The Michelangelo Code

Apr 12, 2006 Alun The Past 2 Comments Archaeoastronomy, Art, Art History, Heliocentricism, History, History of Astronomy, Michelangelo, Nicholas Copernicus, Valerie Shrimplin

Last Judge­ment. Fresco in the Sistene Chapel by Michelangelo.

IN THE MIDST OF ALL assuredly dwells the Sun. For in this most beau­ti­ful who would place this luminary in any other or bet­ter pos­i­tion from which he can illu­min­ate the whole at once? Indeed, some rightly call Him the Light of the World, oth­ers, the Mind or ruler of the Uni­verse: Tris­megis­tus names him the vis­ible God, Sophocles’ Elec­tra calls him the all-seeing. So indeed the Sun remains, as if in his kingly domin­ion, gov­ern­ing the fam­ily of Heav­enly bod­ies which circles around him.

The most inter­est­ing talk of the NAM his­tor­ical ses­sion was the excel­lently titled Michelan­gelo Code. Valerie Shrimplin based her talk on part of her PhD thesis Sun Sym­bol­ism and Cos­mo­logy in Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judge­ment’ avail­able from Tru­man State Uni­ver­sity Press. It tackles some­thing that ini­tially doesn’t seem to be a prob­lem. She also cov­ers this in her paper of the same title in the Six­teenth Cen­tury Journal (Vol 21.4 1990 pp 607–44 JSTOR) which I’ve lif­ted the above quote from. The text above seems a reas­on­able descrip­tion of Michelangelo’s Last Judge­ment. In fact it’s from De Revolu­tionibus, by Nich­olas Coper­ni­cus describ­ing his helio­centric cos­mo­logy. Did Michelan­gelo paint Copernicus’s heav­ens in the Sis­tine Chapel?

It seems unlikely. De Revolu­tionibus was pub­lished two years after Michelan­gelo fin­ished the chapel. After Copernicus’s death helio­centri­cism became con­tro­ver­sial. It could be accep­ted as a math­em­at­ical device, but as a rep­res­ent­a­tion of real­ity, which is how Michelan­gelo uses it, it would later be seen as heresy. The accep­ted explan­a­tion is that Michelan­gelo came to place Christ in a cent­ral pos­i­tion inde­pend­ently, but this is an odd explan­a­tion when you look at other depic­tions of the Last Judge­ment and what it is sup­posed to do.

Last Judge­ment. 12th-century Byz­antine mosaic from Tor­cello Cathedral.

Above is a 19th cen­tury res­tor­a­tion of the Tor­cello Mosaic and it’s a fair rep­res­ent­a­tion of the stand­ard form of Last Judge­ments. It places the heav­ens at the top, Earth in the middle and Hell below. At the top is Christ and this reflects the earthly social order. The Last Judge­ment was a typ­ical theme for the west end of a church, so that when the con­greg­a­tion left they had a close look at what was in store for them if they strayed. Michelan­gelo doesn’t through out all of this com­pos­i­tion, but there are pecu­li­ar­it­ies in the com­pos­i­tion and there was talk of it con­tain­ing secrets not meant for the layman.

The talk explored if Coper­nican ideas could have influ­enced Michelan­gelo and it turns out there’s plenty of evid­ence they could. There’s no evid­ence the two met, but they were con­tem­por­ar­ies and both moved in sim­ilar circles in the upper ech­el­ons of the church. Coper­ni­cus was also talk­ing about his ideas before pub­lish­ing them and this is men­tioned, if I recall the talk cor­rectly, in some let­ters from the Vatican.

Yet the idea that the Sistene Chapel in the Vat­ican was a poster for helio­centri­cism dur­ing the time of the Roman Inquis­i­tion is a bit mad. Surely the church’s hos­til­ity to helio­centri­cism would have made it a taboo sub­ject for Michelangelo’s fresco. On the con­trary, it seems there was not wide oppos­i­tion to helio­centri­cism until after Copernicus’s death. You’d think the church would have been against such thought. Against helio­centri­cism Mar­tin Luther said: “…Holy Scrip­ture tells us, so did Joshua bid the sun to stand still and not the earth.” He wasn’t a noted fan of Cath­olic theo­logy, but he was stat­ing the obvi­ous. The Cath­olic church how­ever had done some think­ing and may have recog­nised there was a major theo­lo­gical flaw of geo­centri­cism. It made Hell the centre of the uni­verse. This wasn’t a new idea, it was explored by Dante in the Divine Com­edy. But if you accept, as people did, that the Earth was round, then a geo­centric uni­verse would, if Hell was the under­world, made the uni­verse Haidocentric.

One pos­sible reason for hos­til­ity to helio­centri­cism – and I’m spec­u­lat­ing wildly here because I haven’t read Shrimplin’s book yet – might not be the answer it gave, but the prob­lems it cre­ated in even ask­ing the ques­tion. Once you have a choice of what is at the centre of the uni­verse then it becomes appar­ent that neither answer is going to be theo­lo­gic­ally per­fect. This is a prob­lem if your reli­gion pos­its the exist­ence of a per­fect god.

The talk was inter­est­ing because it over­turned a few simplistic ideas about the con­flict between reli­gion and sci­ence. The favoured story of Coper­ni­cus being quashed by a dog­matic Cath­olic church doesn’t really stand up, though he may have been jus­ti­fi­ably wor­ried about other denom­in­a­tions. Instead the Cath­olic church seem to have been favour­ably inclined to sup­port­ing Copernicus’s work until people star­ted tak­ing it a step too far. Rather than just see­ing how much Michelan­gelo got right, the talk said much more about how the devel­op­ment of reli­gion and by exten­sion polit­ics occurred in 16th cen­tury Europe. Though obvi­ously we’re a long way from that now.

Through­out the 1970s I had been mainly study­ing black holes, but in 1981 my interest in ques­tions about the ori­gin and fate of the uni­verse was reawakened when I atten­ded a con­fer­ence on cos­mo­logy organ­ized by the Jesuits in the Vat­ican. The Cath­olic Church had made a bad mis­take with Galileo when it tried to lay down the law on a ques­tion of sci­ence, declar­ing that the sun went round the earth. Now, cen­tur­ies later, it had decided to invite a num­ber of experts to advise it on cos­mo­logy. At the end of the con­fer­ence the par­ti­cipants were gran­ted an audi­ence with the pope. He told us that it was all right to study the evol­u­tion of the uni­verse after the big bang, but we should not inquire into the big bang itself because that was the moment of Cre­ation and there­fore the work of God. I was glad then that he did know the sub­ject of the talk I had just given at the con­fer­ence — the pos­sib­il­ity that space– time was finite but had no bound­ary, which means that it had no begin­ning, no moment of Cre­ation. I had no desire to share the fate of Galileo, with whom I feel a strong sense of iden­tity, partly because of the coin­cid­ence of hav­ing been born exactly 300 years after his death!

Stephen Hawk­ing, A Brief His­tory of Time.