The Shape of a Pocket

of the twenty nudes whom he dreamt as a beatitude as he lay painting on his back, and the infinite space of the heavens – these distinct spaces are now clearer and more astonishingly articulated than they were before. Articulated, Marisa, with the aplomb of a master snooker player! And if the ceiling had been badly cleaned, this would have been the first thing lost.
    I’ve discovered something else too: it leaps to the eye but no one quite faces up to it. Perhaps because the Vatican is so formally imposing. Between its worldly wealth on one hand, and its list of eternal punishments on the other, the visitor is made to feel exceedingly small. The excessive riches of the Church and the excessive punishments the Church prescribed were really complementary. Without Hell, the wealth would have appeared as Theft! Anyway, visitors today from all over the world are so awed they forget about their little things.
    But not Michelangelo. He painted them, and he painted them with such love they became focal points, so that for centuries after his death, the Papal authorities had one male sex after another in the Sistine Chapel covertly scratched out or painted over. Happily there are still quite a few that remain.
    During his lifetime he was referred to as ‘the sublime genius’. Even more than Titian he assumed – at the very last possible historical moment – the Renaissance role of the artist as supreme creator. His exclusive subject was the human body, and for him that body’s sublimity lay revealed in the male sexual organ.
    In Donatello’s
David
the young man’s sex is discreetly in its proper place – like a thumb or a toe. In Michelangelo’s
David
the sex is the body’s centre and every other part of the body refers back to it with a kind of deference, as if to a miracle. As simple and as beautiful as that. Less spectacularly, but none the less evidently, the same is true of his
Bruges Madonna
and the sex of the infant Christ. It was not lust but a form of worship.
    Given this predilection and all the pride of the Renaissance genius, what would you say his imaginary paradise might have been? Might it not have been the fantasy of men giving birth?
    The whole ceiling is really about Creation and for him, in the last coil of his longing, Creation meant everything imaginable being born, thrusting and flying, from between men’s legs!
    Remember the Medici tomb with the figures of Night and Day, Dusk and Dawn? Two reclining men and two reclining women. The women modestly fold their legs together. Both men part their legs and, pushing, lift their pelvises, as though waiting for a birth. Not a birth of flesh and blood and not – heaven forbid – of symbols either. The birth they await is of the indescribable and endless mystery which their bodies incarnate, and which will emerge from there, from between their parted legs.
    And so it is on the ceiling. The visitors in the Chapel floor are like figures who have just dropped from between the feet and out of the skirts of the Prophets and Sibyls. OK The Sibyls are women, but not really, not when you get close: they are men in drag.
    Beyond, are the nine scenes of the Creation and there, at the four corners of each scene, sit the amazing, twisting, immense, labouring male nudes (the
ignudi)
, whose presence commentators have found so difficult to explain. They represent, some claim, Ideal Beauty. Then why their effort, why their longing and their labour? No, the twenty young naked men up there have conceived and just given birth to all that is visible and all that is imaginable and all that we see on the ceiling. Man’s loved body up there is the
measure of
everything – even of platonic love, even of Eve, even of you.
    He once said, talking about the sculptor of the Bevedere Torso (50 BC ): ‘This is the work of a man who knew more than nature!’
    And therein lay the dream, the coiled desire, the pathos and the illusion.
    In 1536, two decades after he finished the ceiling, he started to paint the
Last Judgement
on the gigantic wall behind the altar. Maybe it’s the biggest fresco in Europe? Countless figures, all naked, mostly men. Other writers have compared it with the late works of Rembrandt or Beethoven but I can’t follow them. What I see is pure terror and the terror is intimately connected with the ceiling above. Man on this wall is still naked but now the measure of nothing!
    Everything has changed. The Renaissance and its spirit is finished. Rome has