Mike’s Ceiling

By David Snyder

There’s an endless list of beautiful things I’ve never seen, but there’s a clear winner of that eclectic list: the Sistine Chapel — the ceiling, specifically. That’s no doubt the most famous ceiling in the world, high praise, considering the great number of drop everything ceilings I’ve come across the other day. Just the other day, I was nearly run over by a swarm of hungry nine to fivers during the lunch rush because a certainly exposed vent on a coffee shop ceiling made me rethink everything I thought I knew about life.

Most of us know the look of that ceiling: countless religious figures set against a bright blue background, the sky, heaven. The work was done by a rather successful artist of his day, Michelangelo. Mike was the best of the best, in my book. The man behind David, the Sistine works, and the design of St Peters Basilica, not to mention the countless other paintings, sculptures, and poems the iconic Renaissance man was responsible for. Michelangelo was undoubtedly a genius, an all-time great artist, and a wonderfully grumpy old gruff. To me, his ceiling work surpasses all the rest, so it was no doubt a shock to learn what that famous ceiling looked like before Michelangelo had his way with it.

Mental Floss put out a short video the other day, generating an image of what the ceiling must’ve looked like before it became the ceiling. Instead of the overwhelming ode to Christian humanism, it was a simple royal blue coat, with tiny golden/bronze stars dotting the landscape. That simple blue job was done by Piermatteo D’Amelia. Why did Michelangelo ever put his brush to the chapel? A crack in ceiling convinced Pope Julius II to just scrap the whole thing and start from scratch. Enter Michelangelo and the blue and bronze ceiling is lost to the pages of history and long lives one of the great works of art of the past 1000 years.

However, after having seen D’Amelia’s vision, or, at least, a simulation of what it most probably looked like, I’m not convinced that Michelangelo’s is the hugely superior version. This is coming from the person who quietly believes every word of the maxim “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” However, what struck me most is how something as startlingly brilliant like Michelangelo’s ceiling can be favored equally to a much simpler rendition like the one of D’Amelia.

We’re living in quite the age of pop minimalism. It’s the aesthetic appetite that makes the world go round: Starbucks, Apple, Air BnB, and fashion — all are dominated by a minimalist streak. As there always is, there’s been quite the backlash against the austerity of the minimalist design. The contrarians believe not in clutter but in warmth and culture. One would be hard pressed to find me standing against those values; I’m all over that scene. But a part of me wonders if the Sistine Chapel would have been a still more awesome institution if the head honchos decided that the awesomeness of their message was going to fill the pews, not the razzle dazzle of the upholstery. This is all madness, of course. The world is a better place because Michelangelo went nuts on a ceiling. Still, the mind wonders.

Minimalism isn’t going to make Beijing, Rio, and Miami indistinguishable from one another. More alike, sure. Such is the nature of an ever more interwoven world. But D’Amelia’s ceiling wasn’t too complicated, and Christianity did alright, anyway. There’s a nugget of something in there somewhere.