Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel

Michelangelo and the Renaissance

Michelangelo was one of the greatest artists of the High Renaissance. He began his career with the chisel and ended it with the paint brush. He was a master in sculpture, engineering, and painting. Had he excelled in poetry, politics and arms he would have been considered a true Renaissance Man—but his focus was always on art. He spent 20 years of his life on the Sistine Chapel at a time when Europe was undergoing an internal religious and political strife that would tear it apart. His painting of the Last Judgment, which depicts Christ’s return to Earth to judge the living and the dead, is one of awe, dread and hope. Completed in 1541, just as the enormously important Council of Trent (1544-1563) was set to get underway, the Last Judgment represents a world in need of reminding of the promise of Christ that He would return. Through all of his work but especially through his decades-long labor in the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo captured the essence of the High Renaissance and foreshadowed the coming age of the Baroque that would accompany the Church’s Counter-Reformation period.

The humanistic influences of the Renaissance were both embraced and advanced by Michelangelo. He depicted a hyper-idealized human form, often nude in depiction as though communicating the pristine, un-Fallen, innocent and perfect state that man was meant to have and would have possessed for all time—had he not chosen to disobey God’s commandment in the Garden of Eden. Normally, the Church would not condone nudity, but the humanism of the Renaissance had ushered in a new fascination with the art works of the classical period, all of it pagan and much of featuring nudity. The artists of the Renaissance experimented with naturalism in art, and the politics of Italy at the time were such that Italian leaders were happy to see naturalism in art having a provocative effect on the masses, for it distracted the public from the often shady dealings that they were having, particularly in the area of high finance. That said, the artists of the Renaissance approached naturalism differently, depending on their own styles—but none had a style like Michelangelo. He created images of human beings as though they were supermen—his art could be called the very first super hero comic book art. Of course, doing so tends to cheapen it—and his art was anything but cheap.

Nonetheless, this idealized expression of the human form can be seen in all of Michelangelo’s works, from La Pieta of 1499 to his David (1504) to the Creation of Man and the rest of the panels he completed in the Sistine Chapel. These are not forms that are meant to be realistically accurate: they are realistic in the sense that every muscle is accounted for and expressed through the movement and expression of the limbs, contorted and flexed to show off the way a body builder today demonstrates his muscular development. For the Renaissance artists, it was important that they be able to demonstrate their mastery of the human anatomy—but for Michelangelo even this knowledge was not enough: he wanted to reflect the idealized form of man, the way God intended it to be. That was Michelangelo’s gift to the Renaissance. His religious works—particularly the Last Judgment—were his gift to coming Baroque.

Michelangelo benefited Italy by enhancing its beauty and its majesty. In 1546, he designed the dome of St. Peter’s basilica in Rome, which today still stands. It was his final commission. He had worked under Pope Julius II on the Sistine Chapel. Under Pope Paul III, he would design the very heart of the Vatican, where popes were be placed for burial. He was the architect, artist, conceptualist, designer, and beautician of Rome, serving to enhance its majesty for all the world to see at a time when the Western world was writhing within itself over the question of whether it should remain loyal to the Pope and recognize the authority of the Holy See over the Church. King Henry VIII in England had been an ardent defender of the Catholic Church and the faith—but in his pursuit of an annulment from his wife, he threw over the Pope and the Church and became head of the Church of England, breaking England from Rome and ending the supremacy of the Catholic Church throughout his kingdom. Europe was quaking all around. Suleiman and the Muslims were invading from the East, stopped only by Charles V, who had to insist for years that the Vatican call a council to deal with the questions and arguments raised by the increasing number of Protestants in his own realm. Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin were all on the march, all of them calling for an end to the allegiance to the Holy See. Yet here was Michelangelo, in his 70s, working on the designing the defining structure that would come to symbolize Rome’s majesty and authority for centuries—St. Peter’s Basilica. Michelangelo, who began by chiseling the death of Christ out of marble, would end by designing the architecture for the house of dead pontiffs in the place where the Bride of Christ would continue to live, opposed as she was by the Protestants of the Reformation.

Renaissance Italy had been flush with wealth, since trade with the Near and Far East had increased following the Holy Wars. Italian merchants were a class all their own, influencing society at every level. To show off their wealth, aristocratic families commissioned the best artists to work for them, to paint them, to create for them. Michelangelo’s powers for the better portion of his career were commissioned mainly by the Church. The Church wanted him for Herself. Just as the Baroque artists would attempt to depict the reality of nature—of the imperfect peal that was fallen human nature—in the face of the Reformation, which often sought a pristine return to form that could not really ever be achieved (no more than man could achieve the pristine form depicted by Michelangelo in his painting of Adam in the Sistine Chapel at the moment of Creation), Michelangelo depicted the joyful, sorrowful and glorious doctrines of the Church, unabashedly and with a power that awed one and all.

Because he was one of the greatest living artists of the time, he was in high demand—and the fact that the popes of the era kept commissioning him shows that he worked for the very top people of the time. He was literally working for men who could be considered the most powerful in the Western world. Of course, their power was being challenged by the rising Protestants—Luther, Calvin and Henry VIII—but all the same these were popes who headed a very wealthy Church in a very wealthy country and could command the attention of an artist like Michelangelo, who was, as Vasari notes, first and foremost a man dedicated to his craft and not one for whom money was really much of a concern. Michelangelo accepted the challenge of the pontiffs to decorate the Sistine Chapel and to design the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica because he was a great artist who wanted to tackle the great projects. His works did not necessarily bring in great money for Italy because they were always commissioned by already wealthy families or Churchmen, and they were kept by those who commissioned them—they were not sold on the open market. It was not like today when an artist’s works are sold for millions at an auction. These works were commissioned and then exhibited and prized as priceless by those who possessed them.

Vasari, who wrote the much celebrated Lives of the Artists, spoke highly of Michelangelo and expressed his view that the artist was supreme in his skill and in his piety. It is said that once Michelangelo finally retired, he lived as a monk in a monastery because he sought to be away from the world and to spend his days in silence, prayer and meditation. This is quite understandable considering the story that is told in the Last Judgment and the powerful message it contains to the viewer. The man who painted that epic picture surely understood that he himself would face judgment soon enough, and he wanted to prepare himself for that moment. It also goes to show that for all the payment he received as commission for his greatest works, Michelangelo retained a spirit of poverty and simplicity. Where other artists might have lived lavishly and indulged themselves, Michelangelo lived for his art so that even in his 70s he remained dedicated to it, designing the dome of St. Peter’s.

Vasari also tells the story of how Michelangelo was gifted with his ability to create great art even as a child. He was certainly unlike any other artist of any age: he had an eye unlike any other and the ability to translate what he saw into real art. For instance, as a child he was enrolled in the school of a master sculptor with other students, and the students were asked to sculpt a certain design—but Michelangelo was well past the point of doing a simple design and instead he started on something else that had caught his attention. At first the master was unhappy that the child Michelangelo should deviate from the instructions and no one could figure out what he was doing—but then the master suddenly realized what the boy was up to: he was duplicating a sculpture that he had seen in the master’s yard—and he was doing it perfectly, even better than the sculpture that the master owned. This story, recounted by Vasari, shows that Michelangelo had a unique talent from birth—a genius for art—and he maintained that genius throughout his whole life.

Another story that illustrates Michelangelo’s greatness and dedication is that he would stand in front of the quarries where the marble was taken from the mountains. He would stand there for hours or days, looking at the slabs of rock as they were brought down, and no one could figure out what he was doing. But one day someone asked him and he said, “I’m waiting for the rock that contains the statue that I will sculpt. Once the rock comes I will know it and all I have to do is set the statue free.” He had that kind of intense vision; he could see the completed statue he intended to sculpt in the rock before even taking a hammer and chisel to it.

Yet again there is the story that it was Michelangelo who first began the tradition of signing his name on his works. Before that it was uncommon for an artist of any era to sign his works, because the artist was considered a tradesman—not a high-profile celebrity who would dare to elevate himself above the ranks of a common worker. Yet Michelangelo possessed such skill that he took great pride in his work. It just so happened that one day he heard another artist taking credit for one of the sculptures that Michelangelo had carved—so Michelangelo snuck into the place where the sculpture was being exhibited and chiseled his name into it just to make it clear that he and no other had created the work of art.