The Truth(?) About the Sistine Chapel

You have to know that by the time we actually walked into the chapel at perhaps the most uncrowded time of the year (which is to say that there were a few square inches of breathing space between you and the next person instead of the sardine effect most people complain about), I had already given up, having been more than sapped out by overpreparation, having been more than distracted by lesser accomplishments like those of the Flemish and all the glossy art books people were trying to sell us down the long expanse of what I thought was the final corridor but turned out not to be, since we were herded through another airy, sumptuously high-ceiling gallery after that, the Stanza della Segnatura (Raphaels!). I was more than distracted by those exquisitely wrought ceilings that looked like low relief but weren’t – the illusion was so skillful. And a good thing. The guide, Ludovica, as proud of her blatantly peroxided waist-length blond hair as any natural blond ever had been, an artistic prerogative I guess, had led us through this excessive overture and now warned us not to look up at the chapel until we reached the other side and could thus experience it the way countless generations of popes had since the sixteenth century.

Other mythologies quickly occurred to me: Pandora, Lot’s wife, Tiresias: people who violated divine commandments and suffered the consequences and in the process inconvenienced others dreadfully. I decided that option was far more interesting than trying to project myself into a guise I could not remotely relate to – especially considering what utter hypocrites have occupied that office. I had been scandalized by Ludovica’s revelation that morning that all those infinite acres of priceless treasure had not even been open to the public (and clearly they wanted to remind us what chattel we were, even that day) until very recently: many sometime this century.

So I looked up the minute we entered the chapel – I had waited long enough, you understand (women my age are not supposed to give away their age, but I am old enough to be mother to many). I looked up and around and thought, big deal – St. Peter’s Basilica upstairs was far more impressive.

I was immediately grasped by the surprisingly dominant colors bright red and turquoise, which I associate with the American West and Native American art. That in itself was startling. For some reason, I had never known these colors predominated or else I expected archetypically religious hues (and this myth, incidentally, had already been shattered by what I had witnessed earlier in the day: the Pietà surrounded by pastel pinks and greens instead of the achingly reverent (and stereotypical) primary blue velvet we witnessed at the New York World’s Fair in the Vatican pavilion in 1965.

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