Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel

Michelangelo did not want to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling and only started the job because he was ordered to by Pope Julius II. He was first and foremost a sculptor and that was what he wanted to spend his time doing. As he wrote in his journal, “This is not my profession. I am uselessly wasting my time”.

It was not as though Michelangelo was the only person around who could do the job. His younger contemporary Raphael had already achieved great acclaim for the fresco work he was currently doing elsewhere in the Vatican, and Michelangelo suggested that Raphael should be given the Sistine Chapel commission. Although one motive of Michelangelo’s might have been to hope that the young upstart would overreach himself, he also recognised that Raphael had more experience than he had in fresco painting and would do a better job than he could do himself.

An awkward Pope

Michelangelo also resented the fact that the Pope was playing fast and loose with him. Michelangelo, regarded as the greatest sculptor of his day at the age of 33 (in 1508), had been commissioned to create an impressive mausoleum for Pope Julius, hopefully in plenty of time for when it would be required. This would involve the sculpting of some 40 individual pieces. Michelangelo was extremely keen to undertake this commission and spent eight months doing nothing but selecting the marble blocks, in the Carrara quarries, that he would need for the task.

However, no sooner had Michelangelo returned to Rome, with the blocks starting to arrive, than the Pope cancelled the commission. He had been advised by Donato Bramante, the artist and architect who designed St Peter’s Basilica, that it was unlucky to build a tomb in one’s own lifetime. Pope Julius promptly dropped the plan and dismissed Michelangelo, sending a servant to eject him from the Vatican.

Michelangelo was understandably furious, especially as he was now left unpaid for the time he had spent on the project to date and in debt to the quarry for the marble blocks. He therefore left Rome and headed back to his home city of Florence. It was some years before he was able to resume work on the tomb, and then only sporadically. It was not finished until 1545, and then only in a much reduced version of the original concept.

Almost immediately after his arrival back in Florence, Michelangelo received another summons from the Pope. This was the famous command to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Bramante clearly had a particular dislike of Michelangelo, and had proposed the latter’s name to Pope Julius in the apparent hope that he would fail in the task and be banished from Rome for ever as a result.

Pope Julius, on the other hand, may have seen the commission as a way of softening the blow caused by his previous action. He may indeed have been eccentric and inconstant, but he does not appear to have been an unkind man. Whatever the reasoning behind the decision, though, when the Pope commanded something, it had to be done, and Michelangelo’s pleadings to be relieved of the task were never likely to get him anywhere.

Working in the Sistine Chapel

The Sistine Chapel was named after its creator, Pope Sixtus IV, who was the predecessor (and uncle) of Julius II. The greatest artists of the preceding generation, including Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and Perugio, had been engaged on painting the walls with religious and historical scenes, but at Sixtus’s death the ceiling remained unpainted and the duty fell on Julius to see the work finished.

The area in question was enormous, measuring some 130 feet by 43 feet, or more than 5,500 square feet, about 65 feet above the floor. Even if one can picture oneself slapping on an undercoat plus a covering of magnolia, this would strike anyone as a huge undertaking, but the Pope wanted more than that! His idea was for twelve huge images of the apostles, but Michelangelo, with his sculptor’s eye for proportion, did not think that this would work. Instead, he persuaded the Pope to let him design the project his own way. Perhaps out of a sense of obligation to a wronged man, but also taking a huge gamble in trusting a sculptor who had not wielded a paintbrush since he was a teenager, Julius agreed.

Bramante was clearly less trusting than the Pope. When Michelangelo arrived to start work, he found that Bramante had built scaffolding for him to work from, and proposed to drill holes in the ceiling from which ropes would hang to support a working platform. Michelangelo ridiculed this idea, as it would obstruct the surface on which he was to paint, and he may also have had suspicions about the safety aspects of this arrangement.

Instead, Michelangelo built a wooden platform under the ceiling, supported by brackets fixed into holes above the upper windows. A screen, possibly of cloth, was suspended beneath the platform to catch any paint or plaster that might fall. This was particularly necessary because the Chapel would have been in use for services and other occasions while the work was in progress. The platform was moved as required along the length of the Chapel, with only half of the ceiling being scaffolded at any one time. However, the screen was probably in place for the entire length of the ceiling, given that very few people seemed to know what was being painted before it was finally revealed.

Michelangelo at work

In the 1965 film “The Agony and the Ecstasy”, Michelangelo, played by Charlton Heston, is depicted as painting while lying on his back. However, this would not have been practical, as the painter would have needed much more freedom of movement. Instead, Michelangelo stood on the platform with his head tilted back. This was not a particularly comfortable posture, and Michelangelo suffered greatly from neck pains and swollen glands as a result.

Bramante also supplied Michelangelo with a team of experienced fresco-painters brought in from Florence, but Michelangelo was not prepared to work as a team leader in this way. He may also, of course, have been highly suspicious of Bramante’s motives in bringing in his own people to keep an eye on the work and report back to Pope Julius. Michelangelo therefore dismissed all the assistants and got on with the work in his own way.

That is not to say that he worked entirely alone for the whole four years that it took to complete the project, although another Sistine Chapel myth is that this is what he did. He would have needed people around him to mix the paints and prepare the plaster, so that it was at the correct state of moistness to accept the paint. He may indeed have thought at first that he could do everything single-handedly, but he was completely new to fresco painting and would soon have realised that the business of running up ladders carrying buckets of plaster was something that he could leave to others!

There have been suggestions that Michelangelo employed assistant artists to do the “boring bits”, such as background sky and decorative detail. However, the amount of such assistance would have been extremely small, especially as Michelangelo was such a perfectionist, and so temperamental that it is extremely unlikely that many artists would have lived up to his exacting standards. We can imagine him grumpily examining a patch of ceiling painted by an assistant, complaining about it, then re-doing it after the assistant had gone home.

The project had its setbacks, especially at the beginning when mistakes were made through inexperience and misfortune. For example, a panel devoted to Noah’s Flood had to be re-done when the plaster went mouldy due to having been painted when too wet or at the wrong temperature. There were also interruptions due to political circumstances and one occasion when it looked as though the Pope was dying, which was a false alarm. Nevertheless, Pope Julius clearly grew impatient at the apparently slow progress that Michelangelo was making. However, the story that he threatened to throw the artist off his scaffolding if he didn’t hurry up is probably another myth.

Fresco painting is a particularly difficult art, as the paint needs to be applied quickly on to plaster that is correctly moist. Once the plaster has dried, no more paint can be applied. The artist therefore has to work at speed and only on as much plaster at a time as he can paint before it dries. Michelangelo would have sketched out his designs, as “cartoons”, before applying the plaster and painting it in small sections. He would therefore have had to ensure that each batch of paint was of exactly the same shade as the previous one, so that, for example, a character’s robe did not look like a patchwork quilt.

There is evidence that, once Michelangelo got the hang of fresco painting, he worked very quickly. The suggestion is that any other artist, working under the same conditions, would have taken much longer than four years.

The finished work

When the work was finally complete and the scaffolding and screens were removed, on All Saints Day (1st November), 1512, there was universal acclamation for what Michelangelo had achieved. Raphael was unstinting in his praise, despite the fact that he and Michelangelo were hardly the best of friends. Nobody could criticise what was universally acknowledged as a work of genius, all the credit for which had to go to one man.

Instead of the twelve figures originally imagined by Pope Julius, Michelangelo supplied more than 300. Featured in the centre of the ceiling are nine scenes from Genesis, including the iconic image of God’s finger reaching out to that of Adam to give him life. They fall into three groups of three, featuring the Creation, the Fall of Man and the story of Noah, every scene being a masterpiece in its own right. Surrounding the centre are figures of prophets, other biblical figures and figures from pagan mythology, such as sybils, which might have seemed out of place in the headquarters of the Christian Church. However, Michelangelo never saw the two worlds as being completely divided, with many of his greatest sculptures being on pagan themes, and the sybils could be interpreted as foretellers of the future, which included the birth of Christ.

Often overlooked is the clever way in which Michelangelo incorporated architectural features into his design, such that pediments and columns appear to make a three-dimensional framework for the other images, despite being on a two-dimensional ceiling that is flat in the centre but curved at the sides. Michelangelo would not have been able to see his work from the ground when he was designing it, so his success in achieving this “trompe d’oeil” must be put down to his genius as a sculptor that allowed him to visualise the final effect in three dimensions. Perhaps getting the world’s best sculptor to paint the ceiling was not such a bad idea after all!

After the ceiling

Michelangelo was rarely fortunate during his long life, and his good fortune did not continue for long after completion of the ceiling. Pope Julius died within three months, and his successor, Leo X, had work to offer Raphael, but not Michelangelo.

One irony about Michelangelo’s life, as compared to Raphael’s, is that the latter’s, which was serene and well-favoured, only lasted for 37 years, whereas Michelangelo lived to the age of 88, much of it spent in poverty and loneliness. After completing the ceiling he went back to his first love, namely sculpture, but he had not seen the last of the Sistine Chapel.

In 1534 he was commissioned by Pope Paul III to paint the wall at the Chapel’s entrance, which he did with a fresco of the Last Judgement that took him five years to finish. One can wonder how often the sculptor in his 60s looked up to the ceiling he had completed more than 20 years previously. Did he marvel at his previous efforts, and did they inspire him to produce the same quality of work on his current assignment? Or did the old curmudgeon tut-tut to himself as he spotted his mistakes?

© John Welford