Date: 19-06-2005
Owning Institution: The Vatican Museums
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”      
Subject: Renaissance        

Today is Father’s Day, so this week’s picture is a depiction of God the Father creating His first son, Adam. The Creation of Adam, as the work is known, was painted by Michelangelo on the vault of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, sometime during the early months of 1511 – shortly after the artist had embarked on his second and final campaign of work on the world’s most celebrated cycle of fresco paintings. The scale of the figures, far larger than any of those painted by Michelangelo on the Sistine ceiling during the previous two years, seems to have reflected a new and more heroic conception of the ceiling decoration as a whole. Work on the cycle had been held up, partly by the illness of Pope Leo X, the artist’s patron and first mover of the scheme, and partly by the long Roman winter, during which fresco painting was impossible. The delay may have been frustrating but it also gave Michelangelo a new sense of perspective on his own work. Gazing up at what he had already done, looking at scenes such as that of The Deluge, teeming with figures that are difficult indeed to appreciate from the floor of the chapel, he must have realised that he needed to work on a larger scale, not just for grandeur of effect, but for the sake of legibility.

As he contemplated the subject of The Creation of Adam, Michelangelo’s thoughts turned to other depictions of the same theme by earlier Renaissance artists. In particular, he probably had in mind a bronze panel by Jacopo della Quercia on the Porta Magna of San Petronio, in Bologna – a city which Michelangelo had recently visited. Jacopo della Quercia had depicted Adam nude and recumbent on a somewhat abstract outcrop of rock, springing into life as if waking from sleep, with the cloaked figure of God the Father standing over him, making a restrained, priestly gesture of benediction. Michelangelo galvanised this slightly wooden piece of early Renaissance theatre by turning it into a grand encounter between mortal man and immortal God. The Almighty swoops down from the heavens, wrapped in a cloak that enfolds ten cherubim and a single female figure, whom the artist possibly intended to be a sort of premonition of Eve, awaiting her own creation. This severe greybeard of a God reaches out towards the languid, earthbound figure of Adam and imparts to him, across the few inches of air that separate their outstretched fingers, the spark of life that makes man move and breathe.

Michelangelo’s treatment of the subject was profoundly original. In early Christian depictions of the creation of man, God had usually been truncated to a mere hand gesturing from a strategically placed cloud. He had developed into the now-familiar figure of an old man with a beard by the middle of the fifteenth century, but there was no precedent for showing him in full flight, dressed in clinging draperies that reveal his legs from the thigh down. The fingertip creation is also a Michelangelo invention, owing little to the account given in Genesis 2:7: “The Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life”. Michelangelo dramatically compressed the act into a single, imperious gesture. It is also a gesture which imparts a distinctly Michelangelesque meaning to the figure of Adam, who thus is made to reach up towards the figure of God. In this way, he epitomises the artist’s strong Christian Neoplatonism, a view of the human condition according to which we are all souls imprisoned in bodies, aspiring to the freedom of pure spirit. Michelangelo expressed this idea in several of his poems, as in his Sonnet CIX: “That half of me which comes from heaven, / Turns back to it with a great longing and flies.”

Notwithstanding the beauty and subtlety of The Creation of Man, such was its novelty and audacity that even some of his more theologically learned contemporaries were simply baffled by it. Paolo Giovio, Bishop of Nocera, visiting the Sistine Chapel in the 1520s, seems to have had no idea what it actually represented. He remembered seeing a striking picture of “an old man, in the middle of the ceiling, who is in the act of flying through the air.”

Fresco painting literally means “fresh” painting, and was so named because it involved painting directly on to a layer of freshly laid plaster containing quicklime, or calcium oxide, which quickly hardens on exposure to the air into calcium carbonate – the principal component of limestone and marble. It is in the nature of fresco painting that the work has to be done in relatively concentrated bursts, while the newly laid plaster, which will fix the artist’s colours, is still wet. Each section of painting was referred to, in the artist’s jargon of the time, as a giornata, “a day”, in reference to the amount of time a painter had to complete his work before the plaster dried. This was between twelve and sixteen hours, possibly a little more, depending on the weather and humidity. Because the joins between the work of different days are still visible, on close inspection, it is possible to establish fairly precisely just how long it took Michelangelo to paint the section of the Sistine chapel ceiling reproduced here. The entire panel required sixteen giornate to complete. The figure of Adam, for example, was painted in just four days, one for his head and the sky that surrounds it, one for his torso and his arms, and one more for each of his well muscled and perfectly proportioned legs. His famous finger, incidentally, often reproduced as a handsome photographic detail, was damaged beyond repair by a crack that appeared in the ceiling in the mid-sixteenth century. It is not the work of Michelangelo himself but of a papal art restorer, the Modenese painter Domenico Carnevale, who completely repainted it in the late 1560s.

The Renaissance artist and biographer Giorgio Vasari regarded the figure of Adam, in particular, as little short of miraculous: “a figure of such a kind in its beauty, in the attitude, and in the outlines, that it appears as if newly fashioned by the first and supreme Creator rather than the brush of mortal man.” Michelangelo was, to Vasari, an artist blessed with supernatural powers. But in a poem Michelangelo himself wrote about the experience of painting the Sistine Chapel, he chose to stress the sheer hard work involved – the perspiration, so to speak, rather than the divine inspiration. “I’ve grown myself a goitre at this chore, / As water gives the cats in Lombardy… My beard towards heaven, I feel my nape support / The back of my head, I grow the breast of a harpy / And my brush … drips continually on my face.” Vasari’s God of painting not only had feet of clay, but paint in his beard.