Sistine Chapel Ceiling (1508-12)

Michaelangelo never considered himself a painter; indeed, he signed the above work "Michaelangelo, the sculptor" to emphasise his dislike of the job which ensured his legendary status.   In fact, he wasn't altogether prepared for the job which was to cost him 20 months of his life,  The first section he completed, the illustration of Noah and the flood, does not read well from the floor below.  He had forgotten that the viewer would be trying to decipher the image from a distance of thirty feet; as he progressed his characters became more heavily emphasised and much more visible.

In the course of the work, he apparently fell out with his assistants. Their job would have been to help him prepare the paints and the moist plaster surfaces on which the outlines of the characters were to be roughly sketched, using small perforations through paper on which original sketches would have been made. He therefore eventually proceeded on his own using a blend of improvisation and immense energy.

Of Michaelangelo it was said that while sculpting a large work of marble, he would attack the piece of stone so ferociously and with so little apparent plan that onlookers feared that each blow of the chisel would ruin the entire piece; in fact, there are surviving works which show how dissatisfied Michaelangelo was with the result; in one the arm of Christ seems hopelessly out of place; a crack running across it bears out the story of how, in desperation, he hurled the chisel against the offending limb, until the statue lay in ruins before him.  The Pieta was later finished by another sculptor, a competent but uninspired artisan who mended the arm of Christ and added a rigid looking Mary Magdalene, not only stylistically out of place among the fluid figures in the piece, but apparently the wrong scale as well.

In sculpture, Michaelangelo had little sympathy for the female form, as the kinder of the historians have noted.  He was a brash, innovative, energetic and uncompromising artist who, in his own lifetime, mastered painting, sculpture and architecture, but left much work unfinished.  His statue of David, and the tomb of Julius, reflect new ways of looking at religious icons, formerly depicted as stiff and distant figures, but now brought vividly to life.  In his work, their humanity and motivation, and even their sexuality, is quite brilliantly emphasised, and they stand as evidence to his uncompromising vision of releasing figures "trapped in marble".  No one who has stood in front of his massive sculptures, or gazed up in awe at the dazzling compositions of the Sistine Chapel can doubt his artistic genius.

The inspiration which guided this man to create some of the world's most enduring images was solely religious.  In his lifetime he would know nothing of science's busy world, which today presents a strange kind of emptiness.  As a work of art, the Sistine Chapel is unparalleled; it is said that one can have no idea of what one man can achieve in his life until one has seen it.  But as a work of inspiration, it is somewhat greater; the man who threw pots of paint off his scaffolding to discourage regular inspections by the pope and who declared himself "friendless, and better for it" while creating his masterwork, paid homage to a spirit of the soul, one that gave him reason to live.  For me, he sums up religion's greatest asset: reinforcement of our instinctive belief in something bigger than ourselves, something worth living for.

(Illus:  ) The Sistine Chapel: A Glorious Restoration.  Ed: Pierluigi de Vecchi / Nippon TV Network, Tokyo 
             Publ: Harry N Abrams, 1999;  photos of the Sistine Chapel by Takashi Okamura