The ANNOTICO Report

The Results of the Conclave of the Cardinals, electing the leader of 1
million Catholics, could range from Important to Monumental, BUT the drama
of  the balloting will compete with the artistic charisma of  Michelangelo
Buonarroti looking down on them, and perhaps inspire them if they look up.

ADMIRE THE STAGE INSTEAD

Michelangelo's personality dominates every Vatican scene but his theology
attracts less attention

The London Guardian
Jonathan Jones
Wednesday April 6, 2005

All eyes are on one man's achievements as the world's television cameras
dwell on the great spectacle being enacted in the Vatican. I'm talking, of
course, about Michelangelo Buonarroti. It may officially be Pope John Paul
II's week, but as a flatterer once told the sculptor, painter, architect
and poet who conceived the dome of St Peter's, the world has many rulers,
but only one Michelangelo.
When the cardinals go into conclave in the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo's
frescoes will remind them of what is at stake with his unrivalled paintings
of the beginning and the end of the world according to Christian doctrine -
Genesis on the ceiling, the Last Judgment on the altar wall. But that's
just the most celebrated part of Michelangelo's Rome.

There's not a stone in the Vatican that is not shaped, directly or
indirectly, by Michelangelo. Even its fortifications, which you queue
alongside to get into the papal museums, were built under his guidance. It
is no exaggeration to say that everything we see in the TV images from Rome
is the creation of one 16th-century mind.

That's why I feel no resentment at all, as a non-believer, to be watching
these obsequies unfold. It makes great television, doesn't it? I don't mean
the crowds so much as the scene that sets them off - the most cinematic
architecture that exists. The dome of St Peter's against clouds, against
the sunset, against the night sky - in any weather, in every light, it
looks authentically divine.

And yet the man who gave the Vatican its charisma was not, at all, a
conventional Catholic. Michelangelo was a Christian who thought for himself
and whose personal faith encompassed homosexual desire and a view of
salvation at odds with that of his papal employers. All of this feeds into
the Vatican's spellbinding art and architecture.

Michelangelo was not the first designer of St Peter's, or the last, but the
greatest. The challenge to build a new basilica set by the mercurial Pope
Julius II went initially to Bramante, a designer of classical purity whom
Michelangelo loathed. After him came the equally classicising Sangallo, and
it wasn't until 1547, nearly half a century into its troubled construction,
that Michelangelo was put in charge. By then, a special sale of indulgences
to raise money for the new basilica had sparked Martin Luther's Reformation
- and Michelangelo himself had ideas about salvation that were
disconcertingly similar to Luther's. In fact, the Vatican's presiding
genius was almost a Protestant - in his poems he reiterates, again and
again, that divine mercy alone can rescue him, a worthless sinner, in
contradiction to the Catholic belief in justification through good works.

Michelangelo's radical theology seems to have gone unnoticed in the
Vatican. Yet Luther would surely have understood him when he said there was
no gold on the Sistine ceiling because the heroes of the Bible "were poor
men". It was Michelangelo's sexuality, however, that troubled his papal
patrons. All his life, he tried to reconcile his passion for Christ with
his passion for young men's bodies - insisting in verse that all love is a
gift of the divine. The painting in which Michelangelo expresses this most
nakedly is the Last Judgment. When the Pope's advisers saw its nudes
embracing in Paradise they condemned it as more appropriate for a bathhouse
than the Sistine Chapel. After Michelangelo died the nudes had draperies
painted over their genitalia and when the fresco was restored in the 1980s
many were left in place. After all, you wouldn't want the cardinals getting
distracted during a conclave.

All of this heterodoxy, this individuality, is on display on our TV screens
even as the body of a conservative Pope is displayed in the basilica
Michelangelo shaped. He was the first architect in history to see that a
building does not have to be merely functional, nor does it need to attain
a "correct" appearance - architecture can be a means of self-expression.
When he was asked to complete St Peter's he replaced the neat, harmonious
designs of Bramante and Sangallo with a sublime, colossal idea whose almost
unimaginable scale expresses his own wonder before creation, his personal
sense of helplessness below the might of heaven.

The dome of St Peter's is not like the dome of St Paul's in London, whose
rational design reflects a Newtonian confidence in an orderly universe.
Michelangelo's dome induces vertigo and bafflement - it's hard to believe
human beings actually built this, but they did. And one man designed it.

Pedantic architectural historians will tell you that isn't quite true.
Michelangelo died before his model was built, and the design was altered in
the execution - his hemisphere became an egg. But the truth is that
Michelangelo's personality, his gargantuan soul, is in this dome, and it
towers over the cardinals, the nuns and you and me. Rome, with all its
history, bears the mark of one man's personality. Perhaps, as we debate
whether John Paul II was a great man who shaped history, we need to get
some perspective. All the mourners need to do is look up.

· Jonathan Jones is a Guardian art critic
jonathan22@btinternet.com

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/
features/story/0,,1453148,00.html