Art

When confronted with the epic beauty of the Sistine Chapel frescoes, it is easy to see why Giorgio Vasari thought Michelangelo was the greatest of artists, the artist who bears the palm from both the living and the dead, transcending and eclipsing all others (Vasari, 1550, p. 225).  There is perhaps no work that better exemplifies the Renaissance sense of terribilit, the awe-inspiring grandeur for which Michelangelos work is so admired, than the Sistine Chapel frescoes.  This striving for unsurpassed excellence, which is one of the most distinctive qualities of Renaissance art, can be seen in Michelangelos The Last Judgment, painted on the wall behind the chapel altar. The fresco endeavors to create an exhaustive depiction of the apocalypse and the second coming of Christ.  It is a most ambitious work of art, a testament to the audacious humanism of Renaissance art, an ethos that seemed to believe man could accomplish anything.  

Michelangelo labored over The Last Judgment from 1537 to 1541.  The work was created through the buon fresco technique, a practice that made it necessary for the artist to work on a surface of drying plaster, or intonaco. Once dried, the painted intonaco could not be changed, and mistakes could not be corrected without chipping away the entire surface. A days work, or giornata, had to be carefully planned so as not to leave unfinished areas of dry plaster or noticeable gaps between sections. The patience and skill needed to craft a series of buon fresco giornate into a work the size of The Last Judgment boggles the mind. Indeed, it seems incredible that the fresco only took Michelangelo four years to complete.

If the The Last Judgment is awe-inspiring from a distance, standing as it does nearly forty-five feet tall and forty feet wide, it is no less amazing when viewed up close. Vasari praised Michelangelo above all others for the highest perfection in his depiction of the human form, for his manner so facile in overcoming the difficulties inherent in realistically capturing the body (Vasari, 1550, p. 226). Michelangelo made the depiction of the human form look easy, but no less real for that seeming ease.  Each figure in The Last Judgment stands or sits in a perfect natural balance, though many are perched on a cloud or in air. As they wrestle in midair, the bodies of saints and demons contort and strain against each other as naturalistically as wrestlers do on the mat or in the ring.  As the form of the half-clad man on the far-right edge of the fresco swims up through the air, the muscles of his calves and thighs bulge as realistically as if he were climbing stairs. The viewer feels that the apocalyptic progress of souls to their judgment in the sky is profoundly real and undeniably human.  Each figure has embarked on his own unique struggle.

Michelangelo once said that in all the thousands of human forms he depicted, no two were alike (Chambers, 2007, p. 346).  Perhaps it is Michelangelos commitment to the distinct natural appearance in every form that made him the favorite of Vasari and the envy of his fellow artists.  Renaissance artists prized above all else a truth to nature divine in works of art (Vasari, 1550, p. 231).  A classical appreciation for the truth of nature is evident in The Last Judgment.  Through his depiction of the body, Michelangelo is capable of communicating a vast array of emotional states and actions.  Near the center of the fresco, St. Bartholomew holds his flayed skin out for the viewer, a demonstration of his pious sacrifice.  The viewer feels, no doubt with a mixture of awe and disgust, that if it were possible to see a man with his own skin in his hands, it might look exactly the way the Michelangelo has depicted it.  The Last Judgment is an uncanny and awesome sight to behold because the artist has brought his great skill for the truth of nature to the depiction of a fantastical, and otherwise unbelievable, scene.  

The terrible beauty of The Last Judgment struck me as I was completing a reading assignment for another class. In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin writes of an age before the great works of western art were available in copies, in books and on computer screens. He writes that the aura of the work of art has withered because the viewer can see the art object outside its original context and in lesser-quality reproductions (Benjamin, 1935, part II).  I have seen the Sistine Chapel only in reproductions of that sort, but I can imagine the impact Michelangelos frescoes would have had on a sixteenth-century worshipper.  And for the corrupted eyes of a modern-day viewer, perhaps The Last Judgment  best approximates the kind of powerful aura works of art once possessed.