Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel (24 page)

To Christ’s left, the lower part of the painting is crammed with writhing and tormented figures. The air is choked with a throng of entangled nudes, a wriggling crowd that recalls the snakeentwined multitude of
The Brazen Serpent
, which Michelangelo had painted many years earlier on the ceiling of the chapel. Below, in a detail drawn from Dante’s
Inferno
, Charon delivers a boatload of the despairing damned into the clutches of devils. This too calls to mind one of the scenes on the ceiling, being a convulsive variation on the theme of doomed figures in a boat, which had first appeared in
The Deluge
. As if to emphasise such echoes, Michelangelo has even twined a serpent around Minos, the judge of the underworld, who appears in the bottom right-hand corner of the painting. The figure grimaces as the snake bites his genitals.

Detail from
The Last Judgement,
showing Minos, bottom right

According to Vasari, Minos is the only portrait in
The Last Judgement
.
⁴
The figure was apparently Michelangelo’s revenge on Pope Paul III’s master of ceremonies, a man named Biagio da Cesena, who had dared to protest that the artist was violating the sanctity of the chapel with painted obscenities – a complaint, presumably, about the picture’s large cast of nudes and many scenes of violence. Vasari also says that when Biagio complained to the pope about the portrait, the pontiff merely shrugged his shoulders and declared that it was beyond even his power to release anyone from hell.

To Christ’s right, the dead struggle from the ground with what seems like a weary reluctance to be reborn. Some of these figures remain buried to their waists in the ground, while others have emerged as skeletons waiting to be clothed in the flesh of their resurrection.
⁵
Angels wrestle with demons to drag and hoist the blessed up towards their salvation. But the overwhelming impression is one of arduous, precarious struggle. The whole composition is overbearingly top-heavy, so that even the teetering pile of nudes scrambling heavenwards looks as though it might at any moment come crashing down to earth. The figures whirled round in the vortex of the painting have none of the grace and beauty of the newly created Adam or the soaring airborne God on the chapel’s ceiling. They are heavy, lumpen beings, formed from a coarser mould. Even the Apollonian Christ is comparatively ungainly, his torso broadened to such an extent that it has become nearly square.

The Last Judgement
is an uneasy and unwelcoming work of art, a vision of salvation and damnation so crowded that there is no room left in it for anyone else. Its disturbed, tumultuous structure makes the possibility of anyone being truly saved seem almost hopelessly remote. Legend has it that when Pope Paul III saw this troubled dream of a picture for the first time, he instantly fell to his knees and uttered a prayer: ‘Lord, do not charge me with my sins when you come on the day of Judgement.’
⁶

Michelangelo in 1541 was no longer the exuberant prodigy, full of plans for the tomb of Julius II , who had once dreamed of carving a colossus out of a mountain to amaze passing seafarers.
The Last Judgement
, with its crowded, awkward forms, is a renunciation of beauty that also contains within it the artist’s repudiation of his own youthful pride – the hubris that had led him to believe he could carve from stone, or paint with coloured earth, forms so grand and vivid they might rival those shaped by the hand of God.

The Lutheran Reformation had exerted a profound influence on Michelangelo, as it had on so many others within the Roman intelligentsia. Like every conscientious Christian believer of his time, he had been forced into an awareness not only of the corruption of the Roman Church, but of the extent to which it had lost touch with much of the essence of Christianity itself. Many effects of the Reformation may have been unwelcome and destructive, but there is no question that Catholics everywhere, and especially in Italy, were profoundly impressed by the ideas emanating from Protestant Germany – particularly the idea of every man’s duty to form his own direct relationship with God, the idea of the universal priesthood, and the doctrine of justification by faith.

In the 1530s, Michelangelo had begun a passionate friendship with a widowed noblewoman named Vittoria Colonna, who was a leading figure in the nascent Catholic reform movement in Rome. Together, they listened to readings from the Epistles of St Paul, and meditated on Christ’s sacrifice. Michelangelo gave a number of drawings of
The Crucifixion
to Vittoria Colonna to assist her in such contemplation, works of such heightened feeling and piety that they seem to predict the art of the Baroque. Through her he was also introduced to the Spanish preacher Juan de Valdés, a leader of the Roman reform movement, who was influenced by the teachings of Erasmus and who preached the doctrine of the justification through faith alone. Michelangelo, who called faith ‘the gift of gifts’, had much earlier in life been influenced by the severe piety of Savonarola, who had also preached the importance of faith and called vigorously for the reform of the Church. So he may have felt that the religious rebirth of his later years had been marked out for him since his youth.

One of the drawings of
The Crucifixion
given to Vittoria Colonna

Michelangelo as Nicodemus in
The Florence Pietà

In painting
The Last Judgement
, Michelangelo embarked on a new course in his art, which henceforth was to be characterised by a harsh asceticism and a deeply felt sense of spiritual urgency. The phases of his late style mark the different stages of a progressive withdrawal from the world. His two monumental frescoes for the Pauline Chapel of the Vatican,
The Conversion of St Paul
and
The Crucifixion of St Peter
, painted in the mid-1540s, renounce the grace of the Sistine Chapel ceiling even more decisively than
The Last Judgement
.
⁷
In sculpture, he created
The Florence Pietà
in the early 1550s, a work in which he included his own self-portrait, as Nicodemus, helping the Virgin Mary to bear the weight of her dead son. From 1555 to 1564, the year of his death, he worked obsessively on the block of stone that was to become known as
The Rondanini Pietà
, a sculpture so inchoate and harshly emotional that it resembles an unfinished work of the Middle Ages.
⁸

The spirit of renunciation and humility implicit in Michelangelo’s later work is the subject of Giuliano Sacco’s poem about the artist, written in Latin (which was the language of the Church in Michelangelo’s time):