Free Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel by Andrew Graham-Dixon Page A

many compositions, Michelangelo departed from tried and trusted pictorial convention. He told the stories in his own way and embodied them in his own particular language, a form of painting in which representation has been pared down to almost nothing but the figure, nude or clothed (but most frequently nude). He used the human form, in action and reaction, to express a vast range of feelings and ideas and spiritual aspirations. Many of those feelings and ideas can be explained, to a certain extent, by reference to Christian theology. But throughout the ceiling’s rich weave of imagery there are subtleties of allusion, visual echoes and rhymes, suggestions and half-suggestions that go beyond the straightforward expression of Christian doctrine.

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The Genesis Cycle, first triad: The Separation of Light and Darkness ; The Creation of the Sun, Moon and Plants ; The Creation of Life in the Waters
    Michelangelo begins at the beginning, with a depiction of The Separation of Light and Darkness . He shows the Almighty God of the Old Testament as a heroic male figure with grey beard and hair, dressed in lilac robes that swirl about him, twisting upwards through the heavens to separate light from darkness. He embodies male strength but also the fecundity of the female principle, in that Michelangelo has given him pectoral muscles nearly as rounded as a woman’s breasts. The figure rises into space amid rays of light. The picture is at once the sparest and the most austere of the ceiling’s scenes of Creation.
    The subject is drawn from the Book of Genesis:
    In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. (Genesis 1: 1-5)
    There was no precedent in earlier Christian art for Michelangelo’s dynamic airborne deity swooping through an implied infinity of space. The artists of the Byzantine and medieval traditions had expressed their own sense of the ineffable mystery of God the Creator by removing the scenes so elliptically described at the start of Genesis to a pictorial world of abstract geometrical perfection. The Italo-Byzantine craftsmen who had created the thirteenth-century mosaics of the dome of the Baptistry in Florence — a famous and much venerated building at the heart of the town where Michelangelo spent his formative years — had represented the God of the Creation scenes as a solemn, hieratic figure floating on a ground of gold, enclosed by the celestial spheres, making a stiff gesture of benediction. The artists of the early Renaissance had humanised God the Father, to the extent that he could appear in Masaccio’s celebrated fresco of The Trinity , of the 1420s, in the Florentine church of Santa Maria Novella, as a doughty ancient with a forbiddingly solemn expression on his face. But Michelangelo energised this still recently anthropomorphised figure in a way that was both new and revolutionary.
    His reinvention of the all-creating deity as a figure flying through space under the unseen impulse of divine will, was to prove enormously influential. Artists of the High Renaissance such as Raphael, followed by the painters of the Baroque and Rococo periods, would follow Michelangelo in embodying God as a being with human form endowed with a superhuman, cosmic thrust and energy. Romantic painters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would impart something of his twisting, irrepressible force to the Promethean heroes of their own disenchanted mythologies. Michelangelo’s influence can even be discerned in the popular art of the twentieth century. Inventors of the American superhero comic-strip adapted his style to