Adam’s great and beautiful imperfection
I was trying to think of something that was perfect. It’s a surprisingly hard thing to do, in case you were wondering. I would recommend a try.
Michelangelo’s Adam is one of the great masterpieces of art — a masterpiece inside of a masterpiece in fact. Hundreds of thousands walk through the Sistine chapel every year, necks craned upward, to view the Creation of Adam, the work of Michelangelo, a piece of perfection. But, is it perfect?
That is the question that has founded this endeavor. Or perhaps the better question is this: is there imperfection to be found in the Creation of Adam?
I thought I had recalled being told that Adam’s finger was actually un-proportional to the rest of his body. So I went to research whether it was true. Instead, I came across a wonderful, and short, piece by Paul Barolsky entitled, “The Imperfection of Michelaneglo’s Adam,” published in Summer 2001's Notes in the History of Art. It showed me a different kind of imperfection in Adam. There is one quote in particular from it that struck me:
“We may think of Adam’s body as perfect in its physical beauty, but Adam was not in fact perfected until he received the spirit suggested by the incompleted touch from the finger of God[…]. In the imperfection of Adam, […]we behold the imminence of perfection”(8).
Adam is not perfection. He is just short of it. He’s on his way, seconds before hand even, but we can not give him the title. He is the gasp before the breath, the lightning before the thunder, the bracing before impact. What we have commonly come to view as perfect is in fact a portrait of imperfection, which makes glitch a very appropriate medium to use for this statement.
Adam’s imperfection is born from the fact that something is missing from him: God’s touch. It is the space between his fingers that make him imperfect. With this in mind, I redefined the code of this picture of the Creation of Adam by simply adding spaces to the text. The spaces mimic the space between fingers; both are the representation and cause of imperfection in the piece, new and old.
It’s hard to imagine Michelangelo as a modern artist, a digital artist. But, if he were, I would imagine that this glitch would be one feasible option for this piece. It is in the fact that there is a missing piece that this becomes a masterpiece. Or as Barolsky states, “Imperfection […] is something essential to our appreciation of perfection”(6).
Just because a work is a Michelangelo does not mean that it is without defect. As with glitch, sometimes it is that very defect that makes art.
