The Truth(?) About the Sistine Chapel

God’s gift to us, after all, is art and creation. We are imitating Him whenever we create life or art. Das hand ist alles? It is, actually, the Ultimate Artist’s hand at work. In his Last Judgment that occupies the front part of the chapel, Michelangelo shyly added a self-portrait (“alleged” self portrait, from what I have subsequently read), his face on the flayed skin of the martyred St. Bartholomew, obscured in the huge herd of blessed souls being judged. But his real self-portrait, self-tribute, is that hand, epitomizing the artist’s achievement potential and his achievement realized- this, after all, a creation of his relative youth, as opposed to the former, a product of his later life (the artist aged and martyred?); and in the twentieth century Escher most notoriously paid tribute to that model, adding the artist’s hand to his work, human this time. Michelangelo had a more grandiose self-image, and with good reason. Or perhaps he was giving all the credit to God working through his humble hand – there is such a mix of classicism and Christianity in that chapel and throughout Italy that perhaps the hand is both narcissistic and reverent and the obscure, actual self-portrait, so camouflaged, so anguished, betrays this ambiguity.

Another ambiguity that besets me is how such exquisite portals of human achievement occur only under such extreme pressures and sacrifices of every description: be it Michelangelo’s athletic, four-year marathon balanced precariously and painfully on that scaffolding or those Flemish peasants spending their whole lives weaving in complete subjugation and anonymity or the Celtic bards who created such exquisitely wrought poetry at the price of totally constricted and painfully disciplined lifestyles.

Civilization owes these people an enormous debt—the nameless as well as the immortal. It was the dictum of the Greek god Zeus, or at least first verbalized by the ancient Greeks, that wisdom evolves only through suffering (“drasanti pathein”); great art seems to follow the same pattern—those structures, anyway, that have most influenced our civilization and consciousness—the ultimate forms we always turn to for inspiration and as exemplars that define the limitless ambitions of Western, classically rooted, Judeo-Christian culture.

Copyright 1999, 2003 Marta Steele. All rights reserved.

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