The Pope's Ceiling!

Am currently reading Ross King's "Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling", the story of the painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, something I've always wanted to know more about since, I regret to tell you, when I saw it for myself I found it truly truly ugly!

I did indeed ... so shoot me!

I think I was about three or four my first encounter and remember immediately thinking "A great masterpiece?  Who are they kidding?" while all around me folks fluttered their hands as they raved it up in a great many languages, and I noticed the ring of untruth in their voices and realised they were all being insincere in their praise and that this ceiling was "The Emperor's New Clothes" made manifest.

 I mean, just LOOK at it!

And yes, I saw that the individual bits of it were indeed lovely, but the entire ceiling didn't hang together in an even mildly coherent fashion, and those big fleshy Michelangelo angels and saints just looked stupid in relation to each other and they all looked just-plain chunky, fat and unhealthy coming as they did right down to the edge where they joined up with the 42 lean Gothic-style popes that he painted along the side of the upper wall.

And the colours didn't mesh properly in the empty spaces between the figures, and the sizes and perspectives were all crazy-wrong and every bit looked so silly next to the next bit and, yes, it looked like the artist changed style after finishing the easy bits, and so the finished effect was messy, incoherent and artistically unsatisfying.

I far preferred the frescoes on the ceilings of that ducal palace no one's ever heard of AND the one on the ceiling of ... St Stephens?  The church just down the road, anyway!

And I remember too that it was the first time I ever encountered those nasty bony prodding fingers of men in dresses.  Look, all I did was lie on the floor to look properly at the ceiling, wondering if maybe it would look better from that angle ... and I got brutally abraded by those ghastly gargoylish papal emissary types, who all looked like vultures, and mean-spirited vultures at that.

Anyway, it turns out my child's assessment was right because the ceiling was a shambles from the get-go.  Ghastly vulture-pope Julius II hired Michelangelo as a SCULPTOR TO BUILD HIS TOMB, only someone told him it was unlucky to build your tomb before you died and thus he stopped payment to Big Miche, who was then left with a hefty bill for marble and had to go into debt with usurers to cover the cost and so had to return to Florence to finish the 39 statues he already had half finished to pay it back ... only Julius, mad as a hatter and twice as selfish, didn't want him making those sublime works of art for other lesser churches and so had him dragged back by soldiers to Rome to ... to ... well, he didn't actually have anything for Miche to do and so it was a case of "Mmmmm, what are you really bad at?  Frescoes? Ceiling paintings? Well, there you go! Chisel off what's there and do me another one!"

Truly, it was that bad.  The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was simply an exercise in time-wasting AND in teaching an uppity-genius to know-his-place. Truly!  Pope Julius actually questioned other Florentine artists to discover what genre of the arts most frightened Michelangelo and when he heard he was terrified of painting frescoes AND that he was particularly terrified of painting in the "from the bottom up" technique required for paintings seen from below - because he'd only ever done ONE tiny one before and that was at the Borgia's art school when he was a boy and so he knew he'd never even begun to master the techniques required - and so Julius II gave him the biggest and most important fresco-on-the-ceiling on earth, and told him to paint pictures!

Oh, and then, when Julius realised Michelangelo wasn't failing as spectacularly as he'd hoped, he began to run interference and order him to stick things in here-and-there and do this-and-that in different styles ... and so naturally the whole finished piece was a stupid shambles!

Took 18 years to make such a mess too, and the worst part of all this is that the world never got the wonderful body of work that Big Miche would have given us all if only Pope Julius II hadn't been such a selfish, insane, creepy vulture-gargoyle!

However, every time I've seen it since, much older but a lot less wise, I've had a less jaundiced eye and a much kinder assessment so I guess the hand-flutters won and I learned to see it, along with everyone else, within the hype and thus "What a masterpiece!!!"

However, in tribute to my younger and wiser self, I have to tell you the most astonishing fact EVER; something I've just discovered reading this book that has shaken me to my core and made me wonder about "earth memory": the theory that the earth and everything on it retains a memory of everything that has gone before at that particular site.

During those brief seconds I was on that floor before some papal vulture-gargoyle yanked me upwards by the arm and prodded me out of the basilica, I clearly recall thinking "You know what would look really nice up there?  A deep azure covered by gold stars!"

Well, what I've just read is ... you know the fresco already on that ceiling that Michelangelo had to first chisel off?  Guess what was there?

Piermatteo d'Amelia's sublime fresco of ... a deep azure covered with gold stars!!!