Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel, the most famous gesture in the world.

Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel, the most famous gesture in the world

There are some images from the History of Art that are incredibly successful and are known all over the world.

Michelangelo Buonarroti is the author of one of these "iconic images" that has been able to enchant generations of people for centuries.

The Sistine Chapel

We are in Rome in 1511 and Pope Julius II commissioned the frescoes for the vault of the Sistine Chapel from the artist most pleasing to him.

For this fresco scene, Michelangelo spent sixteen "days" and represented "The Creation of Adam".

From that moment on, the result of Michelangelo's imagination became the very symbol of the fundamental biblical passage, drawing the image of the creation of man also within our minds.

God, Angels and brain

The 1994 restoration restored freshness to the fresco, eliminating post-Michelangelo rewritings and messes.

God has decided to create man and is represented in a whirlwind of very young angels who support him. Some scholars have compared the group consisting of God, angels and cloak to a sectional figure of the human brain and found that it is almost identical.

For others, the red cloak that "contains" God and the angels would instead be a clear reference to the female organ responsible for creation.

The most famous gesture in the world

The background is neutral. On the left, the first man seems to wake up just now to welcome the divine will. A virtuosity: Adam's pupil is not drawn, but obtained with different levels of plaster that create the right shadows.

The invention of the gesture is extraordinary: two index fingers extend, but do not touch. It's a split second before the miracle takes place, or maybe you won't even need to touch yourself. The magic of this "moment" could not be expressed better than this.

Michelangelo's choice

Try to imagine a different solution: fingers touching, hands in different positions and so on. You will find that there is only one "right" solution to charm: the one chosen and designed by Michelangelo capable of projecting a "moment" into eternity.

Another prodigy that demonstrates all the value of this great Renaissance artist.

Andrea Giuseppe Fadini