The Creation of Adam shows God giving life to Adam, the first man. Michelangelo painted it around 1511 on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and its meaning sits in a gap: God's finger stops just short of Adam's, a moment before life passes from one to the other.
It is one of nine scenes from Genesis that Michelangelo painted down the center of the ceiling for Pope Julius II, who ordered the job in 1508.
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That gap looks like Michelangelo's own invention. The reclining Adam is not.
More than seventy years earlier, between 1425 and 1438, the sculptor Jacopo della Quercia carved the same moment in marble on the main doorway of San Petronio, the great church of Bologna. His God brings Adam to life with his right hand. Adam lies stretched out on a bare outcrop of rock.
Michelangelo had been to Bologna. The critic Andrew Graham-Dixon, writing in the Sunday Telegraph, thinks he probably had that doorway in mind. Quercia's God has already done the work. Michelangelo's has not.
What did Michelangelo keep from Bologna, and what did he change?
He kept the man. Both Adams lie back on bare ground, and in both God reaches out with his right hand. Both artists gave Adam a muscular body, and the Vatican Museums call Michelangelo's Adam a resting athlete.
He changed the scale and the distance. Graham-Dixon notes that the figures in this part of the ceiling are much larger than the ones Michelangelo had painted in the two years before. Quercia's God brings Adam to life. Michelangelo's God is carried through the air by flying angels, wrapped in a mantle, and has not done it yet.
I think the borrowing makes the gap a decision. Quercia's relief already showed the moment of life, and Michelangelo chose the instant before it.
What You'll Discover
What Adam's body gives away.
Whose face God may wear.
What the gap is said to mean.
How a modern painter answered it.