Michelangelo’s Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel

More than twenty years after completing his era-defining fresco cycle on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo was summoned back to the Vatican to take on an equally challenging commission. The year was 1533, and the ailing Pope Clement VII prevailed upon the ageing painter to take up his brushes once again at the scene of his greatest triumph.

The task? To paint an immense fresco covering the entire altar wall of the chapel. Although much of the wall was already decorated, Michelangelo’s new work would sweep away the existing arrangement. An altarpiece by Perugino was destroyed to make way for the fresco, along with two of the earlier wall paintings from the cycles devoted to Moses and Christ.

As with the ceiling, at first the proposition was unappealing to Michelangelo. Although he was by this time the most celebrated painter of his age, the great man remained a sculptor at heart and was fixated on bringing to a conclusion the tomb of Pope Julius II – a project first commissioned in 1505 that had haunted him through years of delays, revisions, and bitter negotiations. Once again, a pope was diverting him from work he considered unfinished, and Michelangelo was reluctant to let the tomb slip from his grasp.

The subject, too, appears to have evolved as the project took shape. Early records refer to a Resurrection, probably the resurrection of the dead at the end of time, while Vasari also mentions the Fall of the Rebel Angels. The precise evolution of the commission remains a matter of scholarly debate, but what’s not in doubt is the fact that when Michelangelo finally began work in 1536 under Pope Paul III, Clement’s successor, the programme had become something far more complex and and momumental: a dizzying, apocalyptic vision of the Day of Judgment, a cosmic drama in which the saved are carried heavenwards on the wings of angels while the damned are dragged down to hell and eternal torment by vicious devils.

The chapel’s earlier decorative program had told the story of salvation through the lives of Moses and Christ, while Michelangelo’s ceiling took the narrative back to the Creation of the World and the beginnings of humanity. The Last Judgment brought that immense story to its terrifying conclusion. Here, the history of the world gives way to its final reckoning, as every soul faces the consequences of its earthly life.

The price of this dramatic finale was the destruction of important earlier works. Early designs suggest that Michelangelo initially intended to work around the existing altarpiece and preserve the painted lunettes above it. But as Michelangelo’s conception grew to encompass the entire altar wall, the final scheme swept those earlier decorations away. Perugino’s Assumption of the Virgin disappeared beneath the new fresco, along with the first episodes of the Moses and Christ cycles nearest the altar. Celebrated works of Renaissance painting were sacrificed to make room for a single, overwhelming vision of the end of the world.

The altar wall also presented Michelangelo with a formidable artistic challenge. Rather than dividing the scene into orderly episodes framed by painted architecture, the composition surges violently across almost the entire surface. There is no reassuring border to contain the action within the pictorial field. Instead the figures seem to spill through the wall, drawing the viewer into a world where the usual distinctions between heaven, earth, and hell have broken down.

Michelangelo’s vast, complicated, and frequently terrifying painting was in lockstep with the times. When Michelangelo began work on the Last Judgment, Rome was still living with the trauma of the Sack of 1527. Imperial troops serving Charles V had stormed the city, unleashing days of killing, looting and desecration. Churches were ransacked, palaces stripped of their treasures, and inhabitants subjected to violence and extortion.

Many artists and scholars fled; others saw their livelihoods destroyed. The catastrophe was especially humiliating for the papacy: the city that had proclaimed itself the centre of Christian civilisation had been laid waste by an army nominally serving the Holy Roman Emperor.

Rome gradually recovered, and under Pope Paul III the city once again became the stage for ambitious artistic and architectural projects. Yet the Sack had exposed the fragility of its claims to spiritual and worldly authority. The old confidence of the High Renaissance had given way to a more anxious age, troubled by religious division, political upheaval and questions about the fate of the Christian world. Many observers interpreted the disaster as divine punishment for Rome’s corruption and the worldly ambitions of its clergy.

It is tempting to see Michelangelo’s Last Judgment as a response to the Sack, a painted expression of Rome’s collective trauma. But whilst we should be cautious about drawing too direct a causal link between the disaster and the master’s meditation on the nature of diving judgment, his sombre vision of humanity caught between salvation and damnation certainly seemed to reflect something of the repentant atmosphere that pervaded the city in those turbulent years. The end of time had rarely seemed so imaginable.

The Last Judgment was hardly a new subject in Christian art. For centuries, churches had displayed images of Christ separating the saved from the damned, offering worshippers a vivid reminder that earthly life was only the beginning of a much longer story. Medieval portals and painted church walls often presented the scene as an orderly division: heaven on one side, hell on the other, with Christ presiding over the fate of the souls below.

Michelangelo took this familiar subject and turned it into something far less predictable. His world is in motion, its figures caught in a tremendous circular surge that seems to resist any attempt to impose order. The dead rise from their graves, angels haul the saved towards heaven, and devils drag the damned downwards. Even the saints, traditionally models of spiritual composure, are swept up in the drama.

The painting’s emphasis on the resurrection of the body is especially striking. Michelangelo was, after all, the greatest sculptor of his age, an artist who had spent a lifetime exploring the expressive potential of the human form. Here, bodies are not merely vessels for the soul: they are the very means through which salvation and damnation are experienced. The saved rise in flesh, while the damned suffer through their flesh. Muscles strain, limbs twist, and faces register the full range of terror, hope, bewilderment, and despair.

The fresco’s theological implications were also timely. The Protestant Reformation had challenged the authority of the papacy and many established Catholic teachings, while the Church was increasingly concerned with defending its doctrines and addressing demands for reform. Paul III would soon convene the Council of Trent, which opened in 1545. Michelangelo’s fresco belongs to the same unsettled religious world.

The pope himself, it seems, got the message. Whilst fellow painters and cognoscenti reportedly oohed and aahed at the virtuoso foreshortenings that only the great master himself was capable of pulling off, Paul III was more concerned with the reckoning so vividly imagined before him. According to legend, when the pontiff gazed up at the completed fresco for the first time he fell to his knees, exclaiming “Oh Lord, charge me not with my sins when you come on the Day of Judgement.”

At the center of the massive composition is Christ in the guise of a Judge, seemingly recalling the monumental power of ancient sculpture. His body is youthful, muscular, and almost impossibly energetic. At once impassive and seemingly hell-bent on retribution, Christ raises his right hand and imperiously damns the souls of the sinful with a single swish of his palm even as he simultaneously draws the spirits of the saved upwards towards their eternal abodes in heaven.

The Virgin Mary cleaves closely to her avenging son, apparently in awe at his divine power. Traditionally the great intercessor on behalf of humanity, she seems unable to intervene now that the final verdict is being delivered.

Above them, angels carry the Arma Christi, the instruments of Christ’s Passion: the Cross, the column of the Flagellation, the crown of thorns and the other objects associated with his suffering. The angels twist and wheel through the air, seeming almost to play with the enormous objects they carry in a display of virtuoso movement that conservative critics found undignified. In 1564, Giovanni Andrea Gilio complained that the angels looked more like acrobats or jugglers than heavenly beings, arguing that Michelangelo had allowed his artistic ingenuity to overwhelm the gravity of the subject.

Surrounding Christ are the naked bodies of Christian saints and martyrs. The details are extraordinary, and you could spend a week in here trying to work them all out. Several carry the instruments of their martyrdom: St. Lawrence holds his gridiron, St. Catherine of Alexandria her spiked wheel, and St. Sebastian his arrows. Their bodies are powerful and individual, less like the serene, idealized figures of traditional religious painting than a crowd of extraordinary people caught in a moment of dramatic cosmic upheaval.

Perhaps the most fascinating figure, however, relates to the artist himself. A massively muscular St. Bartholomew clutches the flayed skin that recalls his martyrdom. The sagging, lifeless face on the skin is widely interpreted as a self-portrait of Michelangelo. The artist has inserted himself into the scene in a startlingly vulnerable form: not as the triumphant creator we might expect, but as a discarded husk awaiting judgment like everyone else.

The lower half of the painting is a world of rising and falling bodies. On the left, the dead emerge from their graves and struggle back into physical existence. Some are helped upwards by angels, while others appear to claw their way towards the light. Bodies twist and strain, and the process of returning to life looks almost as difficult as the struggle to escape damnation.

On the right, the mood changes dramatically. The damned are seized by demons and dragged downwards, their bodies contorted by terror and resistance. One of the most powerful details in all of art shows a naked man being pulled towards eternal damnation by a pair of gleeful devils. As the awful reality of his fate dawns on him, he clutches his face in his hands, his features contorted into an image of pure despair.

Others are luckier, winched up towards heaven by the hands of angels. Yet even the saved do not glide serenely into paradise. They are hauled, pushed, and carried upwards, their salvation an effortful struggle rather than an effortless ascent. Michelangelo’s vision gives little comfort to anyone who imagines the final passage into eternity as a calm and orderly affair.

At the very bottom of the painting, the classical underworld intrudes into the Christian vision. Charon, the mythological ferryman, hustles the latest arrivals towards their final destination, threatening those unwilling to enter his boat with his oar. Nearby, Minos, judge of the underworld, is entwined in the coils of a serpent. Michelangelo borrows these figures from classical mythology and, more particularly, from Dante’s Divine Comedy, bringing the world of the Inferno into the papal chapel.

To contemporaries for whom the prospect of heaven and hell were very vivid realities, the message of the great painting could hardly be more powerful. Nor would it be lost on those who gazed upwards at the scene of judgement that this was the Pope’s private chapel, the man God had delegated to take care of his affairs on earth. Only God can damn or pardon for all eternity, but in the here and now the Pope had absolute power of life and death over all his citizens.

The fresco’s nudity was controversial almost from the moment it was unveiled. The heaving mounds of naked bodies were intended, in part, to demonstrate the perfection and expressive power of God’s creation. For Michelangelo, the human form was the supreme vehicle of artistic expression, capable of conveying spiritual intensity as well as physical beauty. For some of his critics, however, the profusion of naked bodies in the pope’s private chapel was an outrage.

The most famous complaint came from Biagio da Cesena, Pope Paul III’s master of ceremonies. According to Vasari, Biagio argued that the fresco’s naked figures were more suited to baths and taverns than to the chapel of the pope. For the devout Michelangelo, this was unforgivable slander. And so he retaliated in a way that was as effective as it was ingenious.

Among the ranks of the damned at the bottom of the painting, he added a figure of Minos, judge of the underworld in classical mythology. Minos appears with the ears of a donkey, his body entangled in the coils of a serpent that bites at his genitals. To contemporaries the face of this latest addition was unmistakable: Biagio himself. Biagio appealed to the pope to force Michelangelo to remove his portrait, but to no avail: the pope explained that had the artist placed Biagio in purgatory he could have intervened, but his jurisdiction unfortunately didn’t extend to hell.

The controversy did not end with Biagio. In 1545, the poet, satirist and celebrated pornographer Pietro Aretino launched a scurrilous attack on the fresco’s nudity, affecting to blush at the indecency of the sacred figures. He took particular exception to Saint Blaise, who holds the iron combs of his martyrdom while looming behind Saint Catherine, whose twisting, scantily clad body bends towards him. Aretino insinuated that Michelangelo had depicted the saints committing a sex act, and denounced the fresco as too indecent even for a brothel. It was a spectacular accusation from a man whose own pornographic writings and obscene sonnets had made him notorious across Italy.

Aretino’s indignation may also have had a more personal source. He had repeatedly asked Michelangelo to send him a drawing, hoping to secure a work by the most celebrated artist of the age. When Michelangelo failed to oblige, Aretino’s tone shifted from extravagant admiration to threats of disdain and, finally, public denunciation. Aretino’s hypocrisy was glaring, but the controversy he helped fuel would have consequences for the fresco itself.