Discussion 6: Michelangelo's Last Judgement

Michelangelo's fresco Last Judgement, a project that took five years to complete, shows just how much controversy painting was able to generate.

The Last Judgement really shows how adept Michelangelo was a portraying the human figure in a variety of poses that would be copied by many artists that admired his work. Even so, this didn't stop the controversy. Perhaps it is in the way he portrays hell, with dammed souls being taken across the Styx river into Hades, or that Christ is beardless, possibly a reference to Apollo. One way or another the critics seemed to consider the painting to be in someway counter to the doctrine at the time. Hall talks the different contemporary critics of the time who complained about departures from scripture, how the nudity might distract the worshipers, or the manneristic movements of the individual figures. Hall argues that in many of these cases that critics were really just using Michelangelo as a "scapegoat" or "whipping boy" due to changing policies in the church and pressure from the protestants.

Steinberg had an interesting view on the content of the painting. First of all he argues that the Christ is not wrathful, but rather indifferent to the damming of the lost souls. He also points out the larger number of people in the heaven versus in the relatively small portion in hell. He thought that perhaps in disagreement with the doctrine of the time that perhaps Michelangelo didn't consider hell to be eternal or the punishment and torture to be so literal. Perhaps this also explains the extreme amount of controversy about the painting. Maybe the critics had noticed an almost heretical departure from the doctrine of eternal damnation of all, but a select few. I do agree that the Christ figure certainly does appear to have a more passive look to him rather than an angry one, I'm not sure about Stienberg's idea of Vasari and other biographers misconstruing the deeper meaning of the painting to keep it from being destroyed, although it's possible, in the end really it is impossible to know the intentions of Vasari or if his understanding of the the painting had just been influenced by prints that had been made.