty names in the lunette inscriptions, all of them male, Michelangelo painted over ninety figures in the lunettes and spandrels, including many women and young children. The figures are often vividly realised and occasionally verge on caricatures – such as the hunchbacked greybeard in the ‘Salmon Booz Obed’ lunette, who stares with comical puzzlement at the carved handle of his walking stick, which is decorated with a gurning, gargoyle version of his own face. Many of the paintings of ancestors are of distinctly pedestrian quality, which suggests that Michelangelo’s assistants were allowed to paint a considerable portion of this section of the ceiling. Literal interpretation of the images is made even harder by the paintings in the small spandrels above them. These contain depictions of mothers and fathers sleeping or resting with their children and swell the cast of the ancestors yet further.
The attempt to put a name to every face is plainly futile. Yet many scholars have insisted – and continue to insist – that Michelangelo’s figures must correspond exactly to the biblical list in the Book of Matthew. This has produced some distinctly perverse interpretations. One example is the final lunette, over the entrance wall, which according to its label is devoted to the subject of Jacob and Joseph. Like all these compositions, it is divided into two halves by the tablet of names. To the left there is a cowed old man huddled within the folds of his yellow cloak. He is flanked by a much younger woman, in green, who seems to be dozing, and a sturdy infant shown in profile. To the right sits another young woman, with an elaborate coiffure and a lively, flirtatious expression on her face, who is flanked by an elderly man. A child perched close to the shoulder of the man receives what appears to be a loaf of bread from another child who stands on the ground. Those seeking a one-to-one correspondence between the names and the painted ancestors are forced to find Jacob, his wife and the infant Joseph in the figures to the left; and to find Mary, Joseph and the Christ child in the figures to the right. This fails to explain why Mary and Joseph, if it really is them, should be accompanied by not one but two children. The idea was mooted that this might be a representation of the infant John the Baptist – an explanation wrecked when the ceiling was cleaned in the 1980s, revealing that the second child is in fact not a boy, but a girl. But iconographers are nothing if not ingenious and a Plan B was swiftly formulated to deal with the awkward problem. The little girl became a female personification of the Church presenting Christ with a symbolic attribute of the Eucharist.
Such exegeses, positively yogic in their flexibility, fail to answer certain questions. Why should Michelangelo have painted Jacob as a fearful, wizened simpleton? Why depict Mary, the Mother of God, as a skittish coquette? The most likely answer is that the artist never meant the individuals in these paintings to be seen as particular figures from the Bible. Even if these figures were to be regarded as Mary, Joseph and Christ – executed, for the sake of plausibility, by a clumsy assistant with no sense of decorum – there are many other scenes where no amount of iconographical spadework can excavate the particular identities of the particular figures shown. The best explanation is that Michelangelo, faced with the endless succession of biblical names, treated the ancestors not as individuals but as a collective representation of the peoples of Israel before the coming of Christ. He varied the figures from scene to scene, simply to avoid tedium.
Not that he eliminated tedium altogether, because the paintings in the lunettes and spandrels are conspicuously shot through with a sense of lassitude. The figures seem oppressed by boredom, weighed down by the mundanity of lives that are going nowhere. It has sometimes been argued that these paintings demonstrate Michelangelo’s humanity, his interest in depicting the ordinary existence of ordinary people. But the truth is that he paints the daily round of merely domestic life as if it were a curse.
The female ancestors are generally busier than the men. One of them spins, another weaves and another cuts cloth. Others are absorbed in suckling their babies, while the beleaguered mother in ‘Asa Josaphat Joram’ seems almost smothered by a surfeit of attention-hungry children. The men are occasionally drawn into such activities, although not willingly. In ‘Josias Jechonias Salathiel’ a couple is shown seated back to back. The woman holds one struggling child, the man another. As the children reach out towards each other, he looks across angrily towards her – while she does her best to ignore him – as if to say that he has done more than his fair share of babysitting. Another male ancestor is writing in a rather desultory way, but most are shown slumped in attitudes of melancholic lethargy. Several of them doze fitfully, heads lolling, and one – in ‘Aminadab’ – sits bolt upright with an expression of exasperated impatience on his face. They have the stunned and listless air of people travelling on an underground train, or stranded at an airport, or sitting, apprehensively, in a dentist’s waiting room.
Within the scheme of the ceiling as a whole, the ancestors represent a phase of human history and an aspect of the human condition decreed by divine plan. They may carry within them the physical seed of Christ but they are themselves spiritually unenlightened. They live in a time of waiting and receive no word from God, no sign or revelation. Condemned to a vacuity symbolised by the bare and shallow spaces they occupy, they are kept company only by each other, and by their shadows, cast prominently on the blank walls behind them. They are like the inhabitants of Plato’s cave, who see only the dancing shadows of truth but are blind to truth itself.
Michelangelo includes more images of Christ’s ancestors in the eight spandrels above the lunettes on the chapel’s north and south walls. Here once more they are shown in small family groups, sitting or lying on bare ground. The compositions of these scenes strongly recall traditional representations of the Holy Family on the Flight to Egypt. Like Mary and Joseph fleeing with their child, the ancestors in the spandrels are people on the run. Many of them look exhausted and several have fallen into a deep sleep. They are shown not in rooms, like their cousins in the lunettes, but outdoors, sometimes against dark backgrounds that suggest the night sky. Some of them recline on bags or sacks, which reinforces the impression that they are refugees or fugitives. They call to mind the archetypal image of the wandering Jew, as well as embodying the biblical idea that life on earth is merely transient, an act of passing through – a journey through ‘the land of the shadow of death’ (Isaiah 9: 2). They are the ‘strangers and pilgrims on the earth’ (Hebrews 11: 13). They also evoke the words of David’s blessing of the Lord (I Chronicles 29: 15): ‘For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers; our days on the earth are as a shadow.’