The Truth(?) About the Sistine Chapel

By Marta Steele - Late last year I accomplished a goal I had set for myself back in high school, a very long time ago, nearly ancient history. At that time I read Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy and was completely transported and green with envy over Michelangelo’s epitomal, utterly heroic creativity, in particular that archetypal artistic monument, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. A psychologist might say he spent his whole life curing his own deformities through their inverse, some of the most sublime beauty civilization has ever witnessed. I vowed to involve myself in such utterly selfless, all-absorbing projects and aspired toward creating such masterworks in the process. What else, I thought, was there to live for? I also aspired toward that Jerusalem, that Mecca of exquisite, accomplished perfection.

Perhaps I devoted the subsequent portion of my existence, until now, preparing myself for the encounter with that annex to the papal chambers. I thought of Cavafy’s poem about preparing to go to Ithaca. I thought also of Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” (since I felt young still), Blake’s poem “Jerusalem,” an artistic rendition of book 23 of the Odyssey, E.M. Forster’s essay “Getting Ready for a Cow” – to wit, every sort of anticipation of life’s positive epitomes I could think of.

I was heading for a large fall, you might say, and was surprised, in fact, that you walk down a flight of stairs, not up, to get there, if you’re heading away from the Vatican Museum and not, for instance, the Pope walking out of your apartment to help the College of Cardinals elect his successor. But that day, at the Vatican Museum, we were given a long and suspenseful buildup, as if the too-many years of my existence both physical and artistic weren’t enough.

I wanted to go bounding right to the Sistine Chapel but that was out of the question. We had to tour our rationed (minute) fraction of the museum first (which spans 44 acres actually), the gallery of the (Flemish) tapestries, 3,000 geometrically arranged layered stitches of silk thread per square inch, impressive in itself, and a history of Flemish villages that existed for no other reason than to create these gigantic wall hangings – the craft to offset the art we were about to witness.

We had also consumed a long lecture outside the museum in the freezing cold while we stood being reminded of our utter insignificance in the face of such grandeur by the large, condescending posters explaining the chapel ceiling in very basic, lay terms. Other groups of tourists received similar lectures opposite similar posters throughout the courtyard.

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