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| Michelangelo's Encore Entertainers delight in doing encores. Painters do them too, though
usually with somewhat less pinache than their initial performance, and often
with no small amount of dread, having already done their best, just in trying to
match their original effort. Put yourself in Michelangelo's place in 1536. He's
61 years old. He would live to be 89, but even at that, his days of nimbly
scaling scaffolding were rapidly waning. Following the death of Pope Clement
VII, he was called back to Rome from Florence by the new pope, Paul III, to do
another fresco (a medium which he hated). Worse than that, he was being asked to
do an encore performance in the very room bearing his greatest artistic
masterpiece, the Sistine Chapel. The wall behind the altar had been in a state
of ugly disrepair for a generation or more. Even during the ceiling painting
under Julius II, there had been discussions of what to do about it. However
given the state of Julius's health, his tomb had seemed more pressing, so the
matter was put on a back burner.
When Michelangelo arrived in Rome, he
came thinking the scene would be a resurrection, only to find that with the
change of popes there had also been a change of concepts as well. Pope Paul III
wanted a last judgement. Very well, whatever popes want, they generally get, and
Michelangelo, even at sixty-one years of age, was never one to shrink from such
a challenge. He would do an encore with such a powerful explosion of dramatic
images as to make his ceiling seem to be merely a warm-up exercise. He must have
reasoned that a last judgement could be such a cataclysmic spectacle as to
dominate even Genesis and the story of creation itself. He started to work in
1536 and poured five long, hard years of his dwindling life into the
masterpiece. And like everything else he ever painted, the work was as
controversial as it was wondrous. When it was finished and unveiled in 1541, it
was received with equal parts of awe, shock, and praise.
One might think
that painting a mere wall, even one seventy-some feet tall, would seem like
child's play for a painter who had laboured flat on his back for four long,
excruciating, turbulent years painting a ceiling more than twice as large.
Perhaps, but the wall was not without its difficulties. First of all, two
windows had to be removed, the old frescos torn down, and even two lunettes of
his supposedly sacrosanct ceiling (containing the first seven generations of
Christ's lineage) had to be destroyed by the artist's own hand no less. What a
traumatic experience that must have been. Moreover, once he began, he
encountered a visual problem unlike any he'd had to deal with in the ceiling
work. The Last Judgement would be seen from the floor of course, but
unlike the ceiling, which was a uniform distance from that floor, the fresco's
height ranged from a mere ten feet at the bottom to the full seventy feet at the
top. It meant painting the lower figures (the damned) about half life-size while
those near the central figure of Christ were nearly twice life size. Of course,
all these trials and tribulations would quickly be forgotten once the painting
was finished and the praise and adulation he'd experience in the completion of
the ceiling began rolling in. But unfortunately, times had changed. The
Counter-reformation had set in. About half the people who saw the scores of
writhing, naked figures in the finished fresco hated it.
Contributed by Lane, Jim
31 July 1999 |
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