Sistine Chapel

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The Sistine Chapel is the principal chapel of the Apostolic Palace in Vatican City, raised under Pope Sixtus IV — whose name it bears — between 1473 and 1481. It is the room in which the College of Cardinals locks itself to elect a pope, and the room whose ceiling, painted by Michelangelo between 1508 and 1512, is among the most reproduced images in Western art.

The building’s proportions are widely said to echo those the Hebrew Bible gives for the Temple of Solomon — read, on that view, as marking the papal chapel the heir of that sanctuary. The lower walls were frescoed in the 1480s by a team of Florentine and Umbrian masters — Botticelli, Perugino, Ghirlandaio among them — with paired cycles from the lives of Moses and of Christ, the law and the gospel set facing each other down the room. Michelangelo’s later ceiling carried the program back to the beginning, to the creation and the fall and the generations before the law; on the altar wall he returned, a quarter-century on, to paint the Last Judgment. The chapel thus runs, floor to vault, as a single arc from origin to last things.

What draws the comparative eye is the company kept on the ceiling. Around the central panels Michelangelo set seven Hebrew prophets and, alternating with them, five pagan sibyls — the prophetesses of Greek and Roman religion, here seated as equals among the seers of Israel. The pairing was not Michelangelo’s invention but a commonplace of his moment. Renaissance thought, drawing on Augustine and on Lactantius before him, held that the sibyls too had been granted glimpses of the coming Christ; the sibyls belonged, on this reading, to the same foreknowledge as the prophets. That conviction was one strand of a wider current, the prisca theologia, which read the wisdom of the pagans as a genuine if partial anticipation of Christian truth — the same impulse that, in the Florence of Michelangelo’s youth, made Hermes Trismegistus a respectable ancestor of the faith. To grant the sibyls a place on the ceiling of the pope’s own chapel was to render that idea in stone and paint.

How far Michelangelo intended any deeper esoteric scheme — Neoplatonic, Kabbalistic, hermetic — is contested. Some scholars read coded learning into the figures and their arrangement; others hold that the program is best explained by ordinary theology, the prophets-and-sibyls pairing included, and caution against reading later occult interests back onto it. The frescoes themselves do not settle the question. What is not in dispute is the room’s continuing office: it remains a working chapel, and when a pope dies the cardinals still gather beneath the ceiling to choose the next, the ballots burned in a stove whose smoke the crowd outside reads for an answer.

→ In the library: The Sibylline Oracles (Terry, 1899)

→ Related: Renaissance Hermetism · Prisca Theologia · Canonization