Artistic Decoration of the Sistine Chapel

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 priv

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naissance, says Clark, was in the visual arts, and Michelangelo's work is undoubtedly central to such expression. However, in some of Michelangelo's writings can be discerned a consciousness of intellectual and indeed spiritual tension in his personal life that found expression in his art. In this regard, Santillana cites "the fundamental ambiguity that was Michelangelo's experience of the creative effort. Strange it is that . . . notwithstanding the reassurance, the understanding, the admiration, nay adulation, that he received from pontiff after worldly pontiff, he should never have tried to reconcile his Christian feelings with his humanistic philosophy . . . and should have lived forever in religious dread of his own irresistibly pagan and dramatically overreaching creativeness" (Santillana, 1956, p. 150). Michelangelo appears to have come to a well-developed theory of creativity and of the artistic enterprise, expressed in the form of poetry. What is even more striking is that his changing views of art appear to have influenced the content of the work that he undertook at various phases of his life. Santillana quotes extensively from Michelangelo's poetry, which contains images and referents of art, to this effect. Fo
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Approximate Word count = 2585
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)