What’s so great about the Sistine Chapel?
Visiting the Sistine Chapel is uncomfortable. It’s always crowded, and you have to walk through the vast collections of thebefore you even get there. And when you finally reach this famous room, you have to look up at images that are difficult to see from the ground. Every time I’ve been, I can sense a current of irritation running through the room. Even if you do have the place to yourself, these frescoes will not yield themselves easily.
On the surface the frescoes would seem to be about Catholic doctrine, but instead they show you that Catholicism in the early 16th-century was quite different from what it is today. The frescoes are not simply illustrations of biblical stories, but instead look at the deep questions those stories bring up. They acknowledge that the Bible itself is an artful text, a mysterious collection of verse and prophecy that comes out of a human past that we don’t know so much about.
The Deluge is the first of the panels that pulled me in at a point where I was almost ready to give up. The story in Genesis says that God intends to flood the Earth, wipe it clean and start again. It’s hard not to think about climate change and rising Michelangelo isn’t an apologist for this terrifying Old Testament God. And we know, though Michelangelo would not have, that this story is older than the one told in Genesis. We know that such tales were also told in ancient Mesopotamia centuries earlier; like the story of Atrahasis where a cranky god, finding humans to be irritating and noisy, tries to silence them with a flood while a kinder god tries to save them.
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