Sistine Chapel Ceiling Part II: Earlier Influences

My blog post earlier in the week has inspired me to write even more on Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes.  Honestly I could probably write on this topic weekly and still find new things to say, its impact on art was so significant.

At the same time though, while Michelangelo’s frescoes have provided inspiration for hundreds of other artists and artworks, it appears that he also drew on a wide variety of earlier images.  During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance there were certain visual traditions that were used in art to let the viewer instantly recognize the subject.

Michelangelo was from Florence, the city known as the birthplace of the Italian Renaissance where many examples of art could be found.  Michelangelo greatly respected the master painters and sculptors that came before him and drew on their art for his own inspiration.

Temptation, Masolino and Expulsion, Masaccio, Brancacci Chapel, 

S. Maria del Carmine, Florence, 1424-27

One example can be found in Michelangelo's Temptation and Expulsion fresco, he was influenced by the frescoes in Santa Maria del Carmine, the Carmelite church in Florence.  The frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel by Masolino and Masaccio with the same subject matter were works of art that he was known to regularly visit and sketch from.


Let's compare and contrast the subjects.  From Masolino, Michelangelo borrowed the idea of the serpent in the Garden of Eden having the head of a woman rather than that of a snake.  Both artists also focused on the figures rather than the garden setting.  From Masaccio Michelangelo used the idea of an angel with a sword and showing Adam and Eve as having become haggard and miserable as they were forced to leave, both sets of figures appear to be in agony.


Michelangelo's fresco was painted more than 80 years later than the earlier two.  When comparing and contrasting both sets of figures we can see that he spent quite a lot of time studying anatomy.  Drawing from the nude life model was now a more acceptable practice, and while it was still unacceptable to dissect cadavers, his study of bones and muscles has paid off in a depicting very accurate and realistic bodies.

Temptation and Expulsion from Eden, Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel Ceiling, Vatican, 1508-12

Another example can be found in the cloisters at Santa Maria Novella.  The frescoes done outside in the cloister by Paolo Uccello are known as the Chiostro Verde (Green Cloisters) because they have faded after being exposed to the elements and have a greenish appearance.

Interestingly enough they cover the same subject matter as the Sistine Chapel ceiling: The stories from Genesis (Creation of Adam, Creation of Eve, Temptation, Expulsion) and scenes of the Deluge and Noah's Ark.

Santa Maria Novella is the same church that Ghirlandaio and his workshop painted two enormous fresco cycles.  At the time those were being painted, Michelangelo was studying under Ghirlandaio.  He was participating in the fresco painting and would have become very familiar with Uccello's work.

Again Uccello's Temptation scene shows the serpent with the head of a woman, however he takes great care to paint a landscape and foliage in his fresco.  

 Creation of the Animals, Creation of Adam, Creation of Eve, Temptation in the Garden of Eden, Paolo Uccello, Chiostro Verde, St. Maria Novella, Florence, c-1430-1450

Compare and contrast Uccello's Creation of Adam with Michelangelo's Creation of Eve (left hand scene shown below).  Both show God as an old robed man who is helping up the newly created human.  There is something of Uccello's Adam in Michelangelo's Creation of Adam as well, the pose that Adam takes with one straight leg and one bent knee.

I imagine that when they were first done the Uccello frescoes looked much different and would have been quite impressive.  However when compared side by side (done years later) it is easy to see why Michelangelo became such an influence on later artists.  His realism is stunning.

Look at the interesting view of the ceiling below, the combination of large scenes combined with smaller scenes and the painted illusion of sculpture and a cornice is incredible.  Everything you see below is painted and creates both a striking illusion and a powerful narrative.

Last but not least we should remember the influence of the ancient sculpture, the Laocoon, which was unearthed while Michelangelo was painting this in Rome (more information can be found in an earlier blog post I wrote on the Laocoon in July of 2011).  The sculpture can be seen in the left hand column of this blog.

The struggle taking place and the twisting torso influenced those figures known as "ignudi" on the ceiling.  They were the mysterious athletic male figures who frame the corners of each main scene, no two have the same pose.

In a later post I want to highlight some of the later artists that Michelangelo influenced, I already mentioned this in my writing on Caravaggio.  There are many, many other artists that drew on Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes as a source.  I think that may be a very long blog post indeed.

Until then here are my book recommendations-

Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling by Ross King- I know I just listed it in my last post but this book is really informative and well written.  It is non fiction but feels like a fast paced novel and puts every aspect of this work in a new light.
Michelangelo Biography of a Genius by Bruno Nardini- this is a very good biography.
The Agony and the Ecstasy: A Biographical Novel of Michelangelo by Irving Stone- one of my favorite books, telling the story of Michelangelo through a novel.  This is based on history and research but as a novel isn't 100% accurate, still it is a very good story and will give anyone a new appreciation for this great master.

Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Ceiling

We were never supposed to remember Michelangelo when we think of the Sistine Chapel.  In the early Renaissance an artist was little more than a tradesman or artisan.  Art wasn’t created as self-expression but was typically commissioned by a wealthy patron.  Even the best and most highly sought after artists were not considered to be in the same social class as their patrons.  

In the case of the Sistine Chapel the patron was the pope.  Do many people in the 21^st century know of Pope Julius II (1443-1513) who commissioned the ceiling frescoes or his uncle Pope Sixtus IV (1414-1484) who remodeled the original chapel?  Both were from the extremely wealthy and influential della Rovere family in Urbino.

 Sistine Chapel Ceiling frescoes, Michelangelo, 1508-12, Vatican

When the Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes were commissioned the public was meant to remember these two popes from the della Rovere family instead.  It would have seemed unthinkable before their creation that 500 years later instead the ceiling would be forever linked with the artist rather than the patron.

I have been to the Sistine Chapel more than once, and I am also struck by the fact that it is not just the ceiling which is covered in frescoes by Michelangelo.  The entire chapel is covered in frescoes painted by some of the leading artists of the time including Luca Signorelli and then another three who all trained with Leonardo’s teacher Andrea del Verrocchio: Botticelli, Perugino (Raphael’s teacher) and Ghirlandaio (Michelangelo’s first teacher).  It is as if the entire Italian High Renaissance is indebted to the work in the Sistine Chapel.

 Christ Giving the Keys to St. Peter, Pietro Perugino, 1481-82, Vatican

Michelangelo started his artistic training in the fresco workshop of Ghirlandaio in Florence.  He participated in the fresco cycles at Santa Maria Novella in Florence, but he didn’t enjoy the medium.  Shortly thereafter he received training in sculpting and from that point forward considered himself a sculptor.  Later he went to Rome, where he attracted the attention of the Pope with his sculpture of the Pieta.

Pope Julius II saw in the ceiling a blank canvas to express the greatness of the Catholic Church and therefore the implied greatness of the della Rovere family within the church.  However Michelangelo wasn’t interested in the commission at all, he was more interested in the Pope’s original idea of building himself an enormous marble tomb.  When Julius II changed his mind and asked to have the huge and oddly curved Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoed, Michelangelo left and went home to Florence.  The Pope had him followed and asked that he return and the civic leaders made him return so as not to start a war by disobeying the Pope.

 The Deluge, Michelangeo, Sistine Chapel Ceiling, Vatican, 1508-12

Michelangelo returned with a team of assistants, unlike painting on a canvas a fresco was an incredibly difficult process which involved plastering a wall and immediately painting on the wet plaster.  The painting was permanent and had to be removed to fix errors, it took days of four men working together to paint even a small area.

The role of the artist had slowly been changing in the late 15^th century and the three great artists of the High Renaissance (Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael) played a large role in that.  It is not entirely known what part Michelangelo played in the layout of the ceiling and the depiction of the Biblical stories shown there.  As Ross King writes in his informative book Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling (p. 60):


     "For a pope to hand over to a mere artist - even to an artist of Michelangelo's reputation - the
     complete pictorial program for the decoration of the most important chapel in Christendom 
     would have been, to say the least, highly unusual."

Temptation and Expulsion from Eden, Michelangeo, Sistine Chapel Ceiling, Vatican, 1508-12

It is much more likely that there were advisers to the Pope who helped suggest the design and choose the stories to show.  The scenes are all from the Old Testament and relate to rebirth and new beginnings (God creating the World, God creating Adam and Eve, Garden of Eden and Noah's Ark) and therefore indirectly relate to how the della Rovere family helped achieve it's own rebirth of the church.

However Michelangelo visited many churches in Florence and drew on earlier depictions and sources for these (this will be discussed at length in a future blog post).  His new realism and use of the figure to tell stories had an immediate impact when the first half of the ceiling was unveiled to the public in 1510.

 The Creation of Adam, Michelangeo, Sistine Chapel Ceiling, Vatican, 1508-12

The stories were painted in backwards chronological order,  note how much his style was changed and simplified from the first scene showing Noah and the Flood.  In that early painting the scene is crowded with figures.  His work becomes much more effective when he simplifies his style.

He uses the human figure to represent the entire story, leaving out many of the symbols, landscape and backgrounds that other artists were using.  His studies in human anatomy are evident and this key work shaped the direction of the Renaissance.

 God Separating Darkness and Light, Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel Ceiling, Vatican, 1508-12

Pope Julius II recognized the extraordinary skill level of Michelangelo, but it was through his Sistine Chapel Ceiling frescoes that everyone recognized his genius and his status as a "mere artist" was transcended. 

 

Note: For more on this topic my next blog post  Sistine Chapel Ceiling Part II: Earlier Influences, discusses some of the earlier art that inspired Michelangelo.

Suggested Reading:

Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling by Ross King
Michelangelo: His Life, Work and Times by Linda Murray 
Michelangelo: Biography of a Genius by Bruno Nardini

Has Sculpture Become Just Another Pretty Face?

BERLIN — Sometimes on a whim I stop into the Bode Museum here to commune with a tiny clay sculpture of John the Baptist.
It’s in a corner of a nearly always empty room, a bone-white bust, pretty and as androgynous as mid-1970s Berlin-addled David Bowie. The saint’s upturned eyes glow in the hard light through tall windows. Attributed to the 15th-century Luccan artist Matteo Civitali, the sculpture is all exquisite ecstasy and languor.
Sometimes it’s not the saint I check on but a sculptured portrait in the same room of the banker Filippo Strozzi — stern like a Roman emperor, the face of rectitude and power — by Benedetto da Maiano, Civitali’s contemporary. Then I usually climb the stairs to admire Houdon’s bust of Gluck, the composer, and ogle a towering pair of craggy German knights, relics of Renaissance pageantry made of painted wood, each taller than the N.B.A. star Dirk Nowitzki.
Mostly, though, I go to the Bode for the silence.

Like a sentry commanding the northern tip of Berlin’s Museum Island, its back turned to the busier Pergamon Museum, the Neues Museum, the Altes Museum and the Alte Nationalgalerie, the Bode seems to attract just a few handfuls of visitors a day. Some go there to see the paintings, coins and Byzantine art. The sculpture rooms are mostly abandoned.

Is it me, or do we seem to have a problem with sculpture today? I don’t mean contemporary sculpture, whose fashionable stars (see Koons, Murakami et alia) pander to our appetite for spectacle and whatever’s new. I don’t mean ancient or even non-Western sculpture, either. I mean traditional European sculpture — celebrities like Bernini and Rodin aside — and American sculpture, too: the enormous universe of stuff we come across in churches and parks, at memorials and in museums like the Bode. The stuff Barnett Newman, the Abstract Expressionist painter, notoriously derided as objects we bump into when backing up to look at a painting.

A few minutes’ walk from the Bode, the Friedrichswerdersche Kirche, the rebuilt neo-Gothic former church designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel in the 1830s, houses its own sublime assortment of 19th-century sculpture. It’s usually even emptier than the Bode, and it is free to boot. I’ll occasionally spend an hour or so there, feeling small and unimportant before the portraits of Kant and the great German archaeologist Johann Winckelmann. Except for the doleful guards, I rarely encounter another living soul.

I grew up with the smells of plaster dust and clay in my mother’s sculpture studio on Third Avenue. Making a figure out of stone or metal retains its childlike wonder for me. But sculpture skeptics from Leonardo through Hegel and Diderot have cultivated our prejudice against the medium. “Carib art,” is how Baudelaire described sculpture, meaning that even the suavest, most sophisticated works of unearthly virtuosity by Enlightenment paragons like Canova and Thorvaldsen were tainted by the medium’s primitive, cultish origins.

Racism notwithstanding, Baudelaire had a point. Sculpture does still bear something of the burden of its commemorative and didactic origins. It’s too literal, too direct, too steeped in religious ceremony and too complex for a historically amnesiac culture. We prefer the multicolored distractions of illusionism on flat surfaces, flickering in a movie theater or digitized on our laptops and smartphones, or painted on canvas. The marketplace ratifies our myopia, making headlines for megamillion-dollar sales of old master and Impressionist pictures but rarely for premodern sculptures.

Critics bow to fashion and a legacy of lazy disdain, largely avoiding the topic — I’ve done it myself, so I know — and museums only perpetuate the cycle, offering a steady flow of Botticelli, Monet and Rembrandt exhibitions, before which we genuflect like medieval pilgrims praying before sculptured shrines. But sculpture shows that might broaden our horizons, being costly and difficult to mount, are almost rarer than genuine newly discovered Michelangelos.

In an age of special effects, we may also simply no longer know how to feel awe at the sight of sculptured faces by the German genius Tilman Riemenschneider or before a bronze statue by Donatello. We can’t see past the raw materiality and subject matter. Never mind that Donatello may have been the greatest creative genius until Picasso; he long ago got lapped in the public’s imagination by Madame Tussaud, who has given way to “Avatar” in 3-D and Alexander McQueen’s trippy costumed mannequins.

I read the other day that the Metropolitan Museum had decided to stay open late to accommodate the bewildering crowds for its McQueen extravaganza. Mass hysteria is how a friend described it to me. It clearly became the height of fashion for people to stand in the endless line, if only to have been able to say that they stood in the endless line. How many of those people, I asked myself, stopped to look at any of the Met’s sculptures while they were there, or ever had?
How wonderful, I also thought.

I have the Bode to myself.