Up close and personal with a Renaissance master work
The Vatican Museum just launched a high-resolution, panoramic photograph of the interior of the Sistine Chapel. Photograph fails to describe this site utterly, but I don't think the language has caught up with this technology yet. Follow this link and go on a tour . Photographs of the Sistine Chapel never cease to amaze me but this is something on a whole other level. This photograph lets a view pan and zoom and in doing so, you can see parts of the chapel that you can't see even when you're standing in it.
When maximum human beings think about the Sistine Chapel ceiling, they consider this photograph.
That's truely a detail from the middle, the entire 12,000 square feet of that ceiling appear like this.
My hero, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, painted it over four years from 1508 to 1512. Michelangelo didn't consider himself to be a painter and accepted the commission from Pope Julius II under duress. I'd love to know how those conversations went but alas, they are lost to history. Julius was a megalomaniac and Michelangelo was a neurotic, I'm sure hilarity ensued.
This on-line, interactive picture helps you to arise close and private with this superb work and even as it is hardly an alternative choice to being there in man or woman, it does let you see factors of Michelangelo's paintings you'll never see in any other case. If you move back to that first photo of God and Adam, you can see that Michelangelo depicted God inside the form of a human brain. Seriously, zoom in on it. Keep in thoughts too, that there is not a flat floor available in this ceiling, it's a flattened barrel arch it is reduce transversely by eight smaller vaults along its length and four compound arches at either quit.
All art captures the history of the time it was created and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is the ultimate time capsule from the 1500s. It's not possible to exaggerate the advances being made in science, philosophy, religion, politics and art from that period. All of those new ideas are writ large on that ceiling. As such, this ceiling is nothing less than a complete story of the underpinnings over western civilization.
The Roman High Renaissance was a heady time but it came to a sudden end when Rome was sacked in 1527 by mercenaries from the Holy Roman Empire. In the aftermath of that invasion and pillaging, a new and more serious air permeated what had been a laboratory for free thinking.
Michelangelo regular a second commission in the chapel in 1535, whilst he painted his Last Judgment on the wall at the back of the altar.
It's a big work and because Michelangelo painted it, it's packed with surprises which are evidently visible with this interactive image.
Here's St. Bartholomew and he's holding his own flayed skin.
It's St. Batholomew's skin, but that's Michelangelo's face.
Michelangelo's comfort with showing human nudity caused a lot of controversy in its day and that controversy reached it's peak as he was painting his Last Judgment. George Vasari's 1987 book The Lives of the Artists quotes Michelangelo's chief accuser, Biagio da Cesena: "it was mostly disgraceful that in so sacred a place there should have been depicted all those nude figures, exposing themselves so shamefully, and that it was no work for a papal chapel but rather for the public baths and taverns."
Michelangelo were given inspite of him through depicting him as Minos, a judge of the underworld. To make his point in addition, Minos has the ears of an ass.
Even more amusing is that when da Cesena complained to the Pope about the depiction, the Pope told da Cesena: "That is too bad. If you were in purgatory, I could help you. But my jurisdiction does not extend to hell, so the portrait will have to remain."
It's cool whilst a 500-year-antique shaggy dog story can nonetheless get a laugh.
The forces da Cesena represented had the final say even though because shortly after Michelangelo died in 1564, the nudes in the Last Judgment were protected via loin cloths and fig leaves.
Thanks go to the terrific Nancie Mills-Pipgras, my editor at Mosaic Art Now , who pointed me to EternallyCool.net , where I saw this Sistine Chapel link last week.