PART TWO

The Sistine Chapel Ceiling

The nine narrative paintings that run the length of the ceiling, from above the altar to above the main entrance of the chapel, tell stories drawn from the Book of Genesis. Their subjects are all-encompassing: the origin of the universe; the origin of Man; the origin of evil and the nature of life, as it must be lived, in the world after the Fall. They are arranged by Michelangelo into three triads, or groups of three. The first triad shows God creating the universe and the world. The second shows the creation of Adam and Eve, their falling into temptation in the garden of Eden, and their expulsion from paradise. The third tells the story of Noah, recounting the dark story of the deluge and giving an equally dark account of the beginnings of human history. Between them, these works go to the heart of Michelangelo’s intensely powerful, idiosyncratic spirituality and reveal the full extent of his genius as a painter.

The nine narrative paintings are like nine vertebrae forming a single spine. But Michelangelo’s fresco cycle does not only tell stories from Genesis. It also shows images of the prophets, the sibyls and the Saviour’s ancestors. Taken in its entirety, it amounts to a synthesis of all biblical history before the advent of Christ.

It is an obvious fact, but one worth re-emphasising, that Michelangelo’s paintings frame this great span of pre-Christian history from a Christian perspective. The assertion of Christ’s central salvific role in God’s plan for erring humanity is explicit in the very nature of the Sistine Chapel as a grand arena for ceremonial papal masses — a place where the pope himself, and his cardinals, mystically partake of the flesh and blood of the Saviour. Christ is directly represented only once in the paintings of the ceiling, as an infant pre-existing in the mind of God, among the group clustered together within God’s mantle in The Creation of Adam. But Christ’s life and death are prefigured throughout Michelangelo’s nine Genesis narratives. Several of the scenes have been carefully designed to allude to Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross, the wounding of his flesh and the spilling of his blood. It is a general truth about Michelangelo’s painting that the forms and figures within it are constantly shadowed by their own potential for metamorphosis, so that stories that seem to be about one thing may also be about another.

Such prefigurings of Christ take many forms on the ceiling, some of which would have been obvious to Michelangelo’s contemporaries. It was a commonplace of medieval and Renaissance theology, for example, to refer to Christ as ‘a second Adam’ — expressing the symmetry by which God’s incarnation as a mortal man, in the person of Jesus Christ, held out the possibility of mankind’s ultimate salvation from the consequences of Adam’s original sin. So it is that the sleeping figure of Adam, in Michelangelo’s depiction of The Creation of Eve, anticipates the crumpled figure of the dead Christ awaiting entombment; and so it is that the cruciform shape made by the Tree of Knowledge and the arm of the avenging angel, in The Temptation and Expulsion, prefigures that of the Cross on which Christ would be crucified.

By finding such foreshadowings of the New Testament in the stories of the Old Testament, Michelangelo and those who may have helped him in the design of his fresco cycle were doing something that Christians had done since the dawn of their faith. In the first century of the Christian era, as a result of Paul’s mission to the Gentiles, Paul and the early Church fathers had reinterpreted the entire Jewish tradition in the light of their own beliefs. It was their contention that all of the scattered stories of the Hebraic biblical tradition might be drawn together within a single concept of universal history. The heroes of the Old Testament were recast as a succession of figures whose actions and legends prognosticated the appearance of Christ. The words of the texts telling their stories were interrogated by generation on generation of patristic commentators for any sign that might be read as a concealed, secret portent of the coming of Christ.

The credo that underpinned this ancient tradition of interpretation is summed up by the words of an inscription placed by a master theologian of the French Middle Ages, Abbot Denis Suger, on the Concordance Window of the abbey of Saint Denis: ‘Quod Moses velat Christi doctrina revelat’, ‘What Moses veils, the doctrine of Christ reveals’. In other words, the Old Testament contains the truth as revealed to Moses and the prophets, but partially hidden, as by a veil. Only through the revelation of Christ’s words and deeds can the full truth of God’s plan for mankind begin to be grasped.

Even before Michelangelo ever worked there, this same structure of belief was written into the Sistine Chapel, just as it had been into the window of Suger’s Norman abbey. The series of frescoes at ground level, painted in the late fifteenth century by a number of masters including Botticelli and Perugino, compare and contrast the life of Moses with that of Christ. The message is the same: Quod Moses velat Christi doctrina revelat.1

The notion of a mystical concordance between the Old and the New Testaments, so strongly emphasised by the earlier paintings in the Sistine Chapel, is also integral to Michelangelo’s fresco cycle. This is made clear by the presence of the prophets and the sibyls, those individuals from Judaic and pagan history who were held to have foretold the birth of Christ. These figures all appear in the lower register of his design for the ceiling, with the nine Old Testament narratives seeming to float above them. Both literally and figuratively, the painter’s telling of the Genesis stories is sustained by belief in a vision of universal history that has, at its centre and as its climax, the redemptive sacrifice of Christ.

It is important to understand and to respect the Christian beliefs and traditions which Michelangelo strove to express for three long years of his life. But it is equally important to remember that the Sistine Chapel ceiling is a great work of art precisely because it does much more than give visible form to a particular set of religious orthodoxies. The pictures of the ceiling stunned and impressed the artist’s contemporaries not only because they were so accomplished but also because they were so deeply unorthodox and original.

In almost every one of the Sistine ceiling’s many compositions, Michelangelo departed from tried and trusted pictorial convention. He told the stories in his own way and embodied them in his own particular language, a form of painting in which representation has been pared down to almost nothing but the figure, nude or clothed (but most frequently nude). He used the human form, in action and reaction, to express a vast range of feelings and ideas and spiritual aspirations. Many of those feelings and ideas can be explained, to a certain extent, by reference to Christian theology. But throughout the ceiling’s rich weave of imagery there are subtleties of allusion, visual echoes and rhymes, suggestions and half-suggestions that go beyond the straightforward expression of Christian doctrine.