http://www.guardian.co.uk/pope/story/0,12272,1453146,00.html Admire the stage instead
Michelangelo's personality dominates every Vatican scene but his theology attracts less attention Jonathan Jones Wednesday April 6, 2005 The Guardian All eyes are on one man's achievements as the world's television cameras dwell on the great spectacle being enacted in the Vatican. I'm talking, of course, about Michelangelo Buonarroti. It may officially be Pope John Paul II's week, but as a flatterer once told the sculptor, painter, architect and poet who conceived the dome of St Peter's, the world has many rulers, but only one Michelangelo. When the cardinals go into conclave in the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo's frescoes will remind them of what is at stake with his unrivalled paintings of the beginning and the end of the world according to Christian doctrine - Genesis on the ceiling, the Last Judgment on the altar wall. But that's just the most celebrated part of Michelangelo's Rome. There's not a stone in the Vatican that is not shaped, directly or indirectly, by Michelangelo. Even its fortifications, which you queue alongside to get into the papal museums, were built under his guidance. It is no exaggeration to say that everything we see in the TV images from Rome is the creation of one 16th-century mind. That's why I feel no resentment at all, as a non-believer, to be watching these obsequies unfold. It makes great television, doesn't it? I don't mean the crowds so much as the scene that sets them off - the most cinematic architecture that exists. The dome of St Peter's against clouds, against the sunset, against the night sky - in any weather, in every light, it looks authentically divine. And yet the man who gave the Vatican its charisma was not, at all, a conventional Catholic. Michelangelo was a Christian who thought for himself and whose personal faith encompassed homosexual desire and a view of salvation at odds with that of his papal employers. All of this feeds into the Vatican's spellbinding art and architecture. Michelangelo was not the first designer of St Peter's, or the last, but the greatest. The challenge to build a new basilica set by the mercurial Pope Julius II went initially to Bramante, a designer of classical purity whom Michelangelo loathed. After him came the equally classicising Sangallo, and it wasn't until 1547, nearly half a century into its troubled construction, that Michelangelo was put in charge. By then, a special sale of indulgences to raise money for the new basilica had sparked Martin Luther's Reformation - and Michelangelo himself had ideas about salvation that were disconcertingly similar to Luther's. In fact, the Vatican's presiding genius was almost a Protestant - in his poems he reiterates, again and again, that divine mercy alone can rescue him, a worthless sinner, in contradiction to the Catholic belief in justification through good works. Michelangelo's radical theology seems to have gone unnoticed in the Vatican. Yet Luther would surely have understood him when he said there was no gold on the Sistine ceiling because the heroes of the Bible "were poor men". It was Michelangelo's sexuality, however, that troubled his papal patrons. All his life, he tried to reconcile his passion for Christ with his passion for young men's bodies - insisting in verse that all love is a gift of the divine. The painting in which Michelangelo expresses this most nakedly is the Last Judgment. When the Pope's advisers saw its nudes embracing in Paradise they condemned it as more appropriate for a bathhouse than the Sistine Chapel. After Michelangelo died the nudes had draperies painted over their genitalia and when the fresco was restored in the 1980s many were left in place. After all, you wouldn't want the cardinals getting distracted during a conclave. All of this heterodoxy, this individuality, is on display on our TV screens even as the body of a conservative Pope is displayed in the basilica Michelangelo shaped. He was the first architect in history to see that a building does not have to be merely functional, nor does it need to attain a "correct" appearance - architecture can be a means of self-expression. When he was asked to complete St Peter's he replaced the neat, harmonious designs of Bramante and Sangallo with a sublime, colossal idea whose almost unimaginable scale expresses his own wonder before creation, his personal sense of helplessness below the might of heaven. The dome of St Peter's is not like the dome of St Paul's in London, whose rational design reflects a Newtonian confidence in an orderly universe. Michelangelo's dome induces vertigo and bafflement - it's hard to believe human beings actually built this, but they did. And one man designed it. Pedantic architectural historians will tell you that isn't quite true. Michelangelo died before his model was built, and the design was altered in the execution - his hemisphere became an egg. But the truth is that Michelangelo's personality, his gargantuan soul, is in this dome, and it towers over the cardinals, the nuns and you and me. Rome, with all its history, bears the mark of one man's personality. Perhaps, as we debate whether John Paul II was a great man who shaped history, we need to get some perspective. All the mourners need to do is look up. · Jonathan Jones is a Guardian art critic -- Cheers, Gabe Menezes. London, England