The purpose of this research is to examine the artistic decoration of the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo. The plan of the research will be to set forth the historical context in which the decoration of the chapel was undertaken, and then to discuss the work with reference to Michelangelo's sculpture and decor of other churches in the preceding periods, as well as to the significance of Michelangelo's complex relationship with Pope Julius II for the project.
The historical context for Michelangelo's decoration of the Sistine Chapel is the tension in the fifteenth century between the Church as the dominant institution in Europe and the increasing secularism of culture. In this regard, Gutek believes that the cultural traditions of the classical period never quite disappeared from the time of the fall of Rome and the emergence of the Renaissance. However, Church hegemony over virtually every aspect of life from the Roman period onward, began to shift with the onset of the Renaissance in the fourteenth century and was permanently altered toward pluralism by the time of the Protestant Reformation two centuries later (Gutek, 1972, pp. 63, 99, et passim). With the onset of humanism and the Renaissance, mankind and not God was seen to be the measure of all things. Gutek describes the Renaissance as "the transitional period between the medieval and the modern" (p. 100). This was due in part to political and cultural shifts away from the Church and toward the state and the private economy as man's principal reference points. As Gutek notes, "the clerical scholastic was yielding to the emergent model of the humanistically educated courtier whose loyalties were to king rather than church" (p. 101). Wells describes this period as one in which "Europe begins to think for itself" (Wells, 1971, pp. 2:614). Further to this point, Clark uses the phrase "the hero as artist," to explain that at its peak the Renaissance produced a sensibility ...