Portrait of Michelangelo
Volterra
The following extract written by John W Dixon Jr. Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, provides a compelling argument to explain what Michelangelo intended from his composition of The Last Judgment. He emphasises that the exuberance of the figures is an “embodiment of the Lord” and is emphatic that “This is, after all, the transfiguration of the body at the end of time. While the painting is, in its own distinctive way, clearly a Last Judgment, it is not simply that. It is necessary to repeat: it is the Resurrection of the Body at the end of time.”
Following that line of argument leads me to conclude that it is absolutely inconceivable that any clothing would be required to cover the glory of God’s creation and the miracle of resurrection.
The Transfigured Flesh and the Resurrection of the Body.
[...] As presented on the ceiling, the bodies are transfigured flesh. As presented on the wall, they are the resurrection of the body. These are, specifically, beautiful bodies. Not all are beautiful; the original of St. Catherine, for example, was grossly obese. The question of beauty cannot be put in the abstract; even more specifically defined, the problem is that of beautiful flesh. The modern temperament, indifferent to religion or defining religion only as doctrine, tends to interpret the presentation of beautiful flesh in one mode only: erotic desire. It is not fitting to deny the presence of either desirability or desire, which would be to offend against the integrity of the human body. The question is the motive and the function of such a presentation.
The undeniable influence of ancient sculpture on Michelangelo often serves as a distraction from what he is doing. It raises the complex, difficult question of “idealization” in Greek art, a problem beyond the scope of this study. As applied to sculpture, it seems to mean the art work as imitation of the idea, the essential principle of the human. Despite the resemblance of much of Michelangelo’s work to the Greek, his is never truly an idealization. In this, as in so much else, Michelangelo is a Florentine and a Dantean.
In Canto XIV of Dante’s Paradiso, Beatrice asks, for Dante, if the souls in paradise will retain the light in which they now appear after they receive their resurrected bodies. Solomon answers:
As long as the feast of Paradise shall be, so long shall our love radiate around us such a garment. Its brightness follows our ardor, the ardor of our vision, and that is in the measure which each has of grace beyond his merit. When the flesh, glorious and sanctified, shall be clothed on us again, our persons will be more acceptable for being all complete;…
Paradiso XIV, 38-45. Singleton: 155¯
“The flesh, glorious and sanctified”, or, as Charles Williams translated it, “Reclothed in the glorious and holy flesh” (“la carne gloriosa e santa”) (Williams: 207). As is normal with Michelangelo, he does not here illustrate Dante, for he is not representing Paradise. Shaped by Dante and his own insight, he defines the body as it had not been before (except, perhaps by the very non-carnal Fra Angelico).
Michelangelo does not present the idealized body but the transfigured body, the body as it is in the creative mind of God. The flesh is luminous in its transformation, a luminosity that was discernible even under the dirt but now is revealed in all its glory by the present cleaning. It is the flesh as such that is holy and glorious. The ignudi possess it and the soft and glowing back of the Libyan Sibyl is female flesh at its finest. By its nature, all flesh is glorious and beautiful. He eliminates the immediate and the adventitious, not for a Platonic idea but for the uncovering of the glory.
Classical figures are at ease in their bodies; body and spirit are in complete harmony by their ideal nature. Michelangelo’s figures are willful and intense. The beauty of the holy flesh is an achievement. It is not an achievement in the sense of starting from nothing or even from corruption; the holy flesh is the original quality of creation. It is not for nothing that Adam is the most beautiful male figure on the ceiling. Quite unlike the Greek, Michelangelo’s figures always posses will and will is corruptible. That corruption comes to its full statement in the sodden collapse of Noah’s drunkenness. Its workings are explored in its various moments of human history, presented to us in the different levels of the ceiling.
Always Michelangelo transcends the pain of history in terms of his vision of the transfigured body.
The holy and glorious flesh was at the heart of what he had to say on the ceiling. On the wall it was the resurrection of the body. When the cleaning is completed we will know better how far he went in presenting the transfigured flesh. As it is, we can see the bodies in their magnificent strength and energy but no longer so self-sufficient or self-contained as they were on the ceiling. Now they are participants in the redemptive action, defined by their place in it, that place determined by their free choice.
The damned move with freedom of action but, since they have rejected the source of humane action, they achieve only violence, despair, vain rebellion and confusion. The redeemed are variously taken up into the coherent unity of divine presence. They participate in the energy that proceeds from the central figure of the redeeming Christ.
