Mythic Thinking

The Sistine Chapel was conceived as a pinnacle representative for the Christian church. It was built according to the biblical dimensions of Solomon’s Temple and decorated with images from the Old Testament and their parallel in the New, thus justifying the foretelling of the coming of Christ. Additionally, the Pope was seen as the spiritual descendent of Peter the Apostle, inheriting the keys to the kingdom of heaven upon gaining the papacy. It is in this Chapel that the Catholic Church holds its conclaves, debating and finally voting on the next pope. Capping the chapel is one of the grandest frescoes in Western Christian art painted by the Florentine sculptor, Michelangelo. He was commissioned by Julius II to paint the ceiling for various controversial reasons, among which include Julius’s on-going “punishment” for Michelangelo’s flight from Rome after his burial tomb project failed, thus forcing him into a medium for which he had little training and familiarity. Jewish “tradition teaches that Mikha-el ha-Malakh, the angel Michael [Michelangelo], is the defender of the Jewish people from its deadly enemies” (Blech and Doliner 43), suggesting that Michelangelo was divinely called to do this ceiling, to capture both the Jewish elements of the Old Testament and to make a statement on the state of the Christian church at the time post-Schism and Black Plague but pre-Protestant Reformation, a time of tension within the Church. Through this commission Michelangelo has created a critique on the Church through Biblical imagery and metaphor that suggests that the history of the Church is not the great innovation in the West, but, rather, its downfall.

Michelangelo inherited the project after a couple false starts. The Chapel was built on the decaying remnants of the Palantine Chapel beginning in 1475, the year Michelangelo as born, under the reign of Pope Sixtus the IV and the decoration of the chapel was begun shortly thereafter (Blech and Doliner 9-10).

[T]here is good reason to believe that the Chapel was conceived primarily as a background for the frescoes. … Austere simplicity had to be reconciled with plans for impressive pictorial representations of the truths which the Church serves as custodian of in this world. The paintings themselves, as always in religious edifices, would be expected to fulfill a double purpose: to remind the princes of the Church of its glorious past and their own responsibilities to it, and to instruct in an edifying manner the pilgrims and other faithful who would be admitted to this great shrine on feast days. (Salvini 9)

Now this Chapel is open on the Vatican tour, an event the pilgrims and faithful line up for hours to attend. The ceiling was initially frescoed with images of stars and the night sky, but due to the softness of Roman soil, the foundation of the Chapel was unstable and the ceiling quickly suffered from cracking. Julius II, Sixtus’ nephew, saw to the restoration of the Chapel during his papacy, including the reinforcement of the foundation and the redesign of the ceiling. When he gave the project to Michelangelo, Julius envisioned a ceiling that depicted the twelve apostles. Michelangelo successfully talked him out of what he considered a boring design, in part because “there was very little scope for him to explore his interest in the human form,” eventually convincing the Pope to give him a degree of free control in his design, something that was unusual and unheard of during this era of the Renaissance (King 59-60). Michelangelo chose to focus on the stories of the Old Testament, specifically Genesis and the prophets, partially due to the lingering impression the sermons of Fra Savonarola, the fire-and-brimstone Franciscan monk, had on him as a youth, and partially due to the popularity of portraying these stories in sculptural relief (King 64). He hired a team of assistants, built a scaffold and set to work.

There are four thematic groupings of the entire fresco: 1. In the center are scenes from the book of Genesis, comprising the central part, or storie, of the fresco; 2. the center is bordered with alternating images of the Jewish Prophets and Greek Sibyls; 3. the corners, or pendentives, each reflect a different episode of “the miraculous salvation of the people of Israel” (“Sistine Chapel”); and 4. functioning as a sort of border for the entire fresco are lunettes, or webs, which depict the Ancestors of Christ, including female ancestors not named at the beginning of the Book of Matthew. For the purposes of this paper, I am going to concentrate on the central panels of the fresco.

The fresco as a whole is supposed to reflect the continued Christian theme that the stories of the Tanakh were nothing more than predicators for the coming of Christ and what later became the Old Testament in the Christian Bible. The symbology of this Chapel visually communicates these stories to any viewers, while also reflecting the power and grandeur of the Church. Michelangelo was not compelled to concentrate on the New Testament, but chose instead a subject matter that is mostly Jewish and partially Pagan. Regardless of his actual intentions, one result of this choice in subject matter shows sensitivity for remembering the roots of the religion, but also for reflecting on the stability the Jewish faith represents. The Christian church at the time of Michelangelo was marred by continual conflict, often squelching out the opposition through battle and the burning of books. The threats towards the church were slowly coming to a fore as the printing press began to make written texts more accessible outside the scholastic community. Initially, the press facilitated in a revival of Greco-Roman texts, and it became a key factor in the publishing of pamphlets promoting the Protestant position.