"Powerful In His Conceptive Faculty" (The Last Judgment)

Daniele da Volterra, Portrait of Michelangelo, Chalk, 1533, Teylers Museum, Haarlem, The Netherlands

      After his recovery, Michelangelo returned to work, and finished the Last Judgment in a few months.    It was exposed to the public on Christmas Day in 1541.

Michelangelo, The Last Judgment (detail), 1537-41, Sistine Chapel, The Vatican, Rome.

     Time, negligence, and outrage, the dust of centuries, the burned papers of successive conclaves, the smoke of altar-candles, the hammers and the hangings of upholsterers, the brush of the breeches-maker and restorer, have so dealt with the Last Judgment that it is almost impossible to do it justice now.  What Michelangelo intended by his scheme of colour is entirely lost.   Not only did Daniele da Volterra, an execrable colourist, dab vividly tinted patches upon the modulated harmonies of flesh-tones painted by the master; but the whole surface has sunk into a bluish fog, deepening to something like lamp-black around the altar. Nevertheless, in its composition the fresco may still be studied;  and after due inspection, aided by photographic reproductions of each portion, we are not able to understand the enthusiasm which so nobly and profoundly planned a work of art aroused among contemporaries.

John Addington Symonds, Photographic portrait dedicated to Walt Whitman, 1889.

     It has sometimes been asserted that this painting, the largest and most comprehensive in the world, is a tempest of contending forms, a hurly-burly of floating, falling, soaring, and descending figures.  Nothing can be more opposed to the truth.  Michelangelo was sixty-six years of age when he laid his brush down at the end of the gigantic task.  He had long outlived the spontaneity of youthful ardour.  His experience through half a century in the planning of monuments, the painting of the Sistine vault, the designing of facades and sacristies and libraries, had developed the architectonic sense which was always powerful in his conceptive faculty.  Consequently, we are not surprised to find that , intricate and confused as the scheme may appear to an unpractised eye, it is in reality a design of mathematical severity, divided into four bands or planes of grouping.

Michelangelo, The Last Judgment, 1537-41, Sistine Chapel, The Vatican, Rome.

Notes:

1. John Addington Symonds' superb, moving and highly enjoyable The Life of Michelangelo (1893) should be sought out by anyone interested in the artist. A short biography of Symonds, advocate and champion of l'amour de l'impossible, is found Here.

2.  Restoration and cleaning of The Last Judgment was completed in 1994. A short New York Times article concerning the unveiling is found Here.

Michelangelo's Friend

        Vasari says that not very long before the Last Judgment was finished, Michelangelo fell from the scaffolding, and seriously hurt his leg.  The pain he suffered and his melancholy made him shut himself up at home, where he refused to be treated by a doctor.  There was a Florentine physician in Rome, however, of capricious humor, who admired the arts, and felt a real affection for Buonarroti.  This man  contrived to creep into the house by some privy entrance, and roamed about it till he found the master.  He then insisted upon remaining there on watch and guard until he had affected a complete cure. The name of this excellent friend, famous for his skill and science in those days, was Baccio Rontini.  [1]

        Thereupon Master Baccio Rontini, the Florentine, his friend and a clever doctor, feeling pity for him, went one day and knocked at his door, and receiving no answer, made his way to the room of Michelangelo, who had been given over, and would not leave him until he was cured. [2]

I've grown a goitre by dwelling in this den–

As cats from stagnant streams in Lombardy,

Or in what other land they hap to be–

Which drives the belly close beneath the chin:

My beard turns up to heaven; my nape falls in,

Fixed on my spine: my breast-bone visibly

Grows like a harp: a rich embroidery

Bedews my face from brush-drops thick and thin.

My loins into my paunch like levers grind:

My buttock like a crupper bears my weight;

My feet unguided wander to and fro;

In front my skin grows loose and long; behind,

By bending it becomes more taut and strait;

Crosswise I strain me like a Syrian bow:

Whence false and quaint, I know,

Must be the fruit of squinting brain and eye;

For ill can aim the gun that bends awry.

Come then, Giovanni, try

To succour my dead pictures and my fame;

Since foul I fare and painting is my shame. [3]

Jacopino del Conte, Portrait of Michelangelo (after 1550)



NOTES:

[1]   John Addington Symonds, The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti (1893).


[2]  Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artist (1550)


[3] Michelangelo Buonarroti, Poem describing painting of the Sistine Chapel (translated by Symonds, 1878).