michelangelo's ceiling

Ezekiel

 For two weeks this summer I absorbed the art and culture of  Rome and Florence.  My second day in Rome included a visit to the Sistine Chapel. This past month since I returned has been invested in reading books about Michelangelo and his colossal painting project. The living experience and the reading is now distilled in a lengthy paper titled, "Michelangelo's Ceiling". The following is the beginning and ending of that paper.

Introduction

“I grew up in Rome and was so familiar with Michelangelo that I never questioned whether his work looked now as it had in his own day. I took it for granted than one could hardly make out the figures on Michelangelo’s ceiling, so deeply were they hidden in dark shadow.”  Robin Richmond in Michelangelo and the Creation of the Sistine Chapel

In 1980, a team of experts headed by Guianluigi  Colalucci began a sophisticated multi-million dollar restoration of the Sistine Chapel vault funded by the Japanese television station, NTV. Michelangelo and his assistants invested less time in painting the ceiling than this team took to rid it of layers of candle smoke, incense, brazier fumes, and effects of “the breath of the 17,000 daily visitors, who release more than four hundred kilos of water into the air, setting off a damaging cycle of condensation." The “removal of five centuries of scum revealed such unexpectedly brilliant colors that the Vatican restorers were accused by their detractors of having created a ‘Benetton Michelangelo.’”

The restoration project was rebuked by critics who believed Michelangelo simply was “preoccupied with form at the expense of color.” Most would concur that “His work emerges from the cleaning as a miracle of painting” 

In the summer of 2011 I visited this revered chapel with a group of students and faculty—all part of a graduate program at Gonzaga University. As a visual artist with many of the celebrated images of the Sistine ceiling already animated in my mind, entering this sanctified space was consuming. We stood with hundreds of other tourists on the chapel floor with our heads tilted backwards in an appropriate homage to the man whose neck was in a similar position for countless hours in the four years he invested painting the 12,000 square foot “canvas.”

Conclusion

I grew up in a home filled with ideas, books, stimulating conversations, a love of curiosity, and lots of beautiful art. My mother utilized a spacious wall in our living room to hang paintings borrowed from our local library. She rotated them regularly and spaced them closely together so there were at least ten on that wall at any given time. She also fashioned a coffee table from an old round kitchen table with the legs cut off.  She had a heavy piece of glass cut for the top and carefully arranged pictures of notable paintings under the glass. All of these works of art were with me every day and filled my consciousness with delight in the variety of colors, forms, textures, compositions, and…stories. I am grateful for this, my mother-rhetor’s legacy and I see a parallel gift in Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling which serves as a decidedly successful rhetorical act generated by a man whose energy, skill, and fearlessness are evident in his life and work