THE ROLE OF MEANING ON THE CEILING

For readers familiar with Ross King’s popular Brunelleschi’s Dome, his new book Michelangelo & the Pope’s Ceiling comes as a welcome sequel. The title makes both the point of continuity with his earlier treatment of Florence’s Duomo and a distinction—the great ceiling was the pope’s, not Michelangelo’s; or so one might surmise. But in fact, the new book treats the ceiling fresco as very much a largely technical challenge for Michelangelo on the order of Brunelleschi’s dome, and in that treatment lies the book’s merit. As a window onto the pope’s (or the Church’s) role in shaping the ceiling’s meaning, however, King has less to offer.

The book definitively debunks long-held myths about a much-loved work of art and its creation. For example, King will finally, one hopes, have corrected the image of Michelangelo’s supine position under the fresco: in fact, as has been well-documented for years, he painted the curved ceiling while on a scaffolding that approximated the shape of the vault; which means he worked standing, albeit bent and uncomfortable, under the upper reaches of the fresco. He also, King acknowledges, depended on the assistance of several assistants and “sub-contractors,” and while nothing about this diminishes Michelangelo’s Herculean achievement, it does make it more realistic.

Inevitably, any book on the Sistine Chapel ceiling must recall Irving Stone’s novel The Agony and the Ecstasy (which King mentions finally on the last page of the Epilogue), and Michelangelo & The Pope’s Ceiling does strive to develop narrative pace out of its documentary approach. It is decidedly, though, not a novel (there are no invented dialogues nor undocumented scenes), but is rather more akin to popular treatments of the history of technology like Dava Sobel’s Longitude. That book too, though, gathers shards of historical data into something like a plot, and King’s plot requires a hero, various nemeses and rivals, and subplots; for the former we have the artist himself, toiling tirelessly between various distractions often created by his principal nemesis, the pope. Indeed, King’s Julius II is as bellicose, belligerent, and devoid of spirituality as Martin Luther could have ever cast him; as much obstacle as generator of the frescoes, Julius and his circle of advisors offer here little more than realpolitik propaganda to the ceiling’s content. While King benefits much from the scholarship since Stone’s novel, humanist clerics like Egidio da (Giles of) Viterbo or Tommaso (Fedra) Inghirami mostly float tantalizingly off the margins. The suppression of their undoubted role for the great artist, who King admits at the same time was not proficient in Latin (the definition of “illiterate” for Renaissance humanists), requires the suspect conclusion that Michelangelo himself determined much of the ceiling’s detailed iconography (he does discuss the probable role of iconographers at the beginning of his story, pp. 60–63, but leaves it there). One could, without recourse to the scholarly studies upon which King depends, leave the rest of the book with the impression that the Church surrendered the rhetorical potential of its most important chapel’s ceiling to an artist at liberty to explore his personal psychoses (p. 134), play rude practical jokes (p. 173), and even indulge in skepticism about the papal court’s dominant Weltanschauung (p. 174). In addition to the undoubted role of humanist iconographers, what is missing too is any sense of Michelangelo’s own deep spirituality.

The relative absence of the role of meaning on the ceiling detracts from the book’s real subject, the technical virtuosity required on the vast curved vault painted in the most challenging of media, buon fresco. King is generally very good on the workings of the fresco technique, about which much has been relearned in the last half-century. Apart from some minor errors (dangerously hot lime would never have been present on the scaffolding as he implies [p. 85], since the lime for the plaster would have been slaked at least months if not years earlier to improve its workability; and the contention that a giornata could span twelve to twenty-four hours [p. 49] is an exaggeration, a giornata allowed by the drying plaster more on the order of eight to twelve hours) King is convincingly knowledgeable on the rudiments of the technique, and one would have to look to a technical manual (like Ralph Mayer’s The Artist’s Handbook) for a more thorough discussion of the subject. But something he does stress, the advance preparation required by the fresco technique, is belied by the story of seeming improvisation he tells as the content of the fresco unfolds throughout the book. Actually, it is clear from the fact that Michelangelo began the fresco at the so-called Entry wall (the entry for the public, whereas the many cardinals in attendance in the chapel would have entered from the Altar wall), where the Biblical narrative concludes, that the narrative structure was fully worked out at the beginning of the painting process, since the scenes of Creation were the last to be painted; thematically overlaid over the narrative scenes moving eastward down the center of the vault are the Sibyls and Prophets flanking them, whose chronology runs counter to the Genesis stories.

The dense web of iconographic connections on the ceiling, what the later sixteenth century iconographer Annibale Caro would call dispozione, demanded thorough pre-planning, and implicitly therefore papal approval, for the sacred space so important to the Church’s hierarchy. While that pre-planning would not have precluded improvisation and development of form and detail, it does accord with the importance of the rhetorical role these frescoes, like all the others in the chapel, would have served. Indeed, that rhetorical function was more important than their decorative role, and John Shearman in his collection of essays Only Connect ... is excellent on the careful calibration of meanings Raphael would bring to his slightly later tapestries for the same space. Those tapestries acknowledged that the real audience for the art of the chapel was the college of cardinals within the chancel as much as the dignitaries relegated to the outer precinct. In fact, King is decidedly off the mark when he suggests these frescoes would “illuminate stories for the uneducated” (pp. 202-3)—there would rarely have been many illiterate, much less uneducated, spectators in the Sistine Chapel. It was for a deeply knowledgeable, and highly cultured, audience, that Michelangelo created his great masterpiece, and it is in that sense that it was truly “the pope’s ceiling.”

David Mayernik is a practicing architect and fresco painter. His new book, TIMELESS CITIES: An Architect’s Reflections on Renaissance Italy, has been published by Westview Press.

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