Ross King: Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

By Catherine Pepinster

Rather than a heavenly experience, visiting the Sistine Chapel is hell on Earth. Crowds rush through the rest of the Vatican's museums, making it impossible to savour other riches on display.

Amid the crush of tourists you squeeze into the chapel itself. Can it get any worse? Yes, it usually does. You can rely on a Swiss guard to snatch a forbidden camera from the hands of a compulsive Japanese picture snapper and confiscate it.

But then, with your neck craning, your back contorting and feet twisting, it suddenly all gets better. For high above you is Michelangelo's masterpiece. And despite all the times you have seen parts of it reproduced, the Sistine's ceiling still has the power to shock, stun and delight.

Panel after panel tells the story of man, from the moment that God reached out to Adam and ignited the creative spark, to the fall and failure of man in the face of temptation, and on to the first step in the path to redemption with Abraham, the man of faith.

How that ceiling came to be created is as much a story of mayhem and drama as the Creation, complete with heroes, anti-heroes, plots, counter-plots and passion.

Pope Julius II, a man as much given to cardinal sin as cardinal virtue, wanted to make his mark in Rome. Not content with the promise of life everlasting, he sought a greater guarantee of immortality - a fine tomb.

Michelangelo Buonarroti was brought in to create something fitting as the resting place of a prince of the church. The Pope then changed his mind, and commissioned the Florentine to paint the ceiling of the revamped chapel.

It was a poisoned chalice of a commission: as a sculptor, Michelangelo stood alone, but he was not known for his ability with a brush. And this was no conventional commission: the ceiling, 18.3m above the ground, was to be frescoed.

As Ross King's fascinating account makes clear, fresco is a complicated, time-consuming, difficult task, involving covering the ceiling with a toxic, limestone-based plaster. The painters had to work against the clock, decorating the ceiling before the plaster set so that the colours would be fixed and rich enough to be seen clearly from below. There was little room and little time for error.

Just reaching the ceiling was difficult enough, and a special platform had to be built where Michelangelo and his team of helpers would work. Then the plaster and a previous fresco had to be chipped away before work could begin. The most meticulous preparations were the drawings, or cartoons: Michelangelo made more than 1000 of them.

The ceiling was one of the largest artistic projects ever undertaken, covering 1115 sq m. It took four years of back-breaking work. By 1512, Michelangelo and his assistants produced a work that stunned the Pope and his church with its beauty.

Michelangelo's skill as a sculptor and the anatomical knowledge he had acquired over the years is evident in the muscular figures of the chapel ceiling.

Indeed, King claims that such was the detail of the work that some of the figures' muscles have yet to be named by anatomists.

His observations of everyday life are evident here, too; his depiction of the Flood came from watching the River Arno in spate in his native Florence. The teachings of Savonarola, who emphasised the wrath of the judgmental God of the Old Testament in his sermons, were well-known to the young Michelangelo in Florence, and were powerfully evoked in the turbulent visions of a vengeful God frescoed on the vault.

But it is his Eve who is the most intriguing character. The theology of the church followed the ancient Hebrew tradition of blaming Eve for leading Adam astray, a convention followed by Michelangelo's rival Raphael in his depiction of the Temptation in the Garden of Eden. But, as King points out, Michelangelo's evocation of Eve was an unconventional reading. It is Adam who reaches out to seize a piece of the forbidden fruit from a splendidly coiled, deceptive serpent, writhing around the tree. Eve is more languid, more passive, and perhaps, therefore, exonerated.

A year before Michelangelo painted the scene, a new theory on women was published by the German theologian Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, arguing that Adam, not Eve, had been forbidden from eating the fruit. Might Michelangelo have known about it?

What is clear, as King notes, is that Michelangelo's frescoes, and this scene in particular, are extraordinarily sensual and sexual. Eve's face is close to Adam's genitals; he strains across her to reach the fruit from the fig tree, the symbolic tree of lust. The Cardinals of the church may have gazed at the scene as they elected the various successors to St Peter, but it was a scene that was censored for a long time. No reproduction was made of it for 300 years.

What a shame, then, that the publisher did not think that this excellent book merited a larger format, enabling the reader to look at larger illustrations, rather than the somewhat poor ones included. This is not a pastel-shaded, holier-than-thou story, but a tale of ambition, greed and envy. You will find few saints here, but a church filled to the rafters with sinners, guilty of just about every vice you can imagine. Plus ca change.


Random House $59.95

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