The Truth(?) About the Sistine Chapel

Pink and green? I asked Ludovica quizzically. She said that certainly Michelangelo had not selected that backdrop but allowed it in his later life – something like that. I found my eye-shattering blue surrounding the first crucifix ever used to express religious reverence rather than Christ’s mutilation, and that was in Ravenna, later in the trip, in the mosaic of the Good Shepherd (6th c.) at the Basilica of St. Apollinare. And the more I stared at the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the more the actually predominating hues asserted themselves: red, brown, green, and white actually, colors that invoke sanity and stability.

The Sistine Chapel! How can I allow this Wonder of the World such short shrift? What kind of ignorance am I expressing? Overpreparation at the emotional level. Ezra Pound wrote a wonderful poem about that, set in early-twentieth-century, overcast London, however.

I allowed myself to look around, even though someone next to me was photographing, breaking rules I thought were sacrosanct because of the milieu. I used my binoculars (what preparation!) to no avail. They revealed nothing. I wanted to be on scaffolding, the way the artist had been, in order to experience the chapel appropriately (I am nearsighted and astigmatic and that may be some of the problem!).

But the center portrait saved me and structured the positive conclusion to my impressions. A print of it now hangs framed in my apartment, and I gaze at it often, trying to understand all its implications: God’s hand reaching out toward Adam’s, an aspect of the first act of creation appropriately referred to as “The Creation.” That hand has more life than the hands of the David, whose power gripped me in every way except that I found the veins inaccurately portrayed (to my mind), and that is a place I looked for photographic reality, based on everything Irving Stone led me to believe about the statue. But God’s hand, painted rather than sculpted, had the life David’s three-dimensional ones had less of, perhaps because one was the hand of the Creator achieving a monumental work (energizing his creation, I am told), the others the created and of a fighter and muscleman poised for action, violent action, the hand successfully energized. The irony was that Michelangelo was a sculptor by trade and the chapel showcased an art form he considered a secondary skill at best. Go figure. I wonder also whether the very de-emphasis on color in that center panel also arrested me – perhaps I was thrown into confusion by that surprise aspect and the consequent divinity of the soothing browns.

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