Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel Read Online Free PDF Page A

Girolamo Savonarola. Savonarola had been preaching in Florence, to increasing popular enthusiasm, since before the death of Lorenzo il Magnifico. His sermons had been instrumental in the uprising against the Medici that had been correctly predicted in the dark vision of Cardiere — indeed, the friar had created a climate of hysteria and spiritual emergency that made men prone to visions and hallucinations.
    Savonarola identified the Rome of the Borgia pope, Alexander VI, with the forces of the anti-Christ. His doom-laden interpretation of St John the Divine’s visions in the Book of Revelation had led him to believe that the start of the sixteenth century marked the beginning of the end of the world — the start of the Final Conflict between the forces of good and evil. His call for spiritual reform was coloured by a deep sense of eschatological urgency. If the people of the world did not repent, if the Church did not mend its ways, and immediately, it would be too late. ‘I say to you the church of God must be renewed, and it will be soon.’ 17 Savonarola’s pious revolution was destined to be overthrown, its leader burned at the stake. But his impact on Michelangelo’s thought should not be underestimated. Even in old age, the artist said that the memory of Savonarola’s words remained vivid in his imagination.
    Savonarola was removed from power partly at the instigation of the papacy. But although he was regarded as troublesome and dangerous, a threat both to the Church’s temporal power and to its spiritual authority, many of his ideas were reflected within the Vatican itself. He is sometimes regarded as a freak of history, when he was really a larger-than-life incarnation of attitudes extremely common at the time. Many others shared his apocalyptic view of the world.
    Astronomers and theologians, Savonarola’s contemporaries, nervously scanned the skies for comets that might portend the Second Coming. Omens were found everywhere. Plagues, floods and other natural catastrophes were interpreted as eruptions of the wrath of God. It was even widely assumed that Columbus’s discovery of a new world must have been a sign from above, indicating the imminence of Armageddon — a heaven-sent opportunity for mass conversion of the heathen, and therefore God’s way of swelling his Christian armies, even as the satanic forces of Islam gathered in the East. 18 Astrologers competed to put a precise date to the world’s final day. Italy at the end of the fifteenth century was extremely susceptible to eschatological terrors. As the historian Damian Thompson notes, ‘the conventional picture of Renaissance Italy, in which a cultivated elite turns away from superstition and towards the study of art, architecture, music and astronomy, is extremely selective. We do not see the prophets wandering through Florence and Rome proclaiming the end of an age; nor do we spot the figure of the anti-Christ lurking behind the doric columns of the renovatio .’ 19 In the art of the young Michelangelo — with its ‘elite’ references to classical antiquity and its deep, countervailing Christian piety — these very different attitudes are uniquely combined.
    The greatest projects of the so-called High Renaissance, including the creation and decoration of the Sistine Chapel itself, were themselves bound up with a strong sense of ‘end time’. The renovation of Rome, the rebuilding of St Peter’s, the fortification of the Vatican — in papal circles these schemes were conceived not just as assertions of power and authority but as ways of readying the Church for the imminent judgement of the Last Day. One of the principal theologians at the court of Michelangelo’s greatest patron, Pope Julius II, was the vicar-general of the Augustinian order, Giles of Viterbo. Giles, who may also have sought to influence the iconography of Michelangelo’s paintings for the Sistine Chapel, gave explicit expression to this Messianic strain of thought.