Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel

A worldwide traveling exhibition of blown-up images of the 34 frescoes that make up the Sistine Chapel ceiling, plus The Last Judgment, lit down in Santa Barbara’s Old Mission for the summer, yielding surprises good and bad. The images themselves were less than great, having the look of overenlarged low-resolution photos. (I don’t know how accurate the color was, but that’s to be expected.) The presentation was rather hokey, with the pictures propped up in meeting rooms of the Mission; but with only a handful of people wandering the halls on a Saturday afternoon, the low-key nature seemed appropriate. The good surprise for me was being able to focus, one-on-one, with each scene that made up the ceiling. I knew the famous ones, of course, God Creating Adam, etc., but despite my years of Michelangelo worship I don’t think I’d even noticed his depictions of, for instance, Judith and Holofernes or the Hanging of Haman. Nor had I paid attention to the six triangles containing Ancestors of Christ. The ignudi were missing, but no matter. The audioguide was good and helped us give sufficient attention to each image. I now have a much better picture of what is shown in the Sistine Chapel ceiling. When you look at reproductions of the whole ceiling, as was shown at the Met recently, your eye is drawn to the familiar scenes and much gets overlooked.

Now the bad surprise: most of what I hadn’t known before wasn’t very good. Perhaps that’s the reason so much attention is given to the Creation of Adam, the Sun and the Moon,  Delphic and Libyan Sybils, Prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel. The Ancestors of Christ are repetitive and uninteresting: a mother and father contorted in a triangular space with a young child. Michelangelo, not alone among his peers, wasn’t very good at painting little children, and this weakness carries over to all the putti that hang around God in the Genesis scenes. Judith and Holofernes, a favorite subject of next-century artists, is lifeless and none of the other compositions in the spandrels seem to have left any mark on art history. As good as the Creation of Adam is, the Creation of Eve is an awkward misfire. Eve, as she leaves the Garden, is a horrendous figure; as often noted, Michelangelo’s nude women are toned men with bosoms. In short, the ensemble is unmistakably great, but it is way more than the sum of its parts.