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The Sistine Chapel: Michelangelo Di Lodovico Buonarroti

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The Sistine Chapel: Michelangelo Di Lodovico Buonarroti
The Sistine Chapel

Jackmark

January 22, 2013

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni painted the interior of the Sistine Chapel over a period of 34 years. Michelangelo’s paintings are not only masterpieces of art. The paintings displayed Michelangelo’s relationship to the times and to God. He accomplished this through the content and the style of the paintings. Michelangelo transformed the whole look and the atmosphere of the chapel, while giving us his impressions and ‘’design’’ of God.

Michelangelo painted the …show more content…
The tone of this second installment was much darker and more ominous. The trilogies were painted in the High Renaissance period and the Final Judgement was painted at the beginning of the Inquisition, a dark period in Europe’s history. Not only had the times changed but Michelangelo had become older and cynical.

The Final Judgment is one of Michelangelo’s largest paintings that he had ever done. It was painted on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel. Because of the placement of the Final Judgement, the viewer would see the powerful and angry look from Jesus. Jesus is judging the viewer. The wall was constructed on an angle so that no dust would fall on it, and to show that Jesus is looking down on you.

Jesus, in most minds, is depicted as a thin man but Michelangelo, in the Final Judgment, depicts him as muscular, powerful and angry. Even Mother Mary is looking away from her son Jesus. Unlike the panels on the ceiling of the chapel showing specific events in Biblical history, the Final Judgement shows a large event of huge proportions with many people, taking place in the future. It is a crowded painting and Michelangelo painted it in dark colours. Everything shows despair because so many are being damned to Hell and less to Heaven. Michelangelo symbolized this by depicting the book for Hell much larger than the book for …show more content…
When a Cardinal criticized the Last Judgement, Michelangelo scraped off the face of his original Minos, one of the three judges of the underworld, and replaced it with the face of the Cardinal, giving him ass-ears and wrapped in a snake’s coil. The coils indicated to what circle of Hell the damned are destined. The serpent’s bite on the genitals of Minos illustrated Michelangelo’s disdain for the Cardinal. (It is said that when the Cardinal approached the Pope with his complaint, the Pope replied that his ‘’jurisdiction did not extend to Hell, and the portrait would have to
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