The Creation of Adam

We will to particularly focus on a collection of art from various cultures that will accompany our unit on cosmogonies. It took Michelangelo and his various apprentices 5 years to complete the entirety of this project. There are 343 separate figures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo likely designed almost all of the figures himself and probably did all of the fine detail and finishing work. He and apprentices (who would have done gross work like tracings, backgrounds, and undercoats on figures) worked standing on scaffold. Michelangelo himself documented this process in various letters and journal entries that survive. He found the process of completing the work miserable in no uncertain terms.

One very interesting result of his work is that almost all modern, western depictions trace to the work Michelangelo did here.

God is a dynamic figure: Zeus-like in countenance. Another interesting aspect of this painting is that it is likely the space god and his hosts occupy is a bisection of the human brain. It is not entirely clear why Michelangelo chose this representation. It might be a side-long dig at the Catholic church for forbidding the study of anatomy. It may also be a symbolic representation that God gave man not only life, but intelligence. It may also represent a belief that God should be ever on one’s mind. At this point, most of these ideas are speculative. It is fairly certain that Michelangelo did not plant a subversive antichristian message here because he remained devout throughout his personal writings and correspondence his whole life- though he did become a spiritualist. Spiritualism was a sect within Catholicism contemporary to Michelangelo that believed that the Catholic Church was not the only bearer of truth and that people could find their way to God through other avenues. Over the coming half a millennium, this would come to be the mainstream view in Catholicism. According to Pope Francis, “Even atheist can go to heaven”. Michelangelo’s erstwhile friend, Pope Julius II was less understanding. What other details do you notice below?

Incidentally, the Sistine Chapel (Completed 1520) is one of a great many pieces of art in a long historical conversation that includes art like The Garden of Earthly Delights (Hieronymus Bosch ~1500) and The Ghent Altar Piece (Jan Van Eyck, 1432) and poems like The Divine Comedy (Dante Alligheiri,1320) and Paradise Lost (John Milton, 1622). You can see this dialogue is alive and growing- even today! One of the commonalities of all of these pieces is an attempt to capture and express the supramundane, the sublime, and the transcendent. Pope Sixtus and his successor, Pope Julius wanted you to walk into the Sistine Chapel and feel awed- enraptured by our place in the universe.

Consider the pieces below from popular culture. Sometimes the Creation of Adam is directly referenced while at other times recognizable subject matter is taken from the Sistine Chapel to create something familiar.

Art and popular culture have a fraught relationship. It can be offensive for some people to see the two intertwined. Religious art carries notes of the sacred with it and invoking that in a popular context to attempt to make money can be gauche at best and very hurtful at worst. Try to practice restraint and withhold immediate adjudication. If a piece of art makes you feel uncomfortable or upset, ask yourself: why do I feel this way? Is it the intention of the artist? Is there a meaningful point or is the artist simply trying to be provocative to obtain attention? It’s even fine to absolutely deplore and hate a piece of art; to determine it has very little value in your eyes. You just want to make this adjudication rationally and not based on your immediate impulses.

These are known as artistic allusions. They call to mind all the analysis and connotations one might have for the original piece of art with very short visual references. The second image on the top row is particularly telling. Here, there’s no direct reference, but this version of God is directly descended from Michelangelo’s imagination. There are other interesting parallel’s to note that coincide with this representation of God. Jesus also becomes more robust and muscular and is fixed in most people’s mind today as European. Prior to the renaissance (and even concurrently in many places) Jesus had traditionally been depicted as meek, suffering, and somewhat feeble.

The 4th piece from the bottom is the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) creating Adam by Arne Niklas Jansson. This is satire. The Flying Spaghetti Monster was invented to gently poke fun at certain religious dogmas- particularly the desire of the Kansas City Schoolboard to teach creationism and outlaw the teaching of evolution (repeatedly). Like many memes, the FSM has taken on a life of its own. As a result, it has become a broad symbol for secular and agnostic individuals.

The middle bottom panel features a scene from the opening credits of an anime known as Death Note. The opening of this anime is an absolute masterclass in a brilliantly designed music video that punctuates every moment with a mixture of far east symbolism and Christian iconography that match both the subject matter and tempo of the music in a thoughtful way. The apple, as is often that case, becomes an addendum to the piece referencing the tree of knowledge from the biblical creation myth. So here, the shinigami, Ryuk, is not creating or imparting life to Light Yagami, but instead potentially deadly knowledge. There is considerably deeper layers of symbolism in this image and intro if you have watched the anime.

I have seen people who have various portions of this piece (sometimes the entirety) tattooed on their bodies. I will spare you those images though! The discussion I’d like to have here is fourfold:

1. What does the popularity of this particular image mean?
   
2. Does this cheapen the original intent of the artist or exalt him with this level of popularity?
   
3. Why has this particular piece of art become so extraordinary?
   
4. Compare this to The Fallen Angel. Why has this piece been so much more successful? Is it a matter of quality?