The Creation of Adam is famous because Michelangelo painted the instant before life begins: God's arm stretched out, Adam's hand limp, and a small gap of air between two fingers.
It is one of nine scenes from Genesis that run down the center of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, which Michelangelo painted for Pope Julius II between 1508 and 1512. Of everything on that ceiling, it is the scene people know best.
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Yet the hands were not what the sixteenth century praised. When Giorgio Vasari, the painter and biographer, described the scene in his Lives of the Artists, he gave it a few lines, and the praise went to Adam's body, so beautiful that it looked as if the Creator himself had just made it.
The fingers took over later, and I think photography did it. On the vault, the scene is one small panel among a crowd of figures, seen from the floor. Cut out and enlarged, it becomes a pair of hands that fits on a book cover or a poster. A film poster, a cleaning and a contract that changed who could show the ceiling did the rest.
What did the first viewers see in it?
A ceiling, not a pair of hands. Vasari wrote that Michelangelo threw the vault open to view on the morning of All Saints' Day, when the Pope went into the chapel to sing Mass, and that "all Rome was drawn to see it, and the Pope was the first." Raphael, he added, saw it and "straightway changed his manner."
When Vasari reached the Creation of Adam, he praised the man. The figure, he wrote, was "of such a kind in its beauty, in the attitude, and in the outlines, that it appears as if newly fashioned by the first and supreme Creator." The compliment goes to a body. The sentence says nothing of the fingers.
The gesture found its critic in the nineteenth century. In "The Poetry of Michelangelo," an essay dated 1871, the English writer Walter Pater looked at the same Adam and saw weakness: he "has hardly strength enough to lift his finger to touch the finger of the creator." For Pater the gesture was already the part worth describing.
Then, in 1980, the Vatican began cleaning the ceiling, and the pictures of it acquired an owner.
What You'll Discover
Who owned the cleaned pictures.
What the cleaning cost the ceiling.
Where the finger went next.
What the crops leave out.