Tamong the wonderful frescoes from the vault of the Sistine Chapel One episode deserves to be watched carefully, the Original sin and expulsion from earthly paradise. Eve is very beautiful, in a relationship of complicity with the devil, who, in the form of a woman, but with a snake’s tail, is passing her the apple.
Michelangelo shows us Adam making Eve’s task easier by bringing the branch closer. In the continuation of the story we see the progenitors expelled from paradise.
Adam, as can be seen well – it cannot be a coincidence – has a lock of hair that forms a horn, because he was betrayed by Evewhich was as beautiful in paradise as it was unpleasant at the moment of expulsion.
This episode also documents an extraordinary research journey. The theme of the expulsion, in modern painting, has its highest example in Masaccioin the Brancacci Chapel of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence.
In the Expulsion of the first parents from Eden, the bodies are real, heavy, bruised. Masaccio, first, represents the physical reality of this man and woman who have fallen from grace.
In the same chapel, there are also Adam and Eve by Masolino da Panicale, who are naked, but with an innocent, seraphic nudity, without morbidity, without the weight of the body. Because Masolino represents the ideal vision of the condition of Earthly Paradise.
Masaccio: “Expulsion of the ancestors from Eden”, Brancacci Chapel, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence.
Masaccio, on the other hand, with expressive force, represents the dramatic phase of the expulsion: above, there is a red angel similar to that of Michelangelo, and you can see the two bodies, which are real bodies, slightly deformed; the phallus is erect, prominent, so much so that, for a long time, it was covered by a branch because it was too showy.
She shows her curves, but is no longer beautiful: her pelvis is widened, her hands cover her breasts and pubis. And then her face, painful. It is the first performance of theI scream by Munch. Her face is synthesized, with her eyebrows lowered.
It is useful to tell the story Expulsion of the first parents from Eden also for another reason. Masaccio’s fresco was initially very dark, with cleaning it became lighter, but some halos remained very evident, which are the “days”: in one day he painted Eve – and above there is a small halo – and in one day he painted Adam – behind which there is a stronger blue, which is evidently a chromatic alteration of the continuation of painting on the fresh wall.
It is certain that Masaccio, when dry, would have tried to homologate the background of Adam to the background of Eve. So this fresco, despite its newfound chromatic vitality, has suffered a laceration, because something that attenuated that imbalance was removed.
Michelangelo went to that chapel to study the greatest master from whom he could, in Florence, draw expressive strength. And we know this from Vasari himself, who tells us how, right there, Michelangelo is punched by his friend/enemy Pietro Torrigiani“with whom he shared Lorenzo de’ Medici’s garden”, who breaks his nose.
And U.S we will often see Michelangelo portrayed with a wounded face, in reference to the dispute that took place in the Brancacci Chapel: «He drew many months in the Carmine on the paintings of Masaccio; where he portrayed those works with such judgment that they amazed the craftsmen and other men, so much so that envy grew in him along with his name. It is said that Torrigiano, having contracted friendship with him and jokingly, moved by envy of seeing him more honored than him and more skilled in the art, with such pride he hit him on the nose with his fistwhich when broken and crushed by bad luck marked him forever.”
Masaccio’s figures are so realistic that they even have shadows, and by studying them Michelangelo, very young, at eighteen, he creates a drawing as evidence of his reflection and inspiration.
Vittorio Sgarbi’s new book, “Michelangelo. Noise and fear” (The ship of Theseus).
He starts from Masaccio, even if Buonarroti then paints the bodies with more resentful anatomies. Adam is in the same position of desperation, but he feels the movement of his limbs more. Eve’s thighs are also certainly derived from the fresco, but they are more plastic, sculptural.
So Michelangelo constructs his episode starting from Masaccio’s frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel, reworking them already in his youthful drawing, and finally bringing them to completion in the frescoes of Adam and Eve expelled from the earthly paradise in the Sistine Chapel. It is a process that has an important source, a reflection in the drawing and a conclusion in the fresco.
This also serves to understand what moves in the minds of the artists, and how vital some sources are. Masaccio certainly was for Michelangelo. […] Even though he died very young, he was an absolute master, and this connection indicates this eloquently.
(Excerpt from the new book by Vittorio Sgarbi Michelangelo. Noise and fearThe Ship of Theseus).
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