Will Michelangelo’s Vision Speak to Cardinals, as John Paul Predicted?

c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) When 115 cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church gather to vote on a successor to Pope John Paul II, they will be meeting in the same place where cardinals have gathered for hundreds of years to elect the leader of their church: the Sistine Chapel, home to several of […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) When 115 cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church gather to vote on a successor to Pope John Paul II, they will be meeting in the same place where cardinals have gathered for hundreds of years to elect the leader of their church: the Sistine Chapel, home to several of the most famous frescoes of the Italian Renaissance.

The two most famous frescoes, of course, are the chapel’s ceiling, which tells the story of Genesis from the division of light and dark to the drunkenness of Noah in nine panels, and the Last Judgment, which looms on the wall behind the altar. Both are by Michelangelo Buonarroti.


Holding the conclave, which begins Monday (April 18), in the Sistine, the personal chapel of the popes, fulfills a long-standing tradition. But it also holds special meaning for this conclave.

In 2002, John Paul wrote a poem in which he said the cardinals should look to the Sistine Chapel to give them guidance in choosing his replacement.

“Michelangelo’s vision must then speak to them,” the pope wrote. The poem, written in Polish, the pope’s native language, was translated and published in 2003 as part of papal meditations released by the Vatican. John Paul said the cardinals should particularly look at The Last Judgment.

Even before offering this mysterious guidance, John Paul took special interest in the Sistine Chapel.

In 1996, he unveiled a thorough modern cleaning and repair of the frescoes, revealing them to be not the gray-pink-bluish-brown of memory but instead bright orange, aquamarine, carmine, fuschia and a lemony yellow so sharp you could serve it with fish. The Sistine Chapel has not looked so bright since it was painted (the ceiling from 1508 to 1512, the Last Judgment from 1536 to 1541).

The paintings look like new, but John Paul’s legacy to the chapel extends further.

Fresco is a form of painting on wet plaster, so that the pigments actually become part of the wall, seeping into the plaster before it sets. Over the centuries, beginning with a decree by the Council of Trent just one month before the artist’s death, many of the monumental nudes in the more easily accessible Last Judgment had acquired loincloths or trousers, painted on top of the plaster in a technique called in Italian “al secco” (“dry” painting).

Fifteen years ago, John Paul II finally authorized the removal of all 35 passages (some could be measured in square feet) of al secco drapery, so we of the 21st century _ including the cardinals in the conclave _ can at last see the wall as Michelangelo originally painted it. John Paul II literally unveiled the paintings as no other pope has.


The chapel building itself was erected by Pope Sixtus IV (1414-84) sometime around 1480 on the foundations of a medieval structure (which is the reason the walls are not strictly square, but telescope toward the altar wall _ plumb lines were rare before the 15th century). It is part of the Sistine Apostolic Palace, home to the private apartments of the popes for centuries. The Sistine Chapel is in the tallest building among the cluster that rises just to the right of St. Peter’s basilica as you look toward the main facade.

In previous conclaves, the cardinals have not only met in the chapel but occasionally slept there as well, and in hastily rigged cubicles set up in the hallways of the Apostolic Palace right next door (they used to raid the nearby national seminaries for iron cots). John Paul II ended all that by building the modern Santa Marta residence hall nearby, with two-story-tall suites, wood paneling, modern communications and dining facilities included.

Michelangelo is not the only artist on view in the chapel. Below the ceiling around three walls are frescoed imitation “tapestries” by several of the biggest names of the Quattrocento, including Domenico Ghirlandaio, whose shop trained most of the assistants Michelangelo used to help him paint the ceiling. The tapestry paintings can be glimpsed above the painted trompe l’oeil curtains that rise behind the built-in pews along each wall.

But it is Michelangelo’s work the tourists come to see. The beauty of the designs for both frescoes is only part of his achievement. Michelangelo painted the ceiling, which is roughly 68 feet above the chapel floor, while lying on his back on a free-standing scaffold of his own design. Not only are the walls of the chapel not plumb, but the ceiling itself, if you put your face near it and sight along its surface, ripples like a pond full of fish. Yet the figures and their surrounding architectural decorations read as perfectly straight and proportional from the benches below.

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One reason for holding the conclave in the Sistine Chapel is to impress the cardinals with the monumental dignity of their choice, something Michelangelo’s profoundly heroic nudes should do nicely. One hopes the openness to the nobility of the human form that John Paul II displayed by removing the skivvies on the Last Judgment also would communicate itself.

The painting carries its own warnings. In the lower right-hand corner of the Last Judgment, just above the door tourists enter, stands a donkey-eared demon whose body is wrapped around by two turns of a gigantic serpent. He is Minos, the Judger of Souls, but his face is that of Biagio da Cesena, Pope Paul III’s master of ceremonies and the first person to object to the nudes in the Sistine as “indecent.” When da Cesena complained to the pope, who had commissioned the fresco, about being immortalized in this way by Michelangelo, the pope is said to have replied, “Had he painted you on the ceiling, in heaven, perhaps I could have done something; but alas, I have no dominion over hell.”


Thanks to John Paul II, we can now see clearly what art lovers have only suspected for 441 years: The head of that serpent is biting the testicles of the papal MC.

MO/PH/JL END BISCHOFF

(Dan Bischoff is a staff writer for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. He can be contacted at dbischoff(at)starledger.com.)

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