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Authors: John Berger
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this predilection and all the pride of the Renaissance genius, what would you say his imaginary paradise might have been? Might it not have been the fantasy of men giving birth?
The whole ceiling is really about Creation and for him, in the last coil of his longing, Creation meant everything imaginable being born, thrusting and flying, from between men’s legs!
Remember the Medici tomb with the figures of Night and Day, Dusk and Dawn? Two reclining men and two reclining women. The women modestly fold their legs together. Both men part their legs and, pushing, lift their pelvises, as though waiting for a birth. Not a birth of flesh and blood and not – heaven forbid – of symbols either. The birth they await is of the indescribable and endless mystery which their bodies incarnate, and which will emerge from there, from between their parted legs.
And so it is on the ceiling. The visitors in the Chapel floor are like figures who have just dropped from between the feet and out of the skirts of the Prophets and Sibyls. OK The Sibyls are women, but not really, not when you get close: they are men in drag.
Beyond, are the nine scenes of the Creation and there, at the four corners of each scene, sit the amazing, twisting, immense, labouring male nudes (the
ignudi)
, whose presence commentators have found so difficult to explain. They represent, some claim, Ideal Beauty. Then why their effort, why their longing and their labour? No, the twenty young naked men up there have conceived and just given birth to all that is visible and all that is imaginable and all that we see on the ceiling. Man’s loved body up there is the
measure of
everything – even of platonic love, even of Eve, even of you.
He once said, talking about the sculptor of the Bevedere Torso (50 BC ): ‘This is the work of a man who knew more than nature!’
And therein lay the dream, the coiled desire, the pathos and the illusion.
In 1536, two decades after he finished the ceiling, he started to paint the
Last Judgement
on the gigantic wall behind the altar. Maybe it’s the biggest fresco in Europe? Countless figures, all naked, mostly men. Other writers have compared it with the late works of Rembrandt or Beethoven but I can’t follow them. What I see is pure terror and the terror is intimately connected with the ceiling above. Man on this wall is still naked but now the measure of nothing!
Everything has changed. The Renaissance and its spirit is finished. Rome has been sacked. The Inquisition is about to be set up. Everywhere fear has replaced hope, and he is growing old. Maybe it’s like our world today.
Suddenly the pictures of Sebastiao Salgado come to my mind: his photos of the Brazilian gold mine and of coal miners in Bihar, India. Both artists are appalled by what they have to depict, and both show bodies strained to a similar breaking point, which, somehow, the bodies endure!
There the resemblance ends, for Salgado’s figures are working and his are monstrously unemployed. Their energy, their bodies, their huge hands, their senses, have become useless. Mankind has become barren, and there is scarcely any difference between the saved and the damned. No dream remains in any body, however beautiful that body once was. There is only anger and penance – as if God has abandoned man to nature and nature has become blind! Blind? Finally, it’s not true.
He lived and worked for another two decades after he painted the
Last Judgement.
And when he died, at the age of eighty-nine, he was carving a marble Pietà. The so-called unfinished
Rondanini Pietà.
The mother who holds up the limp body of her son is in roughly carved stone. The son’s two legs and one of his arms are finished and polished. (Maybe they are the remnants of another sculpture he partially destroyed – it doesn’t matter: this monument to his energy and solitude stands as it is.) The crossing line, the frontier between the smooth marble and the rough stone, between the flesh
The whole ceiling is really about Creation and for him, in the last coil of his longing, Creation meant everything imaginable being born, thrusting and flying, from between men’s legs!
Remember the Medici tomb with the figures of Night and Day, Dusk and Dawn? Two reclining men and two reclining women. The women modestly fold their legs together. Both men part their legs and, pushing, lift their pelvises, as though waiting for a birth. Not a birth of flesh and blood and not – heaven forbid – of symbols either. The birth they await is of the indescribable and endless mystery which their bodies incarnate, and which will emerge from there, from between their parted legs.
And so it is on the ceiling. The visitors in the Chapel floor are like figures who have just dropped from between the feet and out of the skirts of the Prophets and Sibyls. OK The Sibyls are women, but not really, not when you get close: they are men in drag.
Beyond, are the nine scenes of the Creation and there, at the four corners of each scene, sit the amazing, twisting, immense, labouring male nudes (the
ignudi)
, whose presence commentators have found so difficult to explain. They represent, some claim, Ideal Beauty. Then why their effort, why their longing and their labour? No, the twenty young naked men up there have conceived and just given birth to all that is visible and all that is imaginable and all that we see on the ceiling. Man’s loved body up there is the
measure of
everything – even of platonic love, even of Eve, even of you.
He once said, talking about the sculptor of the Bevedere Torso (50 BC ): ‘This is the work of a man who knew more than nature!’
And therein lay the dream, the coiled desire, the pathos and the illusion.
In 1536, two decades after he finished the ceiling, he started to paint the
Last Judgement
on the gigantic wall behind the altar. Maybe it’s the biggest fresco in Europe? Countless figures, all naked, mostly men. Other writers have compared it with the late works of Rembrandt or Beethoven but I can’t follow them. What I see is pure terror and the terror is intimately connected with the ceiling above. Man on this wall is still naked but now the measure of nothing!
Everything has changed. The Renaissance and its spirit is finished. Rome has been sacked. The Inquisition is about to be set up. Everywhere fear has replaced hope, and he is growing old. Maybe it’s like our world today.
Suddenly the pictures of Sebastiao Salgado come to my mind: his photos of the Brazilian gold mine and of coal miners in Bihar, India. Both artists are appalled by what they have to depict, and both show bodies strained to a similar breaking point, which, somehow, the bodies endure!
There the resemblance ends, for Salgado’s figures are working and his are monstrously unemployed. Their energy, their bodies, their huge hands, their senses, have become useless. Mankind has become barren, and there is scarcely any difference between the saved and the damned. No dream remains in any body, however beautiful that body once was. There is only anger and penance – as if God has abandoned man to nature and nature has become blind! Blind? Finally, it’s not true.
He lived and worked for another two decades after he painted the
Last Judgement.
And when he died, at the age of eighty-nine, he was carving a marble Pietà. The so-called unfinished
Rondanini Pietà.
The mother who holds up the limp body of her son is in roughly carved stone. The son’s two legs and one of his arms are finished and polished. (Maybe they are the remnants of another sculpture he partially destroyed – it doesn’t matter: this monument to his energy and solitude stands as it is.) The crossing line, the frontier between the smooth marble and the rough stone, between the flesh
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