Renaissance_ A Short History, The - Johnson, Paul [66]
Julius II’s idea, when he first asked Michelangelo to paint the ceiling, was much simpler and maybe more appropriate. The painter replied that it was a “poor” idea, meaning it did not allow him to cut a bella figura. So he was hoist with his own spectacular complexities. However, he completed it in two vigorous campaigns, the second much more successful. The scheme has power, and in places noble beauty. Everyone liked it or said they did, a mark of conventional approval that has continued to this day. (There is more dissent on whether it was finer before its recent restoration or after.) Artists admired it, then and ever since, relieved that they themselves were spared such a horrible and difficult task, glad that a great spirit like Michelangelo took it on and made it work. It has all Michelangelo’s terribilità and set new standards of heroic history painting in the grand manner. As such it was an important event in European art. What more can one reasonably ask?
The Last Judgment is a different matter. It makes perfectly good sense as a major scheme on a single vertical wall, like a giant canvas with one subject. The congregation of cardinals et al., attending mass, would find their eyes drifting upward during the longueurs of the ceremony and exploring the writhing pyramids of bodies ascending the wall or tumbling down it. The impact is frightening, as it should be. The color is gruesome, as is also right. The great work is the apotheosis as well as the damnation of the human form, or perhaps one should say the human male form. Michelangelo worked with a determination and energy that give a forceful dynamic to the work and even a certain sinister glory. It cannot be judged from photographs and must be seen and studied and endured, no easy task in view of the jostling crowds that are there at all times. The general effect of the Last Judgment is to make most people think seriously about what is likely to happen to them when they die, and though they may not accept Michelangelo’s version of the likely events, they are wiser for having studied it. That is exactly the effect he sought to achieve, and the work must therefore be considered successful. By comparison, the big frescoes in the Pauline Chapel, The Conversion of St. Paul and The Crucifixion of St. Peter, though they contain many mysteries, are routine efforts by an aging man who no longer needed to prove himself but was anxious to justify his large stipend.
One weakness, or self-imposed limitation, emerged in all these grand projects. No one has ever devoted such attention to the human body as Michelangelo or so little to the earth on which it is placed. He never showed any interest in locating his figures. While Leonardo was fascinated by all natural phenomena and used realism and dreamworlds for backgrounds, and while Raphael gives us some fascinating glimpses of early sixteenth-century Italy peering out from behind his Blessed Virgins, Michelangelo despised landscape and declined to paint it. In this restricted sense he was the quintessential Renaissance artist—art was about humanity and nothing else. But it means something is missing. On the Sistine ceiling, God creates the sun and moon as geometrical abstractions, round lumps. In the Last Judgment, the blessed float up to nothing and the damned descend into a virtual vacuum. All these great decorative schemes consist of closely woven human vignettes existing in ether. It is a point of view, but not one easy for all of us to share. Dr. Johnson said of Milton’s Paradise Lost, “No one ever wished it longer.” One