Michelangelo hid his own face on a saint's flayed skin
On the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, more than 300 figures swirl around a beardless Christ. St Bartholomew dangles his own peeled skin, and the sagging face on it is usually taken as the painter himself. Michelangelo was nearly 67 when he finished, and he had sabotaged a friend's plan to get there.
Work ran from 1536 to 1541, with wall preparation starting in 1535, a quarter of a century after Michelangelo completed the ceiling above. Clement VII gave the commission, but Paul III, a firmer reformer, saw it through, which probably shaped the result. The idea was likely raised first in 1533. Letters call the subject a Resurrection; most scholars read that as the general rising of the dead, though some think a gloomier theme replaced it as the Counter-Reformation took hold.
Michelangelo had two windows blocked and three cornices removed, and had the surface built out so that it leans forward by about 11 inches from bottom to top. Sebastiano del Piombo, his friend of over twenty years, had the wall smoothed for oil painting. Michelangelo, after months of silence according to Vasari, demanded true fresco, had the plaster roughened again, and sneered that oil was for idle people like Fra Sebastiano. The friendship ended there. The scheme also meant destroying a Perugino altarpiece and two lunettes from Michelangelo's own ceiling.
Tradition set judgment scenes over a church's west doors, so worshippers carried the warning out with them; placing one above the altar was unusual. Michelangelo kept the old pattern of the saved rising on the left and the damned sinking on the right, but even heaven here seethes with anxiety. Saints brandish the tools of their martyrdom, Lawrence his gridiron and Catherine her wheel, perhaps reminding Christ of their suffering because they too are unsure of their fate. Mary turns away, no longer pleading.
Dante supplies the underworld: Charon swings his oar at the damned, and Minos guards Hell's entrance wearing, most agree, the face of Biagio da Cesena, a papal courtier who criticised the artist. The nudity and muscular bodies drew objections from the start, and draperies were later painted over many figures. Recent cleaning kept some of them and revealed oranges, greens and blues beneath a palette once thought almost monochrome.
Source: The Last Judgment (Michelangelo)
