Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T23:25:03.888Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Michelangelo, Copernicus and the Sistine chapel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2011

Valerie Shrimplin*
Affiliation:
1 Monks Horton Way, St Albans AL1 4HA, United Kingdom email: [email protected]
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

It is argued that Copernican astronomy is a key theme in Michelangelo's fresco of the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, and was incorporated with the knowledge, consent and approval of the Popes concerned. In Christian art, the iconography of the Last Judgment (depicting the three parts of the universe: heaven, Earth and hell) was traditionally based on a layered structure relating to perceptions of the flat Earth covered by the dome of heaven according to biblical cosmology. In Michelangelo's revolutionary work, Christ is significantly depicted as a beardless Apollonian Sun-god, positioned in the centre of a dramatic circular design rather than at the top of a layered format. This appears to relate to the traditional Christian analogy between the deity and the astronomical feature of the sun, the neoplatonic cult of Sun-symbolism and sources in Dante. More importantly, the influence of the Copernican theory of heliocentricity is argued, since interest in such ideas in papal circles is demonstrated at exactly the time of the commission of the painting (1533). This provides important evidence of papal support for Copernican heliocentricity as early as the 1530s.

Type
Contributed Papers
Copyright
Copyright © International Astronomical Union 2011

References

Alighieri, D. 1984, The Divine Comedy, transl. Mandelbaum, A, 3 vols. (New York: Bantam Press)Google Scholar
Cassirer, E. 1963, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell)Google Scholar
Copernicus, N. 1543, De Revolutionibus Orbium Cœlestium, Dobrzycki, J. (ed) 1968 (London: Macmillan)Google Scholar
de Tolnay, C. 1943–1960, Michelangelo, 5 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press), Vol 5: 49 and 122Google Scholar
Ficino, M. 1985, De Amore, Commentary of Plato's Symposium on Love (Dallas: Spring Publishers)Google Scholar
Kuhn, T. S. 1957, The Copernican Revolution. Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press)Google Scholar
Lehman, K. 1971, in Modern Perspectives in Western Art History (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston), pp. 227270Google Scholar
Mancinelli, F. et al. . 1990, Michelangelo e la Sistina. La Technica, il restauro, il mito (Rome: Palombi)Google Scholar
Murray, L. 1984, Michelangelo, His Life, Work and Times (London: Thames & Hudson)Google Scholar
Prowe, L. 1883, Nicholas Copernicus (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung), Vol 1, p. 273Google Scholar
Rosen, E. 1971, Three Copernican Treatises (New York: Octagon Books)Google Scholar
Shrimplin, V. 2000, Sun-symbolism and Cosmology in Michelangelo's Last Judgment, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, vol. 46 (Kirksville: Truman State University Press)Google Scholar
von Pastor, L. 1901–1928, History of the Popes, 24 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul), Vol. 10, p. 336, and Vol. 12, p. 549Google Scholar