Michelangelo’s Last Judgment by Marcia Hall and Leo Steinberg

What a challenge it must have been for Michelangelo to narrate the resurrection of the individual as both the Old and New Testament were contradictory in offering information, Averroes and the Medici popes, Leo and Clement, did not believe in such theory and the only source that Michelangelo could rely on was St. Paul’s text in how each individual would receive a new “spiritual body“ for eternal life along with his own imagination in dramatizing the event.

Last Judgment, Sistine Chapel, Rome

The most expensive and brilliant pigment after gold, lapis lazuli, was used to represent heaven in an arrangement of hundreds of figures (originally made and copied from a wax model and melted and reshaped again) into an astonishing array of contrapposto poses which each figure conveys an emotional intensity.  It is understandable that the fresco was view as a school, in which artists were encouraged to draw the great art of Raphael, Caravaggio and especially, Michelangelo’s Last Judgment as it offered a immense source of poses.

On the hand, it is surprising to read that the fresco invoked so much opposition, from Arentino’s blackmail attempt in seeing the indecency of Michelangelo’s figures in the most sacred chapel on earth.  Resulting in the lively discussions of the Council of Trent, who ruled the outcomes and deemed whether the art was sacred.  Finally, the theologian, Giovanni Andrea Gilio, who argued, with supportive evidence through the writings of Horace and other ancient writers on the concept of decorum, that the fresco had fallen into corruption and it required immediate rescue because of its display in nudity and its unnaturalness in poses.  Gilio feared (and eventually the Church) that the Last Judgment would distract the viewer and seem ridiculous in the eyes of those who could not read because sacred art was to be clearly understood, as it was a substitute for the written word.

Although the Last Judgment was corrected with the addition of loincloths, it was the most copied and engraved work of art in all of Europe.  At the end of the century, seventeen versions were made, as it was believed that the people must have used the prints as devotional objects.  In the end, the Church saw how the Last Judgment did reach and instructed a much larger audience and would turn this lesson to their advantage.