“Don’t listen to those who say, ‘It’s not done that way.’ Maybe it’s not, but you’ll do it anyway. Don’t listen to those who say, ‘You’re taking too big a chance.’ Michelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor, which would surely be rubbed out today.” Neil Simon
May 10, 1508 – Rome, Italy: The first time Pope Julius II requested him to tackle the project, he fled from his home in Caprese, Italy, and hid in Rome rather than agree to the pope’s monumental request. He was overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task and didn’t think he was the right person for the job. A few months later, after the second appeal from the pope, he reluctantly agreed to the contract.
Pope Julius wanted Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni to paint religious murals in the iconic Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. He was sure Michelangelo was the right man, God’s man, for the assignment.
Michelangelo disagreed. He was a sculptor, not a painter, and this wasn’t just any project. The pope wanted a series of murals painted on the ceiling, of all places. His only experience as a painter had occurred years before when he was an art student. Still Michelangelo felt he had no choice but to accept the assignment.
Born in Caprese, Italy, in 1475, Michelangelo’s mother died when he was six, and he was sent to live with the family of a stonecutter who worked in his father’s marble quarry. The young lad was a natural with a chisel and hammer. He was more than a stonecutter; Michelangelo was a skilled sculptor, a prodigy, with the rarest gift to see the angel within the marble. Among his early works was the Pieta, a marble sculpture of the Virgin Mary cradling the crucified Jesus at Golgotha, also commissioned by the Vatican.
Michelangelo began his painting in the Sistine Chapel in July 1508. The pope wanted a depiction of biblical scenes from the New Testament, but Michelangelo convinced him to use the Book of Genesis as the subject matter.
The daunting mission included painting more than 300 life-size figures on the curved ceiling, beginning with the creation and culminating with Noah and the flood. The ceiling spanned 130 feet long, 43 feet wide, and was more than 5,600 square feet.
Because the pope was unwilling to suspend mass, Michelangelo’s first challenge was to design a unique scaffold that could hinge off the walls beneath the 65-foot-high ceiling. Through trial and error, he learned the art of buon fresco painting – a method of painting on a moist, plaster surface with colors ground up in limewater. In the early stages of the project, mold grew in the plaster, and a portion of the creation painting had to be removed and redone.
The tedious painting required Michelangelo to stand on a scaffold, painting awkwardly above his head. His arms and back ached from hours of holding the brush above his head. At other times, he painted with his back bent for long periods. His face and eyes provided a human canvas for the paint droppings.
Michelangelo’s initial fears became a reality. The task overwhelmed him. He dreaded the days when the impetuous pope climbed up on the scaffold to chastise him about his slow progress.
In his journal, Michelangelo lamented, “I am not in the right place. I am not a painter. This is torture.” But assisted by a team that mixed his paints and plaster and carried them up, the weary Michelangelo climbed the scaffold day after day, as days turned into weeks, weeks into months and the months into years.
With his vision permanently damaged by the strain and splatter, Michelangelo made his final brush stroke in October of 1512, more than four years after he had begun. As he descended the scaffold for the last time, he was overwhelmed by his masterpiece. He had poured his soul into every detail of the painting on the nine ceiling panels of the Sistine Chapel, bringing Genesis to life.
More than five hundred years later, Michelangelo’s painting of the Book of Genesis is the crowning masterpiece of the European Renaissance. His fresco of the Creation of Adam is second in popularity only to Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
Each year more than five million visitors from around the world tour the Sistine Chapel, their eyes drawn heavenward by the magnificence of Michelangelo’s creation. The most iconic scene, God reaching down a finger to Adam, has influenced countless millions to consider the wonders of their creator and the earth he created.
I would love to see the Sistine Chapel some day.
It is beautiful and awe inspiring.
He was a master of diligence. Love the story.