Maybe it’s the famous one of God and Adam reaching toward each other, or maybe it’s the Prophet Jonah with a fish tucked under his arm.Īnd just as you’re thinking-hey, didn’t Jonah get swallowed by a whale? And what is that look in his eye?-one of the guards will demand silence through a thought-shattering loudspeaker while another guard tries to herd you toward the exit. You might wish you had learned more about Michelangelo while you are standing elbow-to-elbow with a room packed full of your fellow travelers trying to get a look at the ceiling, trying to find one image to hold onto. It was quite something.Īnd because of that experience, I have returned numerous times, and I have approached that feeling again while looking at the images of the pagan sibyls and at the frescoes as a whole, though never quite with the quiet shock of the first time when it crept up on me while I sat on a bench under the scene of the flood.Īnd isn’t that why we go to visit famous works of art, why we travel and build our holiday plans around a trip to see Leonardo’s Last Supper in Milan, Botticelli’s Primavera in Florence, and Michelangelo’s frescoes in Rome? Or are we just checking things off a list: Raphael’s School of Athens-done. But I also felt my consciousness reaching through the images painted on the ceiling to connect to the mind of an artist who has been gone for nearly half a millennium and who himself was trying to connect to the thoughts and stories of the past, maybe even to God. Inside the Sistine Chapel I once experienced a sense of myself in time, as a body of energy that has existed forever with a consciousness frustratingly limited to now. I would bet that you’ve come to see great art because you want to know what it feels like. Okay, maybe you could have read a little more about the images themselves, to understand the significance of the expulsion from the garden of Eden and the depiction of Noah and the story of the flood.īut you’ve come for more than just the facts, which you could acquire without leaving home. And this is not exactly because of a collective failure in those who travel from all over the world to see them. The Sistine Chapel frescoes are much looked upon but rarely seen.
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