The Last Judgment, Michelangelo and the Vatican 11/2/11

Michelangelo’s Last Judgment is painted on the wall behind the altar of the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City. He began work in 1537 and 4 years later, Pope Paul unveiled the masterpiece on Christmas Day 1541. This fresco signals the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of a new era in art. I will show how the formal characteristics, used by Michelangelo, differ from his earlier work and traditional Renaissance methods.

The Last Judgment is a huge fresco that spans the entire altar wall of the Papal Chapel. It is a depiction of judgment day when the souls of humans rise and descend to their fates, as judged by Christ. When we place ourselves within the lower half of this crowded, swirling mass of humanity , we see the dead rising in the lower section on Christ’s right side, launching themselves heavenward like rockets, and swirling over the top. Looking towards Christ’s left we see souls being pulled into hell by demons that appear to be human, but with grotesque animal ears, horns and green, grey and blue skin. What’s worse is that they very much seem to enjoy the pain and torment they are inflicting the damned, overwhelmed by rejection. We can hear their agonizing cries of anguish, gnashing their teeth in pain, as they sink violently to the mythical River Styx and the boat of Charon, who ferries the damned to eternal punishment. Here, the bright blue sky above doesn’t penetrate the stink of decay and death engulfing us. Anxiety and panic blinds us as we desperately strain to grab the muscular arm of an angel who may help us enter the intense blue sky of the heavens. Many of the damned have given up hope of salvation and contemplate their awful fate. Near us, there is a condemned man at the moment of full knowledge and grief of his upcoming punishment. He cowers in in shame, even as 2 demons drag him downward and a third reptilian creature bites into his thigh. There are over 300 figures within the work, and Michelangelo has infused into this mad swirling drama a nightmarish sense of fear. It is the catastrophe at the end of time and a scene that depicts angst among the characters to the point of fury.

Above us, in the center of the bright sky, is Christ illuminated by a brilliant glow of divine light. Christ, a figure of broad, powerful proportions, is raising his right hand, commanding the virtuous to heaven and sending the sinners to hell. He is beardless and muscular resembling the Greek sun-god Apollo. His raised arm is a gesture of command, setting in motion the events we see above and below us. His decree gives the entire painting a clockwise swirl motion, and you can read the painting that way. The Virgin Mary, sitting next to Christ, looks away, unable to gaze directly at her son because of the harshness of his judgments. Clusters of faces peek out from behind those figures standing in front of them growing dimmer in the distance. Michelangelo is using a technique in which one area of focus can be seen clearly while things outside that area are blurred, giving this sixteenth century fresco a third dimension,. Infinite space stretches out in all directions. Instead of using linear perspective, Michelangelo overlapped figures in densely packed groups, forming chains to indicate movement. Compositionally, the

pattern of the surface is a series of curved and angular lines directed vertically. Every element of the painting is a part of the vertical patterning, curving or zigzagging upward. One of Michelangelo's most remarkable innovations is his elimination of a frame. The drama continues off in all directions, laterally and also below. Without a frame, portrays the uncertainty of men and women moving by a force outside of their control to a fate still unknown to them.

Before he began painting the Last Judgment, Michelangelo had the wall reconstructed so that it became vaulted ceiling and overhang the bottom by 12 inches. One would see the forward inclination from the ground. This created a looming effect on the viewer and everyone in the chapel, as if the judgment were falling upon him. His use of ultramarine blue heightened an effect of infinite space, so that the sky of the Last Judgment is one of the most obvious differences with Michelangelo’s vaulted ceiling and the most striking color in the Sistine Chapel.

What is remarkable about the fresco is that nearly every face has a single common emotion. Agitation on every face- no one is marching serenely into heaven. Rather, it is if a great cacophony had exploded around Christ and everyone is shouting and talking at the same time. Each character exhibits a personal response to Christ, which is at the heart of the fresco. The artist's self-portrait appears twice; his own face in the empty envelope of skin that hangs grotesquely from a saint's hand, a metaphor for the artist's tortured soul, and in the figure in the lower left hand corner, which is looking encouragingly at those rising from their graves. His own self-portrait shows a very distinct contrast to all of his other strong and dynamic human figures that characterize his style.  This flat, hanging skin represents, instead, quite literally a deflation of his human body. Michelangelo was metaphorically denied the beauty, strength, and glory of all the other figures because of the patrons who flayed him and squeezed every ounce of labor, talent, and beauty out of his being - leaving nothing but a drooping exterior body. The artist could not have left us clearer evidence of his feeling towards life and of his highest ideals. It's clear that the epitome of the so-called "Renaissance Man" asks himself, "where will I be on that Great Day?" and that he challenges every person who engages it, "And what about you?"

The spirit of the work is totally different from that of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, unveiled 29 years earlier. In the interim, the Church had been torn apart by the Reformation, Rome had been sacked (1527), and Michelangelo's fresco breathes the new militancy of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Copernicus was the first person to formulate a comprehensive heliocentric cosmology which displaced the Earth from the center of the universe. The optimism and confidence of the ceiling is replaced by the pessimism and conflict of the altar wall. Calls for reform led to the denunciation of the excesses of the Renaissance. A new spirituality based on emphasizing a personal rather than an institutional relationship with God had exploded in the city. With these problems literally tearing Europe apart, Italian artists responded to their disillusionment by conveying their intense emotions through a new art form that reflected disintegration, of the universe, religion and humanity. As in his earlier work, Michelangelo continues to focus on the human body as the most beautiful method to express the divine soul, but here bodies are stretched and ill-proportioned, threatening and terrifying. His theology, and

therefore his politics, was profoundly supportive of the new reforms. He believed, as most people did at the time, that Rome had earned its suffering because of years of decadence. Michelangelo’s own rage, his own desire, his own suffering vibrated with the people’s wishes. As they assume ugly, awkward poses, Michelangelo explores the power of ugliness to portray the terror of the Last Judgment. It sent a potent message to religious reformers. Those who turn their back on the Catholic Church are destined for hell.

Michelangelo positioned the image of hell directly over the altar over the altar in the eyes of the pope. His view of the popes after years of living in Rome and working around the papal court was dark. The popes were corrupt, tyrannical and power mad and the chapel was used by the pope and his household and court. He had disagreed with the popes he had served, often at a profound level, because his faith was fairly straightforward while their faith was often about politics and greed. He thought his faith in the church was often stronger than theirs. His message of condemnation was aimed at them. Yet, he was given artistic license as never before and essentially unlimited funds. Michelangelo’s power to demand his patron’s trust enabled him to get away with painting himself and his artistic frustrations among the martyrs and saints.  

An earlier Renaissance humanist would draw inspiration from the nakedness of the ancient Greeks and Romans; the degree of nudity within art would be understood, but not in the more populist times that accompanied the creation of the fresco. At the heart of the Reformations, both Catholic and Protestant, was a growing sense of the centrality of Scriptures, and there were no Greek philosophers in the Bible. Counterreformation sensibility about nudity was far more biblical than Greek, and such blatantly Renaissance depictions of Christ by the foremost painter in Europe in the papal chapel itself ignited a firestorm. Michelangelo pained the beauty and ideal form of the human body to represent the beauty of the soul and the divine. Flowing robes have been put aside, for in Michelangelo's view we will all meet the Lord without emblems of our earthly status. A new uncertainty had gripped Europe. If the harmonious and idealistic representations of the High Renaissance expressed the supreme confidence of man, who saw himself as the measure of all things in the first few decades of the 16th century, this certainty was soon shattered with creation of the Last Judgment. Jesus comes upon the clouds, not as a gentle good shepherd, but terrible as an army. His face is dispassionate, almost blank and particularly terrifying in its ambiguity. It seems impossible to determine his feeling, whether he is furious or uncaring and detached, as he casts countless souls into eternal fire. The ambiguity of the judging Christ evokes anxiety in all the characters of the fresco, even the saints- all are reacting to him, measuring their lives by him, so that even the best of them suffer from insecurity, like Michelangelo himself.

This fresco depicted a Last Judgment unlike any other before. In earlier works, the end of the world is stable, frozen and hierarchical. Christ appeared at the top of very fresco, with the saint directly below him, the souls in purgatory below them and the damned at the bottom. Here, Christ is the dramatic center of the fresco. Unlike earlier examples, there are no obvious hierarchal zones. The traditional static design has given way to a terrifying dynamism, full of

tension and anxiety. Violence of this ferocity had never been seen in religious painting up until that time. The characters are all moving, jumbled, and divided into groups that flow into each other so that the piece forms a dramatic unit. This novel perception is no longer about reasserting social structure but about encoding a dynamic new pattern with the sun and God in the form of Christ as the center.

The Renaissance optimism exuberantly displayed prior on the ceiling had given way to the dark foreboding of the Catholic Reformation in the altar wall. Michelangelo had painted the vaulted ceiling during the height of the Renaissance. Now, there is a fundamental shift from unlimited confidence in the power of human action to a hyperconsciousness of sin and fear of damnation.

Most Renaissance paintings, up to this point, included a frame to create a limited space. Michelangelo designed the Last Judgment to stretch from wall to wall without a frame, creating an implied limitless space; the viewer is drawn into the scene, causing them to question their own lives and their own place on that terrible day. The new fresco would stand apart from the predated iconography of the chapel. It wasn’t coordinated with the ceiling or lateral walls in any way- the characters were on a completely different scale, almost inhuman in their exaggerated musculature, like superheroes twisting in the air. For Renaissance artists like Michelangelo, the human body was the most important metaphor of the human soul. His groundbreaking concept of the event shows figures equalized in their nudity, stripped bare of rank. The proportions of his figures grow broader and more menacing; a marked a change in style for the artist. The overall structure seems to swirl around Christ at the center, replacing the traditional patterns of horizontal layers depicting heaven, earth and hell.

The aureole of light around Christ serves to memorialize the position of the sun in the Copernican universe. The figure Christ is the sun, and all the souls, both blessed and demand, revolve around him. This glowing brilliance also emphasizes Jesus as the classic sun god of mythology.

For some reason, Michelangelo has abandoned the traditional iconography of angels with wings and it is difficult to tell the angels from the saints. His angels are more like muscular heroes or laboring men. Michelangelo takes classical or idealized forms developed by Italian Renaissance artists (including himself) of the early 16th century but exaggerated these forms in unconventional ways in order to heighten tension, power, and emotion. He was free to experiment with traditional subjects from the Bible and mythology; they might intensify the drama and add literary and visual references so that even knowledgeable viewers had to work hard to decipher the meaning. The Last Judgment is painted using contorted figures, twisting poses, elongated human figures, strained poses, and unusual effects of scale and perspective, The Renaissance was all about geometry, harmony, perspective, balance, symmetry, perfecting anatomical structures, and a movement from copying sculptures to copying real bodies. Now this new style depicts unrealistic proportions, an offbeat perspective, a complex composition, and

exaggerated or elongated figures and disproportionate human forms (the figures’ heads are too small for their bodies).

Unlike earlier Renaissance techniques, in the Last Judgment there is a flattened out sense of perspective creating a relative disorganization in the painting. Those falling and rising according to Christ’s judgment appear jumbled and in a throng, twisting and turning bound together. Christ is the only one with freedom of movement. Foreshortening, a technique for achieving the illusion of forms projecting into space, gives the fresco an unrealistic illusion of space, with sharp jumps from foreground to background rather than gradual transitions. It’s a style that displays the skill of the artist and demands knowledge of the viewer. Michelangelo’s fresco involved the spectator in ways that traditional last judgments did not. In the fresco, the dead rise in a group but are separated as individuals. The intended audience knew that Michelangelo’s goal was not to paint some long ago and far away scene, something that happened to someone else who was no longer alive. They would understand that the fresco was about something that would happen eventually, something that would involve the audience; something that they could not escape.

Few members of Michelangelo’s intended audience would have been shocked by the fresco, because they understood the theology underlying the artistry. But something new had entered the world- something that would change everything even more than the Copernican revolution. Michelangelo’s fresco would no longer have to face only the probing eyes of the papal familgia, it would have to face something new- public opinion, brought about by the printing press. Several artists had begun to copy the fresco in engravings and, prints of these engraving circulated widely throughout Europe. These artists helped to create another, less sophisticated audience, one that knew the fresco only through reproductions and written descriptions. The response of this latter audience eventually prompted the church to censor the painting.

Michelangelo spent his life glorifying the Church, etching Catholic ideals into masterpieces that defined religion for the masses. Yet when he died, his body was secretly shepherded off to Florence, and the Church was denied the opportunity to honor him with a grand funeral in Rome. This masterpiece goes beyond the bounds of the Renaissance which began from the adoration of humankind and ends with depicting the underlying baseness of the human spirit. The Last Judgment displays qualities that depart from Renaissance ideas. Art historians call this new artistic style Mannerism. Mannerism created a valuable link between the Renaissance period and the emotional Baroque movement that followed in the 17th century.

As I explored the historical context in which the Last Judgment was created, I felt swept away by the enormous titanic social, religious and scientific changes racing across Europe. Echoing the unease felt by Europeans in the face of this overwhelming confluence of events, I wasn’t sure what to write about. This monumental work of art is packed with information, symbolism, history, iconography, politics, religious fervor, mythology and conspiracy. As I uncovered the secrets behind the fresco, I discovered engrossing stories of conspiring kings, plotting popes and

murderous rivalries between noble families who were vying for control over Michelangelo and his art. After some detective work, I began to understand how these forces influenced Michelangelo’s creation of the Last Judgment. I was surprised to discover how radically Michelangelo moved away from his earlier Renaissance. The Counter-Reformation movement that arose from the ashes of the Renaissance presaged the dawn of a new era is art and philosophy- one of the Enlightenment and the Baroque period.

As I paid attention to the image of this Last Judgment, I better understood the world in which Michelangelo lived and his changing, often tortured relationship with his patrons the popes, his own salvation and his artistic genius of expression. Everyone wanted a piece of Michelangelo and everyone had something to gain or lose by the art he produced. I can’t help but wonder about his inner turmoil and despair.

I never understood the relationship between the Vatican ceiling and the altar wall fresco. The two works always seemed completely different, as if painted by a different artist in a different time period. Now I realize why, in just a few short decades, there was such a radical departure in style and function between the two works. He remains, I believe, one of the artistic geniuses of all time and the Last Judgment, his greatest work. He died February 18th, 1564, at the age of 89.