500 Years of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling, A Chat with Frank Dabell

As 2012 approaches we have begun to think about what great anniversaries would be taking place and none jumped out more than the 500th anniversary of the completion of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.  Michelangelo’s masterpiece has captivated both scholars and travelers for centuries, so it seemed fitting to sit down and have a chat with art historian and long time Context docent Frank Dabell about the artist and his work.  A conversation so rich we will need two posts to cover everything, we hope you enjoy the interview as much as we enjoyed discussing Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel with Frank. Our first portion of the chat brings insight into how Michelangelo’s legacy and life, how it was viewed in his own time and what he would think about his fame now.

Obviously the Sistine Chapel ceiling is one of the most famous artworks in the world, what do you think it is about this work that causes it to resonate so heavily with people today 500 years after it was completed?

I think one is the expectations, which can be lower than one expects because of the noise and the chaos inside, but the positive side of the expectation is what we have to focus on. People have seen these pictures, but in the end people really have no idea of the scale. There’s two different scales, one is the fifty feet above your head but the other is this sort of titanic or heroic approach that Michelangelo takes that is not present in the walls of the chapel which was done traditionally, in the style of the Assisi frescos.  The size of the chapel is not that big. If you go into the Tornabuoni Chapel in Florence -Michelangelo was 12 working for Ghirlandaio and maybe mixing colors, so he would have already had projects of that scale. It’s not the size in feet and meters that is so big, but the size in his mind of what he is trying to do ,which is to literally recreate the ancient world in a Christian idiom, but there’s nothing else like it. He’s a giant, the work is gigantic but it’s the concept behind it, the idea of reviving ancient Rome. This is the only place to see it because you simply can’t do it out of a book. Books are very important. Books with close up images and what we can get on the screen now with virtual reproductions of a hand or an ear or a nose, wonderful anatomical parts that are very important from our point of view, but the sense of being there and surrounded by it, with the greater context of Rome itself, which is not just Rome but all the glories of ancient Rome from the Colosseum to the Pantheon, that makes it all fit together.

Do you think as well that is has something to do with the story of Michelangelo as well? People are fascinated by his working process and all of the stories that you hear about him fighting with Julius. Do you think that as well is something that draws people in?

I think half a century ago, and even until recent years, a lot of people were very familiar with The Agony and the Ecstasy which is actually a lot more accurate than the Dan Brown approach to fictionalized history, so they were fascinated by that personal interaction, which is exciting. It’s definitely interesting because he’s definitely one of the first people to break out of that long medieval tradition with the idea of teamwork or following the instructions of the patron and this sets up a much more modern dynamic. Now I’m not sure how much people read about these things so I don’t find that they are very informed about that because when walking and talking through the Vatican Museums I put in little lines and clues to see whether they will bait and people are less informed than they were. But of course there are exceptions. It’s like Caravaggio.  There are a huge amount of books about “the murder of this” and the “mystery of that” so there is this kind of drama, but deep down they don’t recall the details. They know there’s a dramatic figure, and we happen to know more about him than we do about Botticelli or Giotto for that matter.

Are there other books or texts other than the Agony and the Ecstasy that you would recommend for people?

I find that what people have read in recent years is The Pope’s Ceiling, which is a heavier read, but I guess what we need if we want to popularize it is another miniseries. This works in England. We’ve had several times Elizabethan England and Henry VIII and all of that. It does bring it to life because people do want stories.

Why is it that we know so much about Michelangelo? Is it because of Vasari? Why is he focused on?

Yes, well that’s a good question. There’s more recorded history, number one, which is Vasari, part of which was shaped by himself. He dictated certain things to Vasari that were incorrect and Vasari went out and discovered and corrected them, such as how he trained with Ghirlandaio. Number two, correspondence between other people about his work which has survived. Number three his own writings, including his great poetic output, and he is an extraordinary poet, which I think people don’t realize was more of a rarity. In the sense that from that era, we didn’t have too many artists writing…. You had people that were painters and sculptors at the same time and people who were painters and goldsmiths or designers. You didn’t also have them being great architects, which he is, and great poets, so yes, this was unusual. So there’s just more evidence, but there’s also a very large and consistent body of work which defies easy analysis. There are lots of recurring themes, but it’s boundless in how enriching it is to study and a lot of that can be done in Rome. I teach a Michelangelo course and some people say “Why don’t you go to Florence?,” which we do, but there is an amazing amount between painting and sculpture and architecture [in Rome]. And of course he spent the last 30+ yrs of his life in Rome as a resident.

Michelangelo is someone who I feel like really identified himself more as a sculptor than a painter. So how do you think he would feel that his biggest and most famous legacy is the painted work on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, something he wasn’t so enthusiastic about having to do?

We suspect, but we don’t know, really deep down he realized [the magnitude] after a little bit of initial work with colleagues, because he did not paint the ceiling completely alone. Certainly at least the first weeks and months, maybe longer, he was with a small team of very close friends from Florence. I think he was very ambitious, he knew was success was about. People say he paints like a sculptor, actually he paints like a painter. He’s an extraordinary painter. So where does that leave us with sculpture? Fundamentally being all of these things, he could have been a musical composer, [and] he still would have thought of himself of a sculptor and that’s because of his idea of what the finest art form is.

Yes, towards his old age he not only scorned painting, abandoned painting, burned drawings from his youth to break the connection with any sort of early ties he had with painting, but he must have known he was a great painter. There’s no simple answer to this. He thinks of himself as a sculptor, but he is a very great painter and that he must have known. You remember that his very earliest career, half of this is missing because a number of works are lost, included a number of paintings at a point where he was ready to abandon sculpture it seems due to the failure of his first sculptures in Rome, before the Pieta. The Bacchus was rejected and the Sleeping Cupid, which was this fake antique, was discovered to be what it was. The other important thing is that we have specific instances of his thinking about sculpture the whole time when he was painting the ceiling. If we’re talking about the ceiling, the project was taken on, interrupting the project of the Pope’s tomb. He never stopped thinking about that project and many people have said that in a way, the figures in the ceiling are the painted version of what he would have done for the tomb. Not in the iconography per se but in the language he was using, which was this colossal body language in all of its senses. Also, for direct evidence there is a drawing in Oxford, at the Ashmolean, which is for one of the putti in the background of the Libyan Sibyl. At the bottom of that drawing there are little figs of the captives for Julius II’s tomb so while he’s preparing sketches for the Ceiling, this great painting, he’s thinking all the time about the project.

It’s interesting too because there is always this debate with people always trying to prove what’s the best art form. Is it painting? Is it sculpture? There is that battle.

Right, we don’t lose sleep over this in our century, but this was a genuine debate in the 16th century and the two camps fighting each other are basically led by Leonardo for painting and Michelangelo for sculpture. They would go back and forth and when you are standing in front of the Belvedere Torso you just have to say well, sculpture is the greatest thing in the world–by the way, that piece is something greatly praised by Michelangelo. When we’re standing in front of the Mona Lisa and we look at those hands, we can’t believe that such as image could materialize before our eyes, so yes there was a debate. I think in [Michelangelo's] mind though, and let’s go back to the earlier question, there was no debate about what was the primary art form.

So you mentioned the Belvedere Torso, can you talk a bit about Michelangelo’s interest in antiquity and how he used, especially a lot of the antiquity we still find in the Vatican Collections, to influence him in what he did in his painting?

He had a very rich relationship with antiquity being brought up in Florence around the humanist sculptors and artists of the Medici circle, where there was a deliberate revival of antiquity. Everything from gems and cameos to sculptural fragments…and the legacy of Rome never died in Florence either, there was a sarcophagus outside the Baptistry when he was a boy, which remained there through the 20th century. There was a very direct relationship with the ancient world. We also have the anecdote of his supposed first work of sculpture when he was barely a teenager–making a satyr’s head in the garden of San Marco, Lorenzo de’ Medici’s sort of “sculpture academy.” We have his first, and now lost, sculpture which was a supposedly antique cupid and then the next project was the Bacchus, which was a copy, but it goes beyond the bounds of antiquity, of an ancient subject. So in his artistic makeup and his creative process, the presence of antiquity is very strong. And there is the discovery of the great works that are in the collections in Rome, the Belvedere Apollo at that time was in the collection of Julius II before he was Pope. The Belvedere Torso was in the collection, or now we believe simply housed in the studio, of the greatest local sculptor in Rome in the 1490s, Andrea Bregno. He would have had access to all of these things and they were making discoveries. This culminates in January 1506 with the Laocoon, which has so fascinated people since that five or six years ago somebody at Columbia even suggested that it was a fake by Michelangelo! Which is nonsense, but right there we have a series of things that even though he’s doing paintings in this period there’s a constant thread from antiquity saying “we are real, the essence of the ancient world is us,” they are sort of speaking to him through these discoveries and rediscoveries. Just the presence of these works, and he had an intimate knowledge of them, and of course because of his intuitive knowledge of human anatomy as well, he was able to identify with these very strong anatomical forms.

Stay tuned in the coming days for the rest of our conversation with Frank about the Sistine Chapel, when we will speak about areas of the ceiling in depth and how one can get the most out of their visit to the Vatican Museum.

2 Comments »

1. Fantastic discussion! I can’t wait until part 2. I had no idea that someone recently suggested the Laocoon was actually a Michelangelo. That made me laugh out loud… and I think Michelangelo would be very pleased to have such a mistake made about such a powerful and influential work.

   Comment by Kate Mulhern Graham — December 16, 2011 @ 8:53 pm

2. [...] second part of our conversation with art historian Frank Dabell fast forwards to our modern age, the conditions that are now present inside the Sistine Chapel, and [...]

   Pingback by Frank Dabell Discusses the Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo | Context Travel Blog — December 20, 2011 @ 1:25 pm

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