“… the message is that we do not control our fates.” Is a powerful line from Hall’s After Raphael, describing Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement from the Sistine Chapel. Interesting how Christ is portrayed in an Apollonian fashion and the figures seem to revolve around him. Really interesting how Michelangelo borrows and portrays Dantesque imagery here, artistic choice and license typical of Michelangelo. Nice touch in the self portrait in Bartholemew’s cast off worldly skin, allusion to Michelangelo’s own failing body in no small way due to the painting of the ceiling some 20 years earlier. The fact that Michelangelo makes own decisions in portraying the last day, hell, the damned, demons and angels is testament to his immense genius and creativity. His Mannerist influence is commented on by Hall, as the poses of the figures of the Last Judgement are copied and used (often without the same thought to context that Michelangelo employs) by lesser artists in their later projects. Michelangelo’s choice to portray the resurrected spiritual bodies as nude is examined by Hall from the perspective of the frescoes’ contemporary audience.

     Hah, Aretino criticizing Michelangelo’s nudes actually got me laughing. (Thankfully,  hah again, we have outgrown that kind of self-serving character assassination of the artistically talented. “Most writers were not adept at putting into words what they objected to…” and so Michelangelo’s nudes become an easy target. (The inarticulate attacking the insightful… again familiar.) Apparently most of the criticism concerns the untalented determining what is artistically appropriate for religious works of art. What need of the artist then? These theologians and academics should really have been given free reign to scratch and mark whatever surface called for this imagery, that would have been some great stuff. Oh yeah, “appealing to the popolo”, a sure recipe for something special. Rather than immediately understandable, art must be contemplated, and great art endlessly contemplated. (It is the stop sign, and the bathroom signifier that are immediately understandable.) What strikes me most about the second Hall reading are the parallels to the understanding and regard (by those willfully ignorant) of contemporary art today.

     Steinberg’s Art in America article expands on more recent critics interpretations of The Last Judgement before giving his own interpretations in 15 points. He proposes that the body position, face, and gesture of Christ are deliberately ambiguous, and cites earlier attempts by Michelangelo to be deliberately so. (Julius II sculpture) Steinberg proceeds to offer very plausible interpretations of Michelangelo’s work. One of the best is the Dantesque imagery placing Hell in poetic parentheses, in effect relegating the concept of a physical Hell to fable. Other propositions illuminate an enlightened, merciful, hopeful, if heretical Michelangelo, a man with a personal Christian belief, not blindly accepting of church dogma, with the courage to portray it. (if hidden within a dense and richly complex polyvalent work) Steinberg also illuminates the tendency of an interpretation to endure, irrespective of the source material, specifically the negative and punishing interpretations of The Judgement, that may have originated, in part, to distract from an interpretation of the resurrection by Michelangelo that had diverged from the Church’s.

     In all, I very much enjoyed reading Steinberg’s article. It was full of information, and skillfully expounded on an interpretation of Michelangelo’s work (and the man himself), that (true or not) was refreshing, educational, and entertaining.