Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel Read Online Free PDF

In a sermon preached in Julius’s presence in 1507 he portrayed the pope as a figure to be equated with Moses, Socrates and St Peter, one destined to play a great part in the unfolding of God’s awesome plan: ‘You, after more than 250 popes, after 1,500 years, after so many Christians and emperors and kings, you and you alone . . . will build the roof of the most Holy Temple so that it reaches heaven.’
    The literal reference was to St Peter’s, but Giles had a larger meaning in mind too. Julius II was to preside over the creation of that greater Church, all of Christian humanity, drawn by Rome’s splendour, as by a beacon, to fight on the side of good against evil in fulfilment of St John the Divine’s visions of the apocalypse. 20 The commission to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling was accompanied by the same sense of spiritual urgency that had animated Savonarola, whose words had left such a strong impression on the young Michelangelo. The paintings for the ceiling would bear vivid traces of that apocalyptic anxiety.
    The Drunkenness of Bacchus

    The first triad: The Separation of Light and Darkness (bottom), The Creation of the Sun, Moon and Plants (centre and overleaf) and The Creation of Life in the Waters (top)

    The central triad: The Creation of Adam (bottom and previous page), The Creation of Eve (centre) and The Temptation and Expulsion (top)
    Above : The Creation of Eve
    Overleaf : The Temptation and Expulsion

    The Deluge (previous page and in detail above)
    The Sacrifice of Noah (top) and The Drunkenness of Noah (below)
    The third triad: The Sacrifice of Noah (bottom), The Deluge (centre) and The Drunkenness of Noah (top)

    Michelangelo left Florence in the summer of 1496, two years before Savonarola’s downfall and execution. The cause of his departure was a fake. One of his works, a sleeping Cupid , 21 had been passed off as an antiquity by an unscrupulous Florentine dealer. A prominent collector in Rome, Cardinal Riario, had been duped into believing it was of ancient Roman provenance, and had paid the princely sum of two hundred ducats for it. After discovering that he had been the victim of a confidence trick, the cardinal had sent an envoy to Florence. The messenger was given two tasks: first, to track down the crooked dealer and get a refund; second, to find the artist responsible for such fine work and bring him to Rome. Michelangelo was twenty-two years old. His career was about to take off.
    Riario was intrigued to meet the young prodigy. He even put him up in his own house for a year, according to the artist’s biographers. Condivi says that although the cardinal gave Michelangelo no commissions, the artist ‘did not lack a connoisseur who did make use of him; for Messer Jacopo Galli, a Roman gentleman of fine intellect, had him make in his house a marble Bacchus ten palmi high’. 22 The work in question, which unlike the faked Cupid still survives, is a life-size incarnation of the ancient god of wine, revelry and mystic orgies. Roundbellied and leering, the stone Bacchus (opposite) seems to stagger rather than walk, raising a glass as he teeters through space. Vasari wondered at the way in which Michelangelo had given the figure ‘both the youthful slenderness of the male and the fullness and roundness of the female’, 23 which has encouraged one or two subsequent commentators to find in it an early indication of the artist’s presumed homosexuality.

    There is no documentary proof that Michelangelo found men more attractive than women. He had close friendships with members of both sexes — most notably, in his later years, with Vittoria Colonna, whose piety and interest in spiritual reform he shared, as well as with a young Roman nobleman called Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, to whom he dedicated some drawings and wrote letters that express his affections in the inscrutably formulaic language of courtly convention.
    As he came towards the end of his biography of Michelangelo, Vasari felt