Vatican: Sistine Chapel and Stanze della Segnatura

I agree with Edward Hutton that Michelangelo's work in the Sistine Chapel is difficult to comprehend or take in. It's not just the crowds of tourists but the sheer monumentality is overwhelming. I also prefer the relatively small and intimate Stanze della Segnatura where, despite a room full of people, you are free to linger and explore the four walls at leisure before being swept into the Sistine Chapel.

 

Above these, supported by marvelous and gigantic images of sybyls, of prophets, of slaves, and athletes, stretches the roof of Michelangelo, that new heaven which is the old earth, beautiful with the life of man, his love which brought disaster and all joy, the wild story of the world, which ends on that vast wall above the altar where he has painted not the Last Judgment, it might seem, but the Resurrection.

 

This ceiling, so heavy with life that it always seems to crush us under the weight of its tremendous story, was painted for Pope Julius II., the condotierre, between the years 1506 and 1512…. (216)

 

But this profound and wonderful vision of life by no means decorates the chapel of the Popes; it dwarfs it. The air is so full of shapes that we can see nothing.  In this space… Michelangelo, whose spirit always seems to be brooding over some immense sorrow, has created a tremendous and a terrible crowd of figures, each one of which seems to accuse the Papacy and God Himself of some tragic crime committed upon mankind….  Here we are devoured by insatiable dreams—and how should we answer and satisfy them? (222-223)

 

Raphael: School of Athens.

 

But, after all, what strikes us most in this picture dealing so easily and surely with the greatest matters, is its value as just a picture, its decorative value, that is, its marvelously lovely expression, not of any profound or subtle thought but of its own element, a certain spaciousness, confined as we perceive at last, within very narrow material limits, but that seems infinite. It is the very triumph of decorative art, come at last to perfection in one who had been the pupil of Pietro Perugino. The difficulty of such an achievement, greater here by far than in the ‘Disputa.’ For there all heaven lay open to our eyes, is scarcely felt till in an effort to understand what is really consummate in the art of Raphael—and no man has been praised so much for the wrong things—we perceive here his real triumph. That palace or temple, all of earth, full of the measured beauty of the work of man, is not less infinite in its spaciousness after all than the whole circuit of the world, the limitless kingdom, light on light, of the sky. And this is the real triumph of Raphael, not that he has summed up the ancient and the medieval world and expressed them in the terms of the Renaissance, but that into that narrow, cramped room he has brought an infinite beauty. (227)

 

### 

 

 Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922.