[Mb-civic] The Vatican's Set Designer

[George R. Milman]

By Jonathan Jones
Jonathan Jones is art critic for the Guardian in London, where a version of
this article first appeared.

April 10, 2005

With Pope John Paul II buried, the real Vatican superstar is about to have
his day. As a flatterer once told the sculptor, painter, architect and poet
who depicted not only the outstretched finger but also the ample rump of God
on the vault of the Sistine Chapel, the world has many rulers, but only one
Michelangelo.

The cardinals will soon go into conclave in the Sistina to choose a new
pontiff, and they can hardly forget the genius of the man who made the papal
chapel his own. Michelangelo's frescoes will remind them of what is at
stake, with his unrivaled 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 line up
alongside to get into the papal museums, were built with his guidance.

That is why it is no exaggeration to say that everything we've been seeing,
with reverence or mere curiosity, in the TV images from Rome, is the
creation of one 16th century mind. That's why I've felt no resentment at
all, as a nonbeliever, in watching the obsequies unfold. It makes great
television, doesn't it? I don't mean the crowds and the pomp so much as the
scene that sets them off - the most cinematic architecture that exists. The
dome of St. Peter's Basilica 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 classicizing Sangallo, and
it wasn't until 1547, nearly half a century into its troubled construction,
that Michelangelo was put in charge of St. Peter's.

By then, a special sale of indulgences to raise money for the new basilica
had sparked Martin Luther's Protestant 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 Chapel ceiling because the heroes of the Bible "were poor
men." Michelangelo's sexuality, however, did trouble 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 advisors 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
privates, and when the fresco was restored in the 1980s, many were left in
place. After all, you don't want the cardinals getting distracted during the
conclave.

All of this heterodoxy, this individuality, was on display on our TV screens
even as the body of a conservative pope was interred beneath the basilica
Michelangelo shaped. Michelangelo 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, or the
U.S. Capitol, 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. Perhaps, as we debate
whether Pope John Paul II was a great man who shaped history, we need to get
some perspective. All the cardinals need to do is look up. 

Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times 

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