II

Michelangelo, instinctively and on principle, reacted against the decorative methods of the fifteenth century.  If he had to paint a biblical or mythological subject, he avoided landscapes, trees, flowers, birds, beasts, and subordinate groups of figures.  He eschewed the arabesques, the labyrinths of foliage and fruit enclosing pictured panels, the candelabra and gay bands of variegated patterns, which enabled a quattrocento painter, like Gozzoli or Pinturicchio, to produce brilliant and harmonious general effects at a small expenditure of intellectual energy.  Where the human body struck the keynote of the music in a work of art, he judged that such simple adjuncts and naive concessions to the pleasure of the eye should be avoided.  An architectural foundation for the plastic forms to rest on, as plain in structure and as grandiose in line as could be fashioned, must suffice.  These principles he put immediately to the test in his first decorative undertaking.  For the vault of the Sistine he designed a mighty architectural framework in the form of a hypaethral temple, suspended in the air on jutting pilasters, with bold cornices, projecting brackets, and ribbed arches flung across the void of heaven.  Since the whole of this ideal building was painted upon plaster, its inconsequence, want of support, and disconnection from the ground-plan of the chapel do not strike the mind.  It is felt to be a mere basis for the display of pictorial art, the theatre for a thousand shapes of dignity and beauty.

I have called this imaginary temple hypaethral, because the master left nine openings in the flattened surface of the central vault.  They are unequal in size, five being short parallelograms, and four being spaces of the same shape but twice their length.  Through these the eye is supposed to pierce the roof and discover the unfettered region of the heavens.  But here again Michelangelo betrayed the inconsequence of his invention.  He filled the spaces in question with nine dominant paintings, representing the history of the Creation, the Fall, and the Deluge.  Taking our position at the west end of the chapel and looking upwards, we see in the first compartment God dividing light from darkness; in the second, creating the sun and the moon and the solid earth; in the third, animating the ocean with His brooding influence; in the fourth, creating Adam; in the fifth, creating Eve.  The sixth represents the temptation of our first parents and their expulsion from Paradise.  The seventh shows Noah’s sacrifice before entering the ark; the eighth depicts the Deluge, and the ninth the drunkenness of Noah.  It is clear that, between the architectural conception of a roof opening on the skies and these pictures of events which happened upon earth, there is no logical connection.  Indeed, Michelangelo’s new system of decoration bordered dangerously upon the barocco style, and contained within itself the germs of a vicious mannerism.