Michelangelo's Last Judgment: The Renaissance Response (review)

166 Reviews Barnes, Bernardine, Michelangelo's Last Judgment: The Renaissanc Response (California Studies in the History of Art, Discovery Series 5), Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, University of California Press, 1998; cloth; pp. xix, 171; 57 b / w illustrations, 8 colour plates; R.R.P. US$45.00, £35.00. On 31 October 1541 Michelangelo's vast fresco of the Last Judgement, covering the entire altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, was unveiled. It concluded an extended decorative programme which had begun in the 1480s when Sixtus IV Delia Rovere commissioned a team of leading Umbro-Tuscan painters to paint the upper walls with a complex typological series on the lives of Moses and Christ; twenty-five years later, Michelangelo was entrusted by Sixtus's nephew Julius II with the spectacular Genesis sequence on the ceiling; the third phase, tapestries on the theme of the Apostles for the lower wall, was given by Leo X Medici to Raphael in the middle of the next decade. Apparently initiated in the later years of the ill-fated pontificate of Clement VII Medici, the Last Judgement was executed entirely in the reign of Paul III Farnese. Michelangelo is first documented as working on the fresco on 18 M a y 1536 though he had certainly already prepared preliminary drawings by then and probably also full-sized cartoons. The site was the most important private chapel in Christendom, the altar wall the most sacred position in that chapel; the subject for its decoration needed to be worthy of its singular location, and the painter needed to have the spiritual insight and the artistic vision to realize in paint the awesome expectations that the site demanded. I t was clear that only Michelangelo, already referred to as Divine, was equal to the task: he was at the peak of his powers, he was deeply religious, and he had already demonstrated the audacity that such an enterprise demanded. His challenge was to f i l l the vast altar wall Reviews 167 with images representing one of the most fundamental, and at the same time terrible, tenets of the Christian faith which already had a rich, well-recognized iconography, but at the same time embodied more difficult abstract concepts such as good and evil, hope and despair, salvation and damnation. The massing of nude figures in complex groupings, expressing a range of spiritual states, around the central figure of Christ that resulted provided an astonishing climax to an extraordinarilyrichdecorative ensemble laden with complex levels of meaning. It is hardly less astonishing to us today than it evidently was to the audiences of the Cinquecento. Recently cleaned, the fresco can n o w be read more effectively than was ever possible in its uncleaned state, and, for the purposes of Bernadine Barnes's Michelangelo's Last Judgement, it is n o w possible to understand what the audiences of Michelangelo's o w n time were looking at. For this is the aim of her book: 'to explain [the Last Judgement] in ways that are compatible with what w e know about the people w h o saw the work in the 16th century' (p. xvi). The audience which viewed the frescoes in the Chapel was for the most part clerical, erudite and sophisticated; it was drawn from the Curia, from the most illustrious levels of the great orders and the studia, and from privileged laity with diplomatic and official ties with the papal court. This was the audience that traditionallyfilledthe papal chapel, and presumably the audience Michelangelo had before him as his great vision gradually took shape in his mind and on the wall. But, as Barnes convincingly demonstrates, the audience was never confined to this group, even in Michelangelo's lifetime. Through careful examination of contemporary documents she shows how quickly this work became the object of a much wider audience. That i t did so at all, and so quickly, was the consequence of printing: 168 Reviews by means of printed images those who had no prospect of ever entering the Sistine Chapel could see the work; through the printed word an array of opinion-formers were able to engender a polemic whose potential audience...