Setting the Stage

God needs the Devil, like Superman needs Lex Luthor or Sherlock Holmes needs Professor Moriarty. Without the tension of opposite forces pitted against each other, there is no story, just drab, monotonous perfection. When Giorgio Vasari mapped out his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, he knew his ultimate destination—the perfection of human artistry embodied by Michelangelo. “In our age the Divine Goodness has created for us Michelangelo Buonarroti,” Vasari writes in his preface to that landmark of art history. Knowing that unabashed praise of the master would lack drama, Vasari devised an entire journey through the history of Italian art from the late thirteenth century to his own sixteenth century painted with the chiaroscuro of bright good and dark evil artists. In Victims and Villains in Vasari’s Lives, the late Andrew Ladis demonstrates the importance of Vasari’s “bad guys” who helped define genius through their flaws and made the stars of the Renaissance shine all the brighter. Vasari, Ladis believes, casts the heroic Giotto (depicted above in a woodcut from Vasari’s 1568 edition of the Lives), Masaccio, and others versus a series of contemporary foils in “a great morality play in which sacred virtues, such as humility, charity, and faith, vie against the base motives that perpectually threaten Vasari’s sacred brotherhood.” Vasari, who, Landis writes, “appreciated the rhetorical power of anecdotes, whether true or not,” never lets the facts get in the way of the greater mission of paving the way for the “messiah” Michelangelo.

Ladis’ work presents an often forgotten side of Vasari’s Lives. Most modern abridged translations leave out the minor figures, preferring to give the major names full coverage. Ladis shows how those “minor” figures play a significant role in the Lives as a whole. The Lives lives more fully through the completeness of the opposition Vasari intended. Giotto’s exemplary life becomes humanized through the story of Buffalmacco, who becomes “an extended counterdemonstration of what it takes to be a true artist, a cautionary example of how not to lead one’s life.” Most of Buffalmacco’s works were already gone in Vasari’s day, damaged much like Buffalmacco’s The Triumph of Death (above, from 1355), a visual correlative to the self-destructive impulses of the artist himself. One of the few works of Buffalmacco that Vasari does see intact is a depiction of the suicide of Judas Iscariot, the template for self-destruction. Such “coincidence” always play right into the hands of Vasari as he weaves his narrative.

Ladis not only analyzes the bad painter—good painter dynamic of Vasari’s text, but also shows how Vasari took creative liberties to portray the “heroes” in the specific heroic manner that suits his higher purpose. In the case of Masaccio, Ladis writes, Vasari “ignored chronology and structured the life so that it comes to a climax with the Brancacci Chapel, still regarded as the painter’s greatest work. Making the Brancacci Chapel a kind of shrine and leading the viewer on a symbolic pilgrimage to it, Vasari compresses all of his story into the narrow confines of that sacred space, the holy of holies of the new art.” Images from the Brancacci Chapel, such as St. Peter Baptizing the Neophytes (above, from 1425), thus prefigure the ultimate sacred space of the Sistine Chapel , the site of Michelangelo’s greatest triumph.

While deconstructing the rhetorical life Vasari breathed into his history, Ladis himself shows a flair for vivacious prose. Vasari “turns Perugino into an avatar of avarice,” Ladis writes, “felled by the same thing that had lifted him up: Florence itself.” Ladis uses the case of Perugino to make the distinction between villains and victims. Perugino’s avarice makes him a villain, but the double whammy of being eclipsed by both Raphael, his student, and Michelangelo makes Perugino an unfortunate victim whose reputation has never fully recovered from those blows. Perugino once stood high enough in the art world that he placed frescoes such as The Delivery of the Keys (above, from 1482) in the Sistine Chapel. Later, however, some of his work was destroyed to make room for Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. Such erasure of an artist, however, is acceptable to Vasari as long as it serves to make way for the star of the Renaissance show.

Just before Michelangelo, the ultimate hero, steps into the spotlight, Vasari presents the ultimate villain, Baccio Bandinelli, whom Ladis calls “a larger-than-hell villain.” With the exception of Vasari’s life of Michelangelo, Bandinelli’s life takes up more pages than any other, including all the other good guys going back to Giotto. In life, critics measured Bandinelli’s accomplishments against those of Michelangelo, a contest that Bandinelli himself welcomed. Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus (above, from 1543) not only stood as a rival to Michelangelo’s David but physically stood near the David in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio. Bandinelli’s villainy reaches it’s height when he, according to Vasari, destroyed Michelangelo’s cartoon for The Battle of Cascina, one of the great lost works of the master. Vasari presents Bandinelli as a great artist whose lack of character denies him the same magnitude of genius that the virtuous Michelangelo achieves. Even in death, Bandinelli’s sinister character as embodied in his art shows how greatly he differs from Michelangelo. The tomb Bandinelli sculpted for himself contains a self-portrait of himself as Nicodemus holding the dead Christ. That self-portrait as Nicodemus characteristically upstages the fallen savior—one final demonstration of Bandinelli’s hubris. Ladis remarks that Bandinelli stole the idea of a pieta from Michelangelo’s Pieta, but I’d argue that a closer source might be Michelangelo’s Florentine Pieta, in which Michelangelo cast himself in the role of Nicodemus, but in a much more servile role than Bandinelli’s Nicodemus. These dueling Nicodemi exemplify the larger story Vasari, and Ladis, tell.

You cannot come away from Victims and Villains in Vasari’s Lives and not want to go back to the source and read it again with Ladis’ ideas lurking in the back of your mind. Just as Herodotus’ Histories and Plutarch’s Parallel Lives can be seen equally as literature and history, Vasari’s Lives deserves to be seen as a masterpiece of Renaissance infotainment, but with a purpose. Michelangelo descends from heaven in Vasari’s eyes to redeem the world through art. Vasari, himself a painter, accepts the role of evangelist and spreads the word of Michelangelo’s majesty. Perhaps Ladis’ work will lead to a reappraisal of those minor figures so blithely excised from the abridged versions of Vasari’s work, whose flaws are more fascinating and human than those artistic god that once walked among us. Although Vasari always sided with the angels, he knew the value of the fallen angels to his story. Andrew Ladis’ Victims and Villains in Vasari’s Lives gives the devils their due, just as Vasari intended.


[Many thanks to the University of North Carolina Press for providing me with a review copy of Andrew Ladis’ Victims and Villains in Vasari’s Lives.]

On the Nose

When Pope Sixtus IV gathered the fantastic four of Sandro Botticelli, Perugino, Cosimo Rosselli, and Domenico Ghirlandaio to paint new frescoes for the Sistine Chapel, Ghirlandaio’s reputation among that foursome was second only to that of Botticelli. Ghirlandaio’s The Calling of the Apostles (above) remains among the many wall frescoes overshadowed by Michelangelo’s achievements, but close inspection shows an artist worthy of a second look. The landscape that reaches back into the distance behind the flurry of figures at the front testifies to Ghirlandaio’s gift for realism in depicting devotional scenes. Sadly, the Resurrection fresco he also painted in the Sistine Chapel was destroyed, later to be replaced by Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment. Michelangelo briefly served as an apprentice under Ghirlandaio, who died January 11, 1494, so you have to wonder what he may have felt painting the same scene on the same wall worked upon by his master four decades before.

In the convent of San Marco in Florence, Ghirlandaio painted one of his most enduring versions of The Last Supper (above, from 1486). Ghirlandaio creates a sumptuous dinner, filling the plates with bread, cherries, and more, and weighting down the table with cups and decanters. Following the common layout of the scene, he places Judas on the side of the table opposite Jesus, in contrast to the Da Vinci arrangement modern eyes have come to expect. The rich merchants of Florence would have easily seen a bit of their own life of luxury in the table depicted here. The warmth and humor of Ghirlandaio comes through in the cat in the right foreground, poised to pounce upon any fallen scraps.

My favorite painting by Ghirlandaio, however, is his An Old Man and His Grandson (above, from 1490). I remember seeing this in the Louvre amidst the other great Renaissance paintings. It stood out to me because of the stunning combination of realism in depicting the grandfather’s afflicted nose and humanism in showing the love and pride he took in his grandson. Such a figure could easily have become a Brueghel-esque grotesquerie, yet Ghirlandaio resists that impulse and paints the interior life of the old man beneath the disfigurement. I recall reading years ago Bernard Berenson and Giorgio Vasari on the Italian Renaissance and feeling overwhelmed by the plethora of names—long, long names. Ghirlandaio, however, always stuck in my mind as one to remember.

The Other Guy

In 1482, Pope Sixtus IV called upon artists Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Perugino, and Cosimo Rosselli to begin work on decorating the Sistine Chapel. Rosselli, who died January 7, 1507, seemed an odd choice at the time, ranking far below the other painters called to work on the prestigious project. Even today, poor Cosimo seems the odd man out. His three murals, including The Crossing of the Red Sea (above, from 1482), depicting Moses leading his people through the parted Red Sea, literally are overlooked next to the grand works of Michelangelo and the other bigger names. As Father Pfieffer’s recent work, The Sistine Chapel: A New Vision, demonstrated (reviewed earlier here), Rosselli’s work fits in with the theology of all those more famous works beautifully. How the artist himself fits in remains a question.

I honestly have no recollection of Rosselli’s works from my time in the Sistine Chapel. I was too busy taking in the ceiling and The Last Judgment for the side wall frescoes to even register, even though I knew Botticelli had painted some of them. Rosselli’s The Last Supper (above, from 1482) hangs on the North wall as part of the cycle of scenes from the life of Christ across from the cycle covering the life of Moses. Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Painters wrote of Rosselli’s life and praised this work: “[H]e made an octagonal table drawn in perspective, with the ceiling above it likewise octagonal, the eight angles of which he foreshortened so well as to show that he had as good a knowledge of this art as any of the others.” Rosselli possessed workmanlike skills, but lacked visionary power. The scenes of Christ on The Mount of Olives, arrested, and crucified appearing outside the windows of the supper scene add a surreal touch, but are common to the narrative vocabulary of the time.

Rosselli’s Sermon on the Mount (above, from 1482) is the third and last of his Sistine Chapel frescos. Again, Christ appears several times: walking to the scene with his apostles, preaching, and then healing a leper. Vasari claims that Rosselli filled his Sistine frescos with brilliant blue to cover up his other deficiencies. When the Pope announced a prize for the best artist, everyone thought that Rosselli didn’t stand a chance. Instead, the Pope fell under the spell of those brilliant blues and awarded the prize to Rosselli, adding insult to injury by instructing the other artists to add brilliant blue to their works as well. Rosselli laughed last (at least if that story was true), but soon drifted into the obscurity of a man cursed by colossal contemporaries.

Cracking the Code

The Judge and Mary, Joseph’s hand with the crossed beams, Anne (bottom left), Bartholomew’s knife, and Joachim (behind Bartholomew). From The Sistine Chapel: A New Vision, Abbeville Press. Photo credit: ©Archivio Fotografico dei Musei Vaticani, A. Bracchetti/P. Zigrossi.

Standing in the Sistine Chapel may be the single most overwhelming experience you can have indoors. Like the great vistas of nature’s most beautiful works, you find yourself straining to see it all at once, hoping somehow to take it all in. Unlike those landscapes, however, the Sistine Chapel encloses you in majesty on all sides, surrounding you with visual stimulation. First you crane your neck up to take in Michelangelo’s ceiling frescos. As you neck begins to cramp, you lower your eyes to his towering Last Judgment and feel yourself being judged by Christ in glory (above). I made a point of looking at the other wall frescos by Botticelli and others, the forgotten masterpieces overshadowed by Michelangelo’s mastery. As you shuffle outside with the rest of the crowd, you can’t shake the feeling that you’ve missed more than you’ve appreciated.

Father Heinrich Pfeiffer, S.J., now comes to your rescue. In The Sistine Chapel: A New Vision, Father Pfeiffer takes you on a personal tour of the Sistine Chapel, lingering over every inch of every one of the frescoes, including those “hidden” by Michelangelo’s achievement. After studying the Sistine Chapel since the 1950s, Father Pfeiffer offers in this text a new vision of that most holy space of art and religion by recovering the original vision of the artists and those who advised them. “We can no longer naively believe that painters like Raphael and Michelangelo, however great their genius, could have invented themselves the content of the subjects they depicted in their paintings, much less that of painters who worked in the Sistine Chapel before Michelangelo could have done so,” Father Pfeiffer writes. Taking his text from five articles published since 1990, now translated from the original German, Father Pfeiffer reveals the intricate theological “code” of the art of the Sistine Chapel, an intricate network of meaning linked to the deep theological ideas that theologian advisors conveyed to the artists, who then realized the ideas in paint. Thanks to these “technical advisors” to Michelangelo et al, the Sistine Chapel became a vast religious book to be read by the initiated. “To us today, by contrast, this biblical visual idiom is largely lost,” Father Pfeiffer laments. Thanks to his efforts, we can now read again the language of that idiomatic code. Fans of the mythical Da Vinci Code should revel in this real-life religious code-breaking performed right before our eyes.


Southern wall: Sandro Botticelli, The Punishment of Korah, with scenes of the ships of Solomon and Jehoshaphat at Ezion-geber waiting to depart for the green land of Ophir, and the attempt to stone Moses. From The Sistine Chapel: A New Vision, Abbeville Press. Photo credit: ©Archivio Fotografico dei Musei Vaticani, A. Bracchetti/P. Zigrossi.

In 1482, Pope Sixtus IV, a Franciscan who “cultivated allegorical Biblical exegesis,” called upon artists Botticelli, Cosimo Rosselli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Perugino to begin work on decorating the Sistine Chapel. Sixtus IV dedicated the Chapel to the Virgin Mary. “Mary’s immaculate conceptiion,” Father Pfeiffer writes, “and hence the true role of the Mother of God in God’s will, influenced the artistic conception of the fresco decorations of the chapel from the outset.” Even works such as Botticelli’s The Punishment of Korah contain hidden references to Mary from the Old Testament book of Exodus. Throughout the rest of his analysis of the Sistine Chapel, Father Pfeiffer returns over and over to the centrality of Mary in the scheme of the art. Not only does Mary reach back to the Old Testament, but she reaches forward to the Church as the theological “type” of the Church and the “bride” of Jesus, her son. Parodoxically both wife and mother, Mary’s relationship with Jesus represents just one of the complex interweavings of multiple layers of meaning found in the works of the Chapel, which speak to one another as they speak to us with one powerful voice. Father Pfeiffer amazes with his ability to wed the visual evidence of the art and trace it back to specific theological concepts and even the specific original texts and authors of those concepts. If they ever film Indiana Jones and the Vatican Archives, Father Pfeiffer should get the part.

The prophet Daniel, symbolizing reason, draws his vision on a piece of paper with charcoal. The nude figure representing will carries the large open book, while memory is portrayed behind the prophet’s shoulder. The two pairs of children in the illusionistic marble reliefs perform their nuptial dance. From The Sistine Chapel: A New Vision, Abbeville Press. Photo credit: ©Archivio Fotografico dei Musei Vaticani, A. Bracchetti/P. Zigrossi.

After demonstrating the interplay of typology between the Jesus frescoes and the Moses frescoes along with walls, Father Pfeiffer tackles the grand ceiling frescoes of Michelangelo, which he began in 1508 at the request of Pope Julius II, Sixtus IV’s nephew. Julius II clearly wanted to carry on his uncle’s program. The ceiling frescoes detail the world before Mosaic law, completing the trinity begun by the walls that examined the world both during and after Mosaic law. I use the word “trinity” specifically to give a sense of how even the religious concept of the Trinity takes physical and artistic form in the Chapel in so many ways over and over. These ideas ricochet everywhere in the text, and Father Pfeiffer beautifully handles every carom and angle in explaining these interconnections without losing the reader. When he explained how the five male prophets (including Daniel, above) correspond to the female sibyls in another bride/groom allusion, I saw those familiar figures in a whole new light. When Father Pfeiffer went on to explain how the two smaller figures accompanying each of the prophets and sibyls play out the mental state of the larger figure in a “psychological trinity” (there’s that word again), I finally accepted that no detail, however small, can be considered arbitrary in the Sistine Chapel. Everything, even the colors of the clothing worn by each figure, contributes to the nexus of meaning.

The Fall, detail: Adam does not take the fruit from Eve, but picks it with his own hands. The stump with the leafless branches symbolizes the Tree of Life, or the cross. From The Sistine Chapel: A New Vision, Abbeville Press. Photo credit: ©Archivio Fotografico dei Musei Vaticani, A. Bracchetti/P. Zigrossi.

Father Pfeiffer’s main concern is the embodied theological meaning of the art, but he still demonstrates the artistry of the masters, especially Michelangelo. As Michelangelo grew more confident in his fresco technique, he evolves from the painter of huge crowded scenes of the story of Noah to the creator of simpler, more focused images starring larger figures such as Adam and Eve in The Fall (above). Michelangelo’s artistic confidence parallels a theological confidence as he began to internalize all those years of theological advisors whispering in his ear. In The Fall, Eve takes the fatal fruit from the hand of the serpent, who has the upper body of a woman but the lower half of a snake, but Adam picks the fruit with his own hand, deviating from the Biblical text. Any fears that Father Pfeiffer’s thesis would diminish the acheivement of the Sistine Chapel artists, transforming them into painterly stenographers, disappear as Michelangelo emerges as the first artist to serve as his own technical theological advisor.

Mary’s head shows the technique of spolvero, or pouncing, in which the composition is transferred from the cartoon by rubbing charcoal dust through holes pricked along the lines of the cartoon. The dots left by the charcoal dust are visible, for example, along the lips. From The Sistine Chapel: A New Vision, Abbeville Press. Photo credit: ©Archivio Fotografico dei Musei Vaticani, A. Bracchetti/P. Zigrossi.

When Michelangelo begins work on The Last Judgment in 1534, he refuses any theological advisors at all. (Pietro Aretino, who would have been that advisor, took offense and retaliated by accusing Michelangelo of homosexuality. In response, Michelangelo used Aretino’s face for that of St. Bartholomew, who holds the flayed skin upon which Michelangelo painted his own self-portrait.) The Last Judgment serves as a curtain call for all the other figures in the Sistine Chapel—the neat bow with which the total package is wrapped. The mad press of nude bodies seen in The Last Judgment represents the “architecture” of the Church itself, composed of the bodies of the living members on Earth. The Virgin and Christ as judge co-star in this final act. Mary (above, in close up) actually appears pregnant, representing “the Church in birth pangs with the whole of humanity.” Christ, modeled on the Apollo Belvedere in a show of Michelangelo’s classical, pagan aesthetic, commands the scene with his raised hand of damnation, the “gesture [that] causes the entire painting to tremble, down to the last, lowest corners.” By going character by character and teasing out the meaning of every glance and gesture, Father Pfeiffer makes sense of the riotous chorus of the saved and the damned and gives us a long, deep look into the mind of Michelangelo as he conceived the mind of God. (Da Vinci Code fans should note that Mary Magdalene appears to the right of Christ, dressed in yellow-green. Make of that what you will…)

Father Pfeiffer remarks in his epilogue that he hopes that his study of the theological underpinnings of the Sistine Chapel’s art brings back the study of the ideas embodied by art and not just the surface beauties of the work. His exegesis of the Sistine Chapel will instill a new reverence and awe for even those who have studied these works for years. Just as Father Pfeiffer’s text focuses more and more closely on every detail of the art, the illustrations accompanying the text offer a vision of the art that I’ve never encountered before. To come close enough to see the charcoal dust remaining on the Virgin’s lips as a remnant of Michelangelo’s technique is to see these works as the artist himself saw them centuries ago on the scaffolding. While the miraculous restoration effort restored the colors beneath the grime, Father Pfeiffer’s A Sistine Chapel: A New Vision restores the imaginative power and spiritual intensity of that truly magical space.

[Many thanks to Abbeville Press for providing me with a review copy of this book as well as the images above.]