Michelangelo's The Sistine Chapel

Michelangelo painted the Sistine chapel between 1508 and 1512. To any visitor of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, two features become immediately and undeniably apparent: 1) the ceiling is really high up, and 2) there are a lot of paintings up there. Because of this, the centuries have handed down to us an image of Michelangelo lying on his back, wiping sweat and plaster from his eyes as he toiled away year after year, suspended hundreds of feet in the air, begrudgingly completing a commission that he never wanted to accept in the first place. Fortunately for Michelangelo, this is probably not true. But that does nothing to lessen the fact that the frescoes, which take up the entirety of the vault, are among the most important paintings in the world. Michelangelo began to work on the frescoes for Pope Julius II in 1508, replacing a blue ceiling dotted with stars. Originally, the pope asked Michelangelo to paint the ceiling with a geometric ornament, and place the twelve apostles in spandrels around the decoration. Michelangelo proposed instead to paint the Old Testament scenes now found on the vault, divided by the fictive …show more content…
It was not made as a form of intellect but as a form of worship which displays apollonian characteristics. It is not an argument or an Iconic display, although both of these are present in the painting. The critical examination of the chapel at times loses the simplicity that this is just great art. The focus of Michelangelo's art was man, which on the surface seems to confirm Burckhardt's analysis of the Renaissance. His interest in beauty, as reflected in Michelangelo's preoccupation with the nude, arose from his identification of beauty with the highest good. Far from being worldly in content, the Neo-Platonist argued that the body was the dungeon of the soul; Michelangelo's contorted figures symbolize the struggle of the soul to free itself from matter and achieve a vision of