The Last Judgement: Rome’s Sistine Chapel to Reopen After 30 Years

by | Mar 24, 2016 | Mystical Christianity, Religious News | 0 comments

Are we in the days of the Last Judgement? The signs and symbols of the End of an Age are everywhere and this story of the sistine chapelinfamous Roman sixth-century church known as the Sistine Chapel reopening to the public after 30 years of restoration seems to align with the last days of the Apocalypse (unveiling).

The Sistine Chapel was covered in 847 during an earthquake and it was only exposed in 1900. The Chapel’s frescoes of saints and martyrs, queens, popes and emperors have now been restored at a cost of about $2.1 funded by the Italian state and the World Monuments Fund.

“We have tried to integrate all paintings and all different phases, offering to the public a way to visualize the history of the church, as the various layers of painting succeeded one another as time passed and new work was commissioned by different actors,” said Giulia Bordi, a co-curator of the exhibition.

“This church is the Sistine Chapel of the early Middle Ages,” art historian Maria Andaloro said. “It collected the very best of figurative culture of the Christian world between Rome and Byzantium.”

The Sistine Chapel resides in the Apostolic Palace, the official residence of the Pope, in Vatican City, and at the foot of the hill where Rome’s emperors once lived. This is also the very chapel between 1508 and 1512, under the patronage of Pope Julius II, Michelangelo painted the Chapel ceiling during the time surrounding the Sack of Rome, and between 1535 and 1541, he painted The Last Judgment for Popes Clement VII and Paul III.

This was also the time when when the Jesuits were canonically recognized in 1540. Fast forward to today, and we have the first Jesuit Pope in the history of the church.

The most famous painting in the Sistine Chapel is called the Last Judgement. It depicts the Second Coming of Christ and the final and eternal judgment by God of all humanity. Christ is the judge in heaven who is surrounded by the Saints including Catherine of Alexandria, Peter, Lawrence, Bartholomew, Paul, Sebastian, John the Baptist, and others.

16 Michelangelo Last Judgment 1537-41 Fresco, 1370 x 1220 cm Cappella Sistina, Vatican This fresco was commissioned by Pope Clement VII (1523-1534) shortly before his death. His successor, Paul III Farnese (1534-1549), forced Michelangelo to a rapid execution of this work, the largest single fresco of the century. The first impression we have when faced with the Last Judgment is that of a truly universal event, at the centre of which stands the powerful figure of Christ. His raised right hand compels the figures on the lefthand side, who are trying to ascend, to be plunged down towards Charon and Minos, the Judge of the Underworld; while his left hand is drawing up the chosen people on his right in an irresistible current of strength. Together with the planets and the sun, the saints surround the Judge, confined into vast spacial orbits around Him. For this work Michelangelo did not choose one set point from which it should be viewed. The proportions of the figures and the size of the groups are determined, as in the Middle Ages, by their single absolute importance and not by their relative significance. For this reason, each figure preserves its own individuality and both the single figures arid the groups need their own background. The figures who, in the depths of the scene, are rising from their graves could well be part of the prophet Ezechiel's vision. Naked skeletons are covered with new flesh, men dead for immemorable lengths of time help each other to rise from the earth. For the representation of the place of eternal damnation, Michelangelo was clearly inspired by the lines of the Divine Comedy: Charon the demon, with eyes of glowing coal/Beckoning them, collects them all,/Smites with his oar whoever lingers. According to Vasari, the artist gave Minos, the Judge of the Souls, the semblance of the Pope's Master of Ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena, who had often complained to the Pope about the nudity of the painted figures. We know that

Michelangelo is said to have been inspired by Dante and the lines of the Divine Comedy. It is here where the Cretan lawgiver, Judge of the Underworld and Son of Jupiter, Minos is depicted as the Judge of the Souls.

Michelangelo depicts Minos with donkey (ass) ears with his body being entwined by a huge serpent that is biting off the penis of Minos. As Minos judges his people, a line of demons and angels descend and ascend to their proper places aloted to them by his judgement. Many have already had their cases determined to be been damned to hell or blessed to heaven.

Minos judge underworld

Zechariah prophesied, “Behold! Your King comes to you, humble and riding on a donkey”. His place in the chapel is directly above the door through which the Pope is carried in procession on Palm Sunday, the day on which Jesus fulfilled the prophecy by riding into Jerusalem on a donkey and being proclaimed King.

Pope John Paul II had said this about the Sistine Chapel;

“It seems that Michelangelo, in his own way, allowed himself to be guided by the evocative words of the Book of Genesis which, as regards the creation of the human being, male and female, reveals: ‘The man and his wife were both naked, yet they felt no shame’. The Sistine Chapel is precisely – if one may say so – the sanctuary of the theology of the human body. In witnessing to the beauty of man created by God as male and female, it also expresses in a certain way, the hope of a world transfigured, the world inaugurated by the Risen Christ.”

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