The finger is the conduit through which God’s intelligence, his ideas and his morality seep into Man. In the Jewish tradition, that’s how he writes the tablets of the Ten Commandments for Moses-he sort of lasers them with his finger. God writes on us with his finger, in certain traditions of theology. And as I turned over various ideas and theories, I began to see it as the creation of the education of Adam, because that’s the symbolism of the finger. “In other representations, for example, if you look at Ghiberti’s doors in Florence, God raises up Adam with a gesture of his hand. “Yet I found myself wondering, why did Michelangelo have God create Adam with a finger?” Graham-Dixon says. It has been endlessly reproduced and copied think, for instance, of the well-known poster for the movie E.T. Take The Creation of Adam, with its portrayal of God’s finger reaching to touch Adam’s -undoubtedly the most famous detail of all. As he plumbed the details, he found more and more to admire and ponder. Graham-Dixon immersed himself in the paintings for some time and has now written a book for general readers, Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel (Skyhorse Publishing), published to coincide with the work’s 500th anniversary. Thanks to Michelangelo, however, the chapel’s significance extends to all who have been inspired by the originality and power of his vision-both directly and indirectly, through its influence on subsequent artists and the iconography of world culture. The Sistine Chapel holds a central place in Christendom as the private chapel of the pope and the site of the papal enclave, where the College of Cardinals gathers to elect new popes. However difficult the conditions-and even the challenge of painting at a height of 65 feet required considerable ingenuity, with scaffolds and platforms slotted into specially fashioned wall openings-by the time Michelangelo unveiled the work in 1512, he had succeeded in creating a transcendent work of genius, one which continues to inspire millions of pilgrims and tourists in Vatican City each year. “So he had to chip the whole thing back to zero and start again. “He was working on the largest multi-figure compositions of the entire ceiling when the actual fresco plaster itself became infected by a kind of lime mold, which is like a great bloom of fungus,” says Andrew Graham-Dixon, chief art critic for London’s Sunday Telegraph. And, like many of the early transatlantic voyages of discovery, his ceiling frescoes in Rome’s Sistine Chapel had gotten off to a terrible start. His first name-Michelangelo-would also reverberate through the ages. Inner conflict of a man who is being pulled two ways.In the spring of 1509, just two years after a mapmaker coined the word “America” in honor of the explorer Amerigo Vespucci, a fellow Florentine named Buonarotti was beginning to work on one of the defining masterpieces of Western Civilization. When he was ready to begin carving he had before him a new concept: he turnedĬhrist’s head and knees in opposite directions, establishing through his contrapuntal design a graphic tension, the intense physical and spiritual And as a result his body was twisted in conflict, torn, like all men, by inner He did not know that he was to be crucified. It was inevitable that his Christ would be closer to man than to God. On Christ’s face appeared the expression, “I am in agony, not from the iron nails, but form the rust of doubt.” He could not bring himself to convey Christ’s divinity by anything so obvious as a halo it had to be portrayed through an inner force, strong enough to conquer his misgivings at this hour of severest trial. He returned to his workbench, began exploring his mind with charcoal and ink. Brunelleschi’s Christ was so ethereal that he died at the first touch of the nail, and had no time to think. Donatello’s Christ accepted in serenity, and thought nothing. Soldier drove the first nail through his flesh, and the hour when he died? For these thoughts would determine not only how he accepted his fate, butĪlso the position of his body on the cross. “What went through the mind of Christ between the sunset hour when the Roman
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