Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel (16 page)

The Deluge
was a profoundly original painting, however, precisely because Michelangelo relegated the Ark to the background – something no artist before him had done. He had decided to tell his story principally through the depiction of a crowd of struggling humanity. A convulsive, intermittent energy courses through the whole scene. This rhythm of anguish and despair connects the outstretched arms of the woman and the bearded patriarch on the island to the angular boughs and branches of the blasted tree on the other side, which itself resembles a hand desperately reaching out for help. These energies reach a pitch in the flat-bottomed boat at the centre of the composition, where fighting has broken out between those already embarked, in a desperate attempt to reach the Ark, and those wanting to climb on board to save themselves. Here all the desperation of the story is distilled to a series of violent, doomed struggles taking place in a watery void.

When Michelangelo painted this scene, he may well have had in mind Dante’s description of travelling to the cursed City of Dis, in the eighth canto of the
Inferno
, in which the poet finds himself on a boat that is attacked by would-be boarders from the depths of a river of the damned. Three centuries later, when the French Romantic Eugène Delacroix painted a celebrated picture inspired by that same passage from Dante, to which he gave the title
The Barque of Dante
, it was to the example of Michelangelo’s boatload of the doomed that he would turn for visual inspiration. Delacroix sensed intuitively the kinship that existed between Dante and Michelangelo, and recognised that it was particularly strong in
The Deluge
. Michelangelo admired Dante more than any other Italian writer. His vision of the flood is a Dantean vision of hell, realised in painting rather than poetry.

‘Is disproportion one of the conditions that compel admiration? ’ Delacroix asked this rhetorical question in his journal entry of 8 May 1853. He had Michelangelo on his mind again: ‘If Mozart, Cimarosa and Racine are less striking because of the perfect proportion in their works, do not Shakespeare, Michelangelo and Beethoven owe something of their effect to the opposite quality?’
¹⁰
Once more, the French painter may have been thinking of
The Deluge
, a picture long regarded as a great example of Michelangelo’s sublime irregularity. It is one of the most vigorously muscular of all his compositions, but it could hardly be described as a work of perfect proportion. It is singularly lacking in pictorial grace and harmony – a discordant, fragmented creation, which is almost impossible to contemplate as a unified whole. The multitude of figures within it can easily appear, to the eye straining upward to discern the logic of their organisation, like separate groups of sculptures on display in a museum.

The conventional explanation for this is that Michelangelo was still grappling with the challenge of painting the chapel’s immense ceiling when he planned the composition of
The Deluge
. According to this frequently repeated argument, he made a fatal misjudgement of scale, overloading the work with such a surfeit of figures as to make it barely legible from the floor of the chapel beneath – a mistake that he did not repeat when he painted the other narrative works, in which the figures are both fewer and more monumental in scale.

But such a view involves a serious misreading of the coherence of the Sistine Chapel ceiling as a whole. The cycle of frescoes begins with the creation of the universe, of the world and of man within it. It hymns the immeasurable, illimitable unity of God the Creator and celebrates the moment when the spark of life is imparted to Adam, the first of men. Henceforth, its rhythms implacably express the view of human existence implicit in the story of the Fall. Unity with God becomes disunity and separation. As Man departs Eden and enters the world of history, the human race both multiplies and fragments, taking on a myriad of forms – all of which represent, from different angles, so to speak, the condition of having fallen from grace. This process reaches its climax in
The Deluge
. The disconnected figures thronging the picture look like leaves scattered in the wind by comparison with the more monumental figures on the ceiling, such as God the Creator or the languorous Adam. But that is no error on the part of Michelangelo. It is a device that exactly expresses the severe world view of the Old Testament.

That severity is, however, tempered by a significant detail. Two figures are set apart from the rest in
The Deluge
: an aged father struggling to support the body of his dead son. These are the only figures calculated to evoke genuine sympathy, and the only ones who seem tragic rather than merely unregenerate. They are also unique in that they alone elicit a sympathetic response from those around them.

Placed in isolation near the centre of the painting, this group may have been intended as a symbol of hope, an allusion to the future coming of Christ, and the redemption of mankind. The old man recalls Joseph or Nicodemus lowering the body of Christ from the Cross in scenes of the Deposition. The association was certainly made by the artist himself. Much later in life, Michelangelo would adapt this same group to create a number of images of Christ in the arms of Nicodemus. The most famous of these is the celebrated late sculpture of the
Pietà
now in Florence’s Museo del Duomo, in which he gave the anguished Nicodemus his own face as an old man (see p. 172).

It is part of Michelangelo’s unruly greatness as an artist that the meanings of his work cannot be easily confined. It is impossible to say exactly what he intended by including that statuesque father bearing his dead son through the blasted world of
The Deluge
. But it is an image that complicates this otherwise ruthlessly ascetic, apocalyptic vision of sinful humanity punished by the God of Genesis. It does so by introducing into it a pathos and ambiguity that amount, themselves, to a lament on behalf of suffering humanity. Life is pain and life is mystery. Faith may be the only path but it is not an easy one. The sons of Adam must suffer the inscrutability of their God, like powerless children.

The Deluge
is flanked by two other paintings representing scenes from the biblical story of Noah. The first of these, which can be identified as
The Sacrifice of Noah
, appears to be the only one of the Sistine ceiling’s narrative pictures to have been placed out of chronological sequence. It precedes
The Deluge
, although logic dictates that it should come afterwards, given that its subject is Noah’s sacrifice to God for having spared him and his family from the Flood. The subject is described in Genesis 8: 20-1: ‘And Noah builded an altar unto the Lord; and took of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt offerings on the altar. And the Lord smelled a sweet savour; and the Lord said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more everything living, as I have done.’

Michelangelo’s decision to place this scene first has been the cause of some confusion. The artist’s early biographers, Giorgio Vasari and Ascanio Condivi, assumed that the picture did not illustrate the life of Noah at all, but must represent the sacrifice of Cain and Abel. Their explanation, which has been followed by some modern scholars, has the virtue of restoring chronological integrity to Michelangelo’s fresco cycle (since Cain and Abel’s sacrifice occurs well before the Flood in the Book of Genesis). But it is contradicted by the visual evidence of the fresco itself. There are no obvious candidates for the figures of Cain and Abel, while Abel’s offering, ‘the fruit of the ground’ (Genesis 4: 3), is nowhere to be seen. The congested queue of animals awaiting sacrifice, which include an elephant, is surely intended to suggest the multitude of living creatures disgorged from the Ark.

Comparison with the other frescoes definitively confirms the subject as
The Sacrifice of Noah
. The patriarch may only appear as a diminutive figure in
The Deluge
, but his principal attributes are unmistakable. He wears red, and he has a long white beard. So too does the figure at the centre of Michelangelo’s scene of sacrifice. The altar over which he presides stands next to a structure resembling part of the Ark in
The Deluge
. There is further supporting evidence, if any were needed, in the distinct similarity between Noah’s three sons in the nearby
Drunkenness of Noah
and three of the youths assisting at the rite in
The Sacrifice
– the boy bearing logs for the fire, the boy kneeling astride the dead ram, and the boy peering into the altar flames. They are the same figures in different poses.

So the chronological conundrum remains, but Michelangelo’s apparently puzzling decision to place the scene out of sequence is most plausibly explained as a victory for expressive power over strict narrative coherence.
The Deluge
, a subject that involved multitudes fleeing a rising flood, clearly called out for the largest of the three fields dictated by the structure of the ceiling’s design. The artist must have been reluctant to relegate it to the first of his two smaller panels, so, instead, he placed
The Sacrifice
there.

Michelangelo was the first artist of the Italian Renaissance to create an image of
The Sacrifice of Noah
that evokes the pagan sacrifices depicted on sarcophagi and other works of antique art. His predecessors, such as Jacopo della Quercia, who had depicted the life of Noah in his bas-reliefs on the doors of San Petronio in Bologna, represented the episode as a comparatively inert act of devotion, showing the patriarch and his family joined in prayer around a simple altar – a far cry from Michelangelo’s dynamic frieze of turning, twisting figures.

In deciding to treat the subject in this way, Michelangelo was looking back in time, past the early Renaissance and the Middle Ages to the distant traditions of Greece and Rome. The artists of antiquity had dwelt in much detail on the material preparations for acts of sacrifice to their many gods – the preparation of offerings, the lighting of fires – and Michelangelo drew direct inspiration from such classical sources in planning his own composition. Noah’s daughter-in-law, who shields her face from the heat as she places a brand of wood in the sacrificial fire, is directly derived from a figure representing Althea in a frieze on a Roman sarcophagus. The youth seen from behind, crouching to peer into the flames, may have been based in part on a similar figure on a sarcophagus in the museum of antiquities at Naples. He bears an even closer resemblance to the lower, struggling figure in one of the most celebrated surviving classical statues, the pair of marble wrestlers preserved in the Uffizi Galleries at Florence. Since this work was only excavated in 1583, Michelangelo cannot have known it directly. But it seems probable that he was familiar with a similar sculpture, subsequently lost to the ravages of time.

Michelangelo’s allusions to classical sculpture should not be taken to signal an unthinking admiration for the world of antiquity. The opposite is the case. On this occasion, he uses the figural language of Roman art, with its straining, busy forms, to suggest that Noah’s children are so wrapped up in the bloody acts of animal sacrifice that they misunderstand the true significance of the rite in which they partake – the implication being that they are almost as lost in ignorance as those devotees of ancient pagan cults whom the artist has made them resemble. They wrestle with the reluctant beasts; they carry wood; they tend the fire and exchange a bloody parcel of viscera, destined for the flames. The contrast between these figures and that of Noah himself could hardly be more extreme. While they are lost in mere action, he is absorbed in solemn contemplation. His eyes are lowered, his head bowed in thought. Those around him resemble warriors, but he looks like a priest. His shaven head even faintly resembles a priest’s tonsure.

In the contrast between Noah’s stillness and the movement all around him lies the essence of the picture. In the theology of Michelangelo’s time Noah’s offering was seen as a prefiguration of the Mass, the salvific re-enactment of Christ’s death, the offering of his flesh and blood as bread and wine. It is to that higher rite that Noah’s gesture, pointing heavenwards, prophetically refers. A stark contrast is drawn between the old rites of sacrifice, made redundant by the coming of Christ, and the pure rite of the Mass – between the acceptable and the unacceptable offering.

It is a characteristically Michelangelesque image, nonetheless, one that places a single, inspired individual in a pit of fools. The solemn, white-bearded prophet, rapt in contemplation of the true spirit of God, is surrounded by a crowd of the unenlightened, whirled in the circle of their own restless energies around a vortex of flames.