Marcia Hall: Michelangelo's Last Judgement.

Twenty years after he completed the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo returned to Rome in 1534 to paint the monumental altar scene of the Last Judgement.  In preparation for this commission, significant changes had to be made to the chapel.  Part of these changes included the destruction of his own lunettes, which were painted as part of the ceiling project.  Also destructed was the large altarpiece of the Assumption of Mary (1481) by Perugino, along with the Finding of Moses, the Birth of Christ, and a series of popes painted across the wall and clerestory windows.  The windows were bricked up.  What remained was a large, uninterrupted wall in which Michelangelo had to conceive his work.  This was quite different to the multi-partite ceiling of the Sistine chapel, which afforded Michelangelo architectural breaks in his thematic composition.

Michelangelo's layout of this scene of the Last Judgement departs from traditional renderings of the scene, which had registers with heaven above and hell below.  Here, Michelangelo places Christ, Mary at his side, in the center with angels and mortal swirling around him in a cosmic fashion.  The resurrection of the dead is in the lower left and hell is in the lower right.  We feel as if Christ, with his illuminated mandorla, is the sun around which everything orbits.

With his movement coming towards us, Christ raises his right arm and glares down toward the damned, showing his power.  "For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel's call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God.  And the dead in Christ will rise first."  (Hall-Thess)

Just below Christ is the figure of Saint Bartholomew.  He holds the knife that caused his demise in one hand and his skin in the other hand.  His face does not match that of the face on the skin and it is believed that this is a self-portrait of Michelangelo.  Common theology felt that when one is judged they will not enter heaven in their imperfect, mortal body but, rather, will take on the perfection of Christ at the age he sacrificed himself for mankind (age 33).  As we learned earlier, Michelangelo had a fascination with the human body so his commission of this piece, and the nudes he painted, must have been intriguing to him.

All of the figures twist and turn in varying contrapposto poses.  In 1586, Armenini, who wrote after Visari, suggested that Michelangelo used wax figurines to get these different  poses.  After creating one in a contrapposto pose, Michelangelo would sketch it and then melt the wax to create another pose.  Here we see Saint Peter holding the keys to heaven.  His pose is quite different from that of Saint Bartholomew above.

Reward and punishment was a marketing tool for the Church.  The belief of redemption and immortality was a big attraction.  With personal resurrection promised, Michelangelo's Last Judgement was a visual confirmation of this belief.  Many engravings were created of the Last Judgement, making it accessible to more than those who had access to the chapel.  With Counter-Reformation mandates, loin clothes were later painted on Michelangelo's nudes