Sistine Chapel
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Sistine Chapel, private papal chapel in the Vatican Palace that also serves as the meeting place of the College of Cardinals when its members assemble in conclave to elect a new pope. It is one of the most important monuments of Renaissance art, renowned for an extensive fresco cycle that brought together some of the leading artists of late 15th- and early 16th-century Italy, including Michelangelo. His frescoes for the ceiling and the altar wall (The Last Judgment) are regarded as masterpieces of Western painting.
History of the chapel
The Sistine Chapel replaced an older papal chapel known as the Cappella Magna, dating to about 1377. By the late 15th century, the structure had deteriorated, and Pope Sixtus IV (reigned 1471–84) had it rebuilt between 1477 and 1480 by the architect Giovanni dei Dolci. The Sistine Chapel is a simple brick building with six arched windows on each of the side walls and a barrel-vaulted ceiling. The chapel’s exterior is unadorned, but its interior walls and ceiling are decorated with frescoes (completed during the periods 1481–82, 1508–12, and 1536–41). On August 15, 1483, Sixtus consecrated the renovated chapel and dedicated it to Our Lady of the Assumption. It subsequently became known as the Cappella Sistina—the Sistine Chapel—after Sixtus himself.
Early frescoes (1481–82)
Before the Sistine Chapel was consecrated, Sixtus commissioned a decorative program for the interior by many Florentine Renaissance masters, including Perugino, Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Cosimo Rosselli, Luca Signorelli, and Bartolomeo della Gatta. Although many of the frescoes completed by these artists are now somewhat dwarfed by Michelangelo’s masterpieces, the walls of the chapel contain significant works of art, such as Botticelli’s Temptations of Christ, Perugino’s Handing Over of the Keys, and Ghirlandaio’s The Calling of the First Apostles (all 1481–82). These three scenes are part of the Christ cycle, which originally began with a Nativity scene by Perugino, but that fresco was on the west wall, behind the altar, and was lost when Michelangelo later painted The Last Judgment (1536–41).
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Today the Christ cycle begins on the north wall with his baptism as the first of six frescoes depicting his life and ends on the entrance wall with his resurrection (originally by Ghirlandaio, the fresco was destroyed when the entrance to the Sistine Chapel collapsed in 1522 and was repainted by Flemish artist Hendrik van den Broeck during the pontificate of Gregory XIII [1572–85]). On the south wall are six frescoes depicting the life of Moses. The cycle originally began with the birth and finding of Moses by Perugino, but, like the Nativity, it was destroyed by Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment. The cycle now begins with Moses’s journey in Egypt and ends on the entrance wall with the dispute over his body (originally by Signorelli, and, like the Resurrection, the fresco was destroyed in 1522 and repainted by Matteo da Lecce during the pontificate of Gregory XIII).
Above these works smaller frescoes between the windows depict various popes, and today the lunettes have frescoes depicting the ancestors of Christ, later painted by Michelangelo as part of the ceiling decoration. False drapes decorate the lower registers of the walls. For great ceremonial occasions these portions have been covered with a series of tapestries designed by Raphael and woven in 1515–19 at Brussels. They depict events from the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was originally painted blue with gold stars by Pier Matteo d’Amelia.
Frescoes by Michelangelo
The most important artworks in the chapel are the frescoes by Michelangelo on the ceiling and on the west wall behind the altar. The frescoes on the ceiling, collectively known as the Sistine ceiling, were commissioned by Pope Julius II (reigned 1503–13) in 1508 and were painted by Michelangelo in the years from 1508 to 1512. They depict incidents and personages from the Old Testament. The Last Judgment fresco on the west wall was commissioned by Pope Clement VII (reigned 1523–34), but Michelangelo executed it for Pope Paul III (reigned 1534–49) in the period from 1536 to 1541. These two gigantic frescoes are among the greatest achievements of Western painting. A 10-year-long cleaning and restoration of the Sistine ceiling, concluded in 1989, removed several centuries’ accumulation of dirt, smoke, and varnish. Cleaning and restoration of The Last Judgment was completed in 1994.
The Sistine ceiling (1508–12)
Julius had initially summoned Michelangelo, who regarded himself primarily as a sculptor, to Rome to design an elaborate tomb for himself, interrupting the artist’s work on the unfinished Battle of Cascina, a mural for Florence’s town hall, and a series of sculptures for the Duomo. As Julius became increasingly occupied with the rebuilding of St. Peter’s Basilica and with military campaigns aimed at resisting French influence in Italy, however, he evidently became disturbed by the cost of the tomb. Michelangelo instead was assigned the less expensive and relatively unimportant project of painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The Twelve Apostles was planned as the theme—ceilings normally showed only individual figures, not dramatic scenes. Traces of this project are seen in the 12 large figures that Michelangelo produced around the edges of the ceiling, between the pendentives and spandrels, comprising seven prophets and five sibyls, or female prophets found in classical myths. The inclusion of female figures was very unusual though not totally unprecedented.
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The center of the barrel-vaulted ceiling of the chapel is the apex of Michelangelo’s career, featuring nine scenes from Genesis depicting God’s creation of the world, God’s relationship with humans, and humans’ fall from God’s grace. The nine scenes cover 8,610 square feet (800 square meters). Michelangelo completed the task almost single-handedly because the Florentine craftsmen assigned to help him did not meet his exacting standards. It was a feat of endurance for the artist, painting at a fast rate and working from scaffolding. The result is an unrivaled work of art that reinvented the depiction of the human form with the dynamic style of its more than 300 figures.
Michelangelo began by painting the Noah scenes over the entrance door and moving toward the altar in the reverse direction of the narrative. The first figures and scenes naturally show the artist reusing devices from his earlier works, such as the Pietà, since he was starting on such an ambitious work in an unfamiliar medium. These early scenes are relatively small in scale and feature numerous figures engaged in complex narratives. In The Flood, for example, Michelangelo divides the composition into four narrative episodes: On the left, nude figures attempt to escape the deluge by climbing to higher ground, some burdened by their possessions; on the right, additional nudes shelter from the rain beneath a makeshift covering; at the center, an overcrowded boat is on the verge of capsizing; and in the distance, men work on the ark, the only means of salvation.
As Michelangelo proceeded, he quickly grew in confidence. Indeed, investigations of the technical processes used show that he worked more and more rapidly, reducing and finally eliminating preparatory drawings and incisions on the plaster surface. The same growing boldness appears in the free, complex movements of the figures and in their complex expressiveness. While remaining always imposing and monumental, they are more and more imbued with suggestions of stress and grief. This may be perceived in a figure such as the prophet Ezekiel halfway along. This figure combines colossal strength and weight with movement and facial expression that suggest determination to reach a goal that is uncertain of success. Such an image of the inadequacy of even great power is a presentation of heroic and tragic humanity and is central to what Michelangelo means to posterity. Nearby, the scene of the creation of Eve shows her with God and Adam, compressed within too small a space for their grandeur. This tension has been interpreted as a token of a movement away from the Renaissance concern with harmony, pointing the way for a younger generation of artists, such as Jacopo da Pontormo, often labeled Mannerists.
Michelangelo’s work on the ceiling was interrupted, perhaps just after these figures were completed. When he painted the second half, he seemed to repeat the same evolution from quiet stability to intricacy and stress. Thus, he worked his way from the quietly monumental and harmonious scene of the creation of Adam to the acute, twisted pressures of the prophet Jonah. In the later-painted scenes from Genesis, particularly those centered on God’s ordering of the universe, Michelangelo simplified the narratives, limiting them to a few essential figures rendered on a monumental scale. The change made the compositions easier to read from the chapel floor and gave them greater emotional force. In the three frescoes depicting the separation of light from darkness and the formation of the heavens and earth, the imposing figure of God dominates each scene, while his forceful gestures convey the events with little additional detail.
The complex and unusual iconography of the Sistine ceiling has been explained by some scholars as a Neoplatonic interpretation of the Bible, representing the essential phases of the spiritual development of humankind seen through a very dramatic relationship between humans and God. With Michelangelo’s fulfillment of the commission, the Sistine ceiling was recognized as a masterpiece in its own time. The artist was judged to be a superhuman being and earned the title “the divine Michelangelo.” Contemporaries spoke of the terribilità, or awesome power, of the frescoes and their creator.
The Last Judgment (1536–41)
So arduous was the undertaking of the Sistine ceiling that Michelangelo forswore painting for more than 20 years until he returned to the Sistine Chapel to paint The Last Judgment on the wall behind the altar. Clement VII commissioned the work toward the end of his life, and he did not live to see it; instead Michelangelo completed the fresco in 1541 under the patronage of Clement’s successor, Paul III. The commission had specified that the work contain a depiction of Jesus’ Resurrection, but otherwise Michelangelo had considerable liberty in subject matter, and, populating the painting with dozens of figures, he relates the triumph of good over evil. The work is in a painting style noticeably different from that of 20 years earlier. The color scheme is simpler than that of the ceiling: flesh tones against a stark blue sky. The figures have less energy, and their forms are less articulate, the torsos tending to be single fleshy masses without waistlines. At the top center, Christ as judge—surrounded by a crowd of apostles, saints, patriarchs, and martyrs—lifts an arm to save those on his right and drops the other arm to damn those on his left, suggesting, in the idiom of the period, a scale to weigh humans in the balance.
The saved souls rise slowly through the heavy air as the damned ones sink. (Michelangelo included a self-portrait on the flayed skin of St. Bartholomew.) At the bottom of the wall, skeletons rise from tombs, a motif taken directly from medieval precedents. To the right Charon ferries souls across the River Styx, a pagan motif that Dante had made acceptable to Christians in his Divine Comedy and that Signorelli had introduced into painting about 1500. Michelangelo admired this artist for his skill in expressing dramatic feeling through anatomical exactitude.
Indeed, Michelangelo fully investigated the emotional personality of each individual. This inventiveness is perhaps best exemplified by a character in the lower mid-right of the fresco, a damned soul descending to hell, who, amid the figures struggling around him, appears too horrified to resist his fate: He covers one eye with his hand and has an expression of pure terror on his face. The true genius of Michelangelo was that he could explore the psychological reaction of so many characters with equal conviction. The Last Judgment, conceived as a single, unified, grandiose scene without the architectural elements that the artist had used on the ceiling to divide and define its space, is permeated by a sense of dynamic intensity derived from the emotional gestures and expressions of the judged.
The Last Judgment has become so iconic that it is difficult to remember that in its own time it was controversial. Not least of all the concerns regarding the image was its pervasive nudity, much of which was later covered up by Michelangelo’s pupil Daniele da Volterra and finally uncovered again by restorers between 1980 and 1994. Certainly Michelangelo was preoccupied with the glory of the human body—as is evident throughout his oeuvre—but the nudity of figures in The Last Judgment, combined with the emotional fury of their gestures, emphasizes their vulnerability in the midst of the chaos around them. The result is a vision of divine judgment that is at once monumental and deeply human.