"Powerful In His Conceptive Faculty" (The Last Judgment)

Daniele da Volterra, Portrait of Michelangelo, Chalk, 1533, Teylers Museum, Haarlem, The Netherlands

      After hisrecovery, Michelangelo returned to work, and finished the Last Judgment in afew months.    It was exposed to thepublic on Christmas Day in 1541.

Michelangelo, The Last Judgment (detail), 1537-41, Sistine Chapel, The Vatican, Rome.

     Time, negligence,and outrage, the dust of centuries, the burned papers of successive conclaves,the smoke of altar-candles, the hammers and the hangings of upholsterers, thebrush of the breeches-maker and restorer, have so dealt with the Last Judgmentthat it is almost impossible to do it justice now.  What Michelangelo intended by his scheme ofcolour is entirely lost.   Not only didDaniele da Volterra, an execrable colourist, dab vividly tinted patches uponthe modulated harmonies of flesh-tones painted by the master; but the whole surface has sunk into a bluishfog, deepening to something like lamp-black around the altar. Nevertheless, inits composition the fresco may still be studied;  and after due inspection, aided byphotographic reproductions of each portion, we are not able to understand theenthusiasm which so nobly and profoundly planned a work of art aroused among contemporaries.

John Addington Symonds, Photographic portrait dedicated to Walt Whitman, 1889.

     It has sometimesbeen asserted that this painting, the largest and most comprehensive in theworld, is a tempest of contending forms, a hurly-burly of floating, falling,soaring, and descending figures.  Nothingcan be more opposed to the truth. Michelangelo was sixty-six years of age when he laid his brush down atthe end of the gigantic task.  He hadlong outlived the spontaneity of youthful ardour.  His experience through half a century in theplanning of monuments, the painting of the Sistine vault, the designing offacades and sacristies and libraries, had developed the architectonic sensewhich was always powerful in his conceptive faculty.  Consequently, we are not surprised to findthat , intricate and confused as the scheme may appear to an unpractised eye,it is in reality a design of mathematical severity, divided into four bands orplanes of grouping.

Michelangelo, The Last Judgment, 1537-41, Sistine Chapel, The Vatican, Rome.

Notes:

1. John Addington Symonds' superb, moving and highly enjoyable The Life of Michelangelo (1893) should be sought out by anyone interested in the artist. A short biography of Symonds, advocate and champion of l'amour de l'impossible, is found Here.

2.  Restoration and cleaning of The Last Judgment was completed in 1994. A short New York Times article concerning the unveiling is found Here.