Ceiling Decorations in the Sistine Chapel

Today, I had a dream came true. I visited the Sistine Chapel. I have been in Rome three times over the years and for one reason or another, I have never managed to get inside the Vatican Museum complex. I spent a full eight hours in the complex today, and so when I say I visited the Sistine Chapel, I did that and much more.

Over the years, a number of people have boasted that they saw the Sistine Chapel empty, that is, without the hoards of tourists with whom I shared my experience. Of course, at the time, I had no idea what that meant, but today, I realized, it means very little. At least, I can’t honestly say that my experience of the ceiling was impoverished by the wall to wall tourists who filled the space at any one time. Because, always the eye is turned upwards. No one was ever in my way, no one’s head was too big to see over, no one pushed in front of or past me to get a closer look. The only place to look was up, and the line of sight was clear at all times.

I would even say that the multitudes had little effect on how moved I was to be in the presence of a work of art that is so famous that it is everyone’s dream come true to stand before it. I was overwhelmed along with everyone else. As I walked from the contemporary art galleries I could feel the anticipation and then, as I stepped inside and saw The Consignment of the Keys to St Peter with its incredible, luminescent colour, I began to cry. It wasn’t the reputation of the ceiling that overwhelmed me, but to be in the presence of a piece of art that is so masterful and so powerful, a piece of art that is so difficult to conceive of when we look at it, and impossible to imagine how it was executed, that’s overwhelming. I managed to grab one of the few seats along the right side of the chapel and as I sat there wiping away the tears, a woman who could barely speak English next to me, who had travelled from the Phillipines, said “it’s a lot to take in.” I thought she was trying to comfort me, acknowledging the sheer profundity of the experience. But she then said, “it’s like being in IKEA.” I couldn't quite bring myself to ask for an explanation. I didn't want to be robbed of my emotional revelations, and to admit I was crying from exhaustion after a two hour pilgrimage through the preceding galleries to reach the Sistine Chapel.If the crowds didn't alter my experience, it was because I refused to let them.

The most reproduced panel of the ceiling is, of course, the central panel depicting The Creation of Adam. There’s a reason for that: namely that it is stunning. That and the next panel, Separation of Land from Water, in which God bursts out of the sky looking as though he is heading straight for us, are so perfect. The adjacent panel that sees the Original Sin and the Expulsion from Paradise is also wonderful, but the perspective and placement in the foreground make the first two like magic. Because the ceiling was painted backwards, from the far wall and beginning with the end of the story in the flood, by the time Michelangelo reached the beginning of the story in the centre of the chapel, he had mastered the complex art of perspectival foreshortening. God and Adam are perfect because they are simpler, more grand, more graceful, more balanced in their perspectival rendition. They float through the air.

Zechariah

I also loved the prophets from the old testament and the sibyls from Classical tradition, because in them we see how brilliant is Michelangelo’s understanding of the perspectival illusionism in the story of Genesis on the ceiling proper. The twelve figures are oversized and overdressed in their gorgeous robes. They sit between the ceiling and the walls of the church, between heaven and earth, literally. I kept wanting to reach out and touch those robes. 20 meters up in the sky, and I felt as though I could touch them because of the mastery of perspectival illusion. Their telling of the coming of Christ – the reason behind Michelangelo’s selection of the twelve figures — makes them humble and beautiful. Not to mention the freshness and clarity of their robes, the delicacy of their facial expressions, the contortions of their bodies.

Delphic Sybil

So while the stories are impressive and no doubt Michelangelo offers new and exciting interpretations of the Book of Genesis, what makes the Sistine Chapel a masterpiece is the perspective of images that cohere the long vaulted ceiling, and yet, echo the architectural design of panel separation. That, like bodies falling out of the sky, robes billowing thanks to the movement of bodies that nevertheless sit still, and the delicate features of faces painted five hundred years ago, 20 meters above my head, still seems like an impossible task to me. 

Caravaggio, Calling of St Matthew, 1599

Caravaggio, The Calling of St Matthew, 1599

I have loved this painting for a lifetime. I have seen it over and over and over again in reproduction. I have referred to it, I have been mesmerized by it, and when I was writing A Culture of Light, a postcard of Caravaggio’s The Calling of St Matthew was pinned above my desk. I have always thought of The Calling of St Matthew as the most convincing evidence that the cinematic existed centuries before the cinema was invented. For me, this painting is exquisite.

Today I visited the Contarelli Chapel – fifth on the left as every guidebook repeats – in the San Luigi dei Francesi, just off the Piazza Navona. I stood before The Calling of St Matthew for the first time. The work is so astonishing that I felt my heart begin to race. Really. Four hundred years later and the painting is as clear, and as unfathomable as it must have been in Caravaggio’s time. It is a painting that fills its viewer with joy, with hope, as though the light that sweeps without hestiation through the scene catches us in its magic.

The Electrical Lights ruin the painting

Let me begin with the narrative.  According to the scriptures, when Christ calls Matthew, the dishonest tax collector, to be his disciple, Matthew already knows Christ. And so opens the first ambiguity of the Caravaggio’s depiction. Who is Matthew? Is it the bearded man pointing his left hand? And if so, who does the finger point to? Is it to himself? Is it to the man on his right with the glasses? Or is it to the young boy, head hung in shame or humility (whatever the case may be) because he recognizes Christ. I have never admitted that I was unsure of which of the three figures represented the man who would become St Matthew. Critics and commentators usually assume it’s the bearded man pointing his finger because he most resembles the man in the other two paintings in San Luigi dei Francesi’s St Matthew cycle: The Inspiration of St Matthew and The Martyrdom of St Matthew. But after today, I am not so sure. I know, without a doubt, there are a number of possible interpretations. Today, caught up in the vigor of this breathtaking painting, I became more convinced than ever, Caravaggio wanted it to be ambiguous. There’s no telling which one is Matthew. It could be any one of the three of them.

Of course, the most extraordinary element of The Calling of St Matthew is the light. More distressing than the rail that stops visitors entering the chapel and thus demands that we contemplate The Calling of St Matthew and The Martyrdom of St Matthew from an angle, is the harsh electrical lighting that becomes activated by a euro in the light box. I assume that in Caravaggio’s day, the chapel, thus the paintings, would have been lit by candles. And while candlelight would not soften the ambiguity of St Matthew’s identity in the painting, it would accentuate and enrich the dramatic lighting effects. The beam of light that falls through the window above and to the right of the scene is what enables the “calling”. The calling is Matthew’s summons from earthly to divine. The beam of light energizes the painting, it is everything. The beam of light ignites the drama as it then moves effortlessly from Christ’s perfect face, to his hand, across the face of the beautiful young boy caught in a moment of absolute wonder, to the hand of the bearded man. The sweep of light, its spilling into the room and across the relay of hand gestures must be one of the great moments of the seventeenth century. If ever we had any doubt that the cinema had predecessors in painting, this beam of light puts them to rest.

Caravaggio, The inspiration of St Matthew, c. 1600

The painting is three dimensional in its composition: while it’s difficult to see because of the crosswise perspective from behind the rail, once we turn to the The Inspiration of St Matthew and we see the dimensionality of the stool on which Matthew rests his foot, a stool that is about to fall out of the frame, and we then turn back to The Calling of St Matthew, everything changes. When we turn back, we see that no only has Caravaggio pushed the figures to the front of the picture plane, but that we are invited to fall into the space, as though into a tavern at the turn of the 17^th century. Whether we agree with the critics who call this realism, or those who want it to be naturalism, whichever way we go, there’s going to be indecision and even more ambiguity. I stood there this afternoon, seduced into this vivacious space that is nevertheless silenced in disbelief and reverence for Christ, I realized that Caravaggio entices us into an extraordinary, illusory and impossible world that has only tangential reference to reality. The figures, all of them, including Christ, look like they could have been pulled off the winding cobblestone streets that surround the Church. But Caravaggio paints them into a world that is in motion, in transition between earthly vice and the perfection of spiritual transcendence. And for an hour or so today, I felt, temporarily, as though I too was being called to a life of piety and humility. Such is the power of The Calling of St Matthew.

David Hockney, "Drawing in a Printing Machine", Galerie Lelong

David Hockney, The Atelier, March 17th, 2009

I have always associated David Hockney with the photocollages, polaroid snaps and hyperreal portraits of lovers and friends from the 1960s and 1970s. When a friend saw the Hockney retrospective in Bilbao and came home raving, I wondered if Hockney had radically changed direction in the second half of his life. At least, my friend’s description of the show made it seem as though this was the case. I haven’t seen Hockney’s work since the late 1980s, so I didn’t know what to expect of the much applauded exhibition of so-called drawings at Galerie Lelong.

David Hockney, Summer Sky, 2008

While the works are billed as drawings, they are, in fact computer drawn and inkjet printed. In the statement from Hockney that is the press release distributed by the gallery, he says that the computer allows a speed of execution not possible with oil or even watercolour. With the computer, there is no need to change brushes, wait for paint to dry, and the colour has a certain speed. In addition, as we see in the exhibition, Hockney is able to work with a whole range of vivid new colours thanks to the computer. For example, in many of the portraits we see areas of an appealing light peppermint green. And, particularly in the landscapes, I noticed a layering — of trees, background, sky in different forms and colours — that makes these more recent Hockney works both specific and different from the older photo-collages. 

David Hockney, A Bigger Green Valley, 2008

While my initial response was of a stronger interest in the landscapes because of this layering, the more I stood before the portraits, the more interesting they became. With time, I realized that they had the appearance of still lives. Much like Hockney’s best known portraits, the figures are caught, one could even say, frozen, on the image. The figures are static, a stasis that is reinforced by the deliberate pose, the expressionless faces, the fact that they are usually sitting, not doing anything, just looking “at the camera”. The stasis is also enhanced by the backgrounds which are typically made of two different sections. The larger section is of parallel lines on the page, angled and skewed, and the figures look as if they are placed on a raked stage. And so, I was inspired to think of them as related, if only distantly, to Chardin’s and Cezanne’s still lives. That is, they were falling off the image. 

David Hockney, Matelot, Kevin Druez 1, 2008 

The figures are also curious because they are photographic, but as Hockney insists, they are not photographic reproductions. This is the connection to Warhol’s screen prints, also in artificial colours: they are reproduce-able but not reproduced. But while Warhol is clearly painting, Hockney’s works exist somewhere between painting, computer drawings, prints, with an inflection of the photographic. It is as if he is creating a new medium. The longer I stood before the “drawings”, the more intrigued I became by the creative process. There is something very enigmatic about both the portraits and the landscapes which seems to be attributed to their stasis together with the questions that the viewer cannot help asking about the process. In the works for which he became known in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the enigma is elsewhere, namely, in the narrative of what just happened, or what is about to happen. In this sense, the earlier works are akin to Edward Hopper’s spotlight on what is taking place outside of the frame. However, in these more recent drawings, the figures have impenetrable expressions: are they happy or sad? And what of their past stories? Of course, none is revealed. The opaque expressions of course contribute to their ambiguity. Nevertheless, what makes these images interesting and even at times inaccessible (in the best possible sense) is the creative exploration of the technology he uses.

Copyright for images : Courtesy Galerie Lelong / Photo Fabrice Gibert