Genesis of the Creator
Genesis of the Creator
An exhibit of Michelangelo’s Sistine sketches provokes pertinent questions for our historic times.
Michelangelo Buonarroti wasn’t a great painter, per his own admission, especially compared to his contemporaries and students, Caravaggio and Raphael. He wanted to be more renowned as a sculptor, which was his first passion, and he is recognized as arguably the greatest ever. He declined to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling, thrice, fled twice, was caught and brought back twice, and was supposedly punched in the face by Pope Julius II at least once. Visitors are not to make any sound for the duration of their strictly time-limited stay, but there is usually no need for any enforcement; the scale, complexity, and beauty of the enterprise makes the tourist speechless and humble as he walks across the hall, neck straining and head held high, looking up—mortality in presence of divinity.
It is impossible to describe what a profound experience Sistine Chapel can be, although the experience might affect you differently depending on your philosophical compass. A woman with an American accent muttered next to me while coming out of the hall about the sum of money spent to paint “biblical stories,” a level of pedestrian utilitarianism that, as a historian, I could hardly contemplate. The nine frescoes above and the humanoids within increase in size, a fact some attribute to Michelangelo’s genius for storytelling: from the tiny Creation to the wall covered by the Last Judgment, the greatest fresco ever painted by a muse-inspired human hand. A more prosaic explanation is that he didn’t know what he was originally doing. Story goes that he painted the first panel up close, came down to see that they are barely visible from the floor, and then went on to paint each one a size bigger.
Michelangelo: The Genesis of the Sistine is currently an exhibit in the Muscarelle Museum of Art, next to the sprawling William and Mary campus in erstwhile British Virginia’s colonial capital, available for general viewing till late May. It carries rarely seen sketches and letters lent from Florence and the Vatican. A portrait of the artist, done by one of his “unimaginative” students (whom he dismissed) is on display: Michelangelo is wearing a Mediterranean white turban, a sign of the upper-class, meritocratic synthesis of post-Crusade Renaissance Italy. The various experimental sketches of torsos in tension, the first signs of science creeping into art, are there, as are his letters with simple daily discussions about ducats. Even divinely inspired artists are not above mortal needs.
The replication of the Last Judgement needs more explainer notes for the uninitiated. It is difficult to grasp the importance of that painting without historical grounding; the curators should have perhaps explained a little more about why the Son of God tearing up time and space is so muscular in the middle, or why most of the nudes in the fresco was eventually covered up by students of Michelangelo, or why a flayed, bald Saint Bartholomew (who looks more than a little like the artist himself) holds his own skin in his hand.
One of the curious historical puzzles since the times of Hypatia is whether Athens civilized Jerusalem or Jerusalem stabilized Athens—that is, whether the infusion of Athenian reason and Roman elite sophistication transformed the philosophical bearings of a tribal Middle-Eastern religion spreading through a warlike and hierarchical continent; or a warlike, tribal continent was ultimately stabilized by a revolutionary and egalitarian force, which provided an everlasting and unprecedented opportunity for human flourishing in a land that had been forever cursed to be stifled by hierarchy and conformity.
I am not qualified to provide a verdict on that debate, although the fact that libertines such as Raphael and Michelangelo were some of Christianity’s greatest painters, immortalized in the walls of the building that has the bones of St Peter buried in its premises, can sway one either way. The irony of our times is that, absent a truly detached and enlightened elites who are also in love with their history, the safeguard of that patrimony is now in the hands of those who perhaps won’t be able to say whether they fall on the side of Athens or Jerusalem when they claim to start a crusade to save “Western” civilization. Michelangelo’s paintings were covered up by the puritanical forces of his era—perhaps something that the Savonarolas of our times should be interested in considering.
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