What All of Rome Saw

On October 31, 1512, Michelangelo's finally completed Cappella Sistina ceiling was unveiled, and Giorgio Vasari tells us in The Lives of the Artists that all of Rome came to see it. For Vasari, imitating Michelangelo is like imitating nature because Michelangelo has imitated nature so well that he is almost a second Creator: He is a “blessed artist” who has “removed the blinders of the eyes from your minds” (449–50), “something divine rather than mortal” (414). Vasari comes close to proclaiming that the artist is a second Incarnation, at least a new prophet—“a man sent by God into the World” (482)—as an example of moral, intellectual and artistic perfection. What did all of Rome see that day? What sight so aroused Vasari's latent paganism that he could conceive of Michelangelo as an artistic god? All Rome saw what one still sees when straining to see the ceiling of the Cappella Sistina with one's head bent upward, disoriented by the physical effort of contortion: an artistic complexity so bright and varied that it is overwhelming. Only by patient attention can one begin to discern the patterns in the ceiling, the patterns which establish the work's complex harmony. Harmony is not identical to unity, though. The ceiling is harmonic, but as one sees how Michelangelo reads the Bible, how story becomes image, one begins to see creative tensions in the harmony.

Those tensions arise from Michelangelo's deliberate decision to juxtapose a precisely-conceived theological program on the ceiling of the Cappella Sistina with a boldly articulated artistic one. The theological program must be understood in terms of a much-used interpretative approach of the artist's day called typology, which attempted to fuse the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament into a unified account of Christian salvation by reading the New Testament back into the Hebrew Bible, now called the Old Testament and thought to be a promise fulfilled. But with Michelangelo, that theological program is in tension with a bold artistic program whose interest in classical beauty challenges Christian doctrine. In other words, the beauty of Michelangelo's perfect bodies is not easily reconcilable with the Christian metanarrative of the Fall.