NAVIGATION
ALL ARTISTS
THE
SISTINE CHAPEL
The heroic forms and expressive powers which Michelangelo brought to the superhuman task now imposed upon the unwilling sculptor by the great pope of the High Renaissance, Julius II: the frescoing of the Sistine Chapel ceiling (133 by 45 feet; 1508-1512). The program of the earlier frescoes on the walls below, which had opposed equivalent episodes of the lives of Moses and Christ, surmounted by figures of the early popes, was now to be made universal by Michelangelo's additions of the essentials of the Old Testament, and eventually, by Raphael's tapestries of later New Testament material and by Michelangelo's Last Judgment on the altar wall.
The ceiling frescoes reduce Genesis to nine scenes of the Creation and of Noah and the Flood; at the sides are colossal Hebrew prophets and gentile sibyls who foretold the Coming, such proto-saviors as David and Esther, and the ancestors of Christ. Even in Michelangelo's painting, everything is concentrated in the human body, and here, in astounding variety and quantity, its expressive possibilities were infinitely multiplied. Landscape and even space itself are reduced to an unprecedented minimum.
Michelangelo is more interested in massive three-dimensional form than in the color which serves primarily for the further clarification of this form. It is appropriate that the text which says God created man in His own image should occasion Michelangelo's most sublime figure, the Adam whose human beauty thus partakes of the divine-a concise visual epitome of the Renaissance; yet Adam, doomed by his own iniquities, is also the archetype of Michelangelesque tragedy. The immense accomplishment of the Sistine Chapel expanded the scope of art to incalculably broader dimensions.
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