Michelangelo's Last Judgment shows the end of the world as the Gospels tell it: Christ returns, the dead rise from their graves, and every soul is sent up toward heaven or down toward hell. He painted it on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel between 1536 and 1541, with more than three hundred figures.
The scene comes from the Gospel of Matthew, where the Son of Man divides the righteous from the damned as a shepherd divides sheep from goats. The wall was unveiled on October 31, 1541, the eve of All Saints' Day.
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In Matthew, though, the judge sits down. "When the Son of Man shall come in his glory," the Gospel says, "then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory." Anyone who knew the text expected a throne.
There is no throne on the altar wall. Michelangelo's Christ is on his feet, bare chested and beardless, built like a wrestler, one arm raised. People noticed. In 1564, the churchman Giovanni Andrea Gilio wrote a dialogue in which one speaker complains that a standing Christ contradicts Matthew, and another answers that standing is more powerful.
I think the missing throne is the point. A seated judge hears a case. This one is already acting.
A Christ built like an ancient god
The gentle, bearded Christ of older pictures is gone. Art historians read Michelangelo's figure as a blend of the ancient gods Hercules and Apollo, with a touch of Jupiter hurling thunderbolts.
The choice came naturally to Michelangelo, a sculptor who had already filled the chapel's ceiling with muscular bodies. The painter and biographer Giorgio Vasari, who knew Michelangelo, wrote that he would paint nothing except "the human body in its most beautifully proportioned and perfect form." A judge on that wall had to be built the same way.
Gilio's dialogue shows how readers took this in 1564. Ruggiero, a speaker in the book, calls many of Michelangelo's choices personal inventions that put the artist's genius ahead of the subject. Nobody doubts that the man in the picture is Christ. They only argue about whether he may look like that.
Close beneath Christ, the saints press in, each carrying the instrument of a death. One of them, a martyr flayed alive, holds something no other figure on the wall holds.
What You'll Discover
What the flayed saint holds.
Who sits in hell with donkey ears.
Who was hired to cover the nudes.