The Truth(?) About the Sistine Chapel

We received another lecture on the spot that rather salted the negative side of this pivotal encounter: it seems a large explosion in the early 1990s destroyed a portion of one of the outside panels, close to the papal entrance. The guide pointed out a small, blank portion of the ceiling I hadn’t noticed or assumed was part of the total scheme I had to read more about. She said that the exquisite artistry (part of the first panel Michelangelo worked on, the “Drunkenness of Noah,” specifically one of the 20 or so ingnudi [young male angels, many of them androgynous] and the top part of a tree in the adjacent “Flood” panel) turned into a pile of colorful dust on the floor that someone just swept up and threw out. Quite soon after that event, a computerized program was developed that could have restored the destroyed portion of the ceiling – because another lesser work of art in Italy had been similarly destroyed and restored.

There I stood, on what was to be an epitomal day of my life, wanting to murder people for their ignorance – but according to that logic we should canonize the British for absconding with the Elgin Marbles, I suppose. Is the story of Tantalus actually most appropriate – was I close to the fountain of complete enlightenment but barred by my own forms of blindness from experiencing it appropriately? I think my own classicism was another problem – I simply preferred other art forms and artistic achievements and had already experienced them and was asking too much from a certainly comparable accomplishment that I should have experienced as that wide-eyed high school student rather than half a century later (or thereabouts). Not only was this event overprepared but rather upstaged years ago by other preoccupations I had acquired since my teenage years.

And yet nothing can interfere with that portrait of God’s creativity, if we can be so brash as to call the human race His greatest achievement, which I am inclined to doubt. Our utter miraculousness almost guarantees that He could do better and somewhere has, in ways we will never begin to comprehend. Be that as it may. That hand, its contrast with the lesser human one it reaches out to and the energy of that space between the two (which I compared to the powerful silences in a masterful piece of music like Beethhoven’s Ninth Symphony), the soothing browns which I have for so long (mistakenly) associated with classical monuments (which also betray, in reality, traces of the garish primary colors the Sistine Chapel is guilty of), the life so accurately portrayed in this sublime deception we call art, might also be called the radius of my own consciousness materialized – who knows? A very viable possible rendering of that anyway.

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