Focusing on the Reception and later changes of The Last Judgment (Michelangelo), explore the Modern about the Artistic criticism.
Modern In many respects, modern art historians discuss the same aspects of the work as 16th-century writers: the general grouping of the figures and rendering of space and movement, the distinctive depiction of anatomy, the nudity and use of colour, and sometimes the theological implications of the fresco. However, Bernadine Barnes points out that no 16th-century critic echoes in the slightest the view of Anthony Blunt that: "This fresco is the work of a man shaken out of his secure position, no longer at ease with the world, and unable to face it directly. Michelangelo does not now deal directly with the visible beauty of the physical world." At the time, continues Barnes, "it was censured as the work of an arrogant man, and it was justified as a work that made celestial figures more beautiful than natural". Many other modern critics take approaches similar to Blunt's, emphasizing Michelangelo's "tendency away from the material and towards the things of the spirit" in his last decades.In theology, the Second Coming of Christ ended space and time. Despite this, "Michelangelo’s curious representation of space", where "the characters inhabit individual spaces that cannot be combined consistently", is often commented on.Quite apart from the question of decorum, the rendering of anatomy has been often discussed. Writing of "energy" in the nude figure, Kenneth Clark has:
The twist into depth, the struggle to escape from the here and now of the picture plane, which had always distinguished Michelangelo from the Greeks, became the dominating rhythm of his later works. That colossal nightmare, the Last Judgment, is made up of such struggles. It is the most overpowering accumulation in all art of bodies in violent movement"
Of the figure of Christ, Clark says: "Michelangelo has not tried to resist that strange compulsion which made him thicken a torso until it is almost square."S.J. Freedberg commented that "The vast repertory of anatomies that Michelangelo conceived for the Last Judgment seems often to have been determined more by the requirements of art than by compelling needs of meaning, ... meant not just to entertain but to overpower us with their effects. Often, too, the figures assume attitudes of which a major sense is one of ornament." He notes that the two frescos in the Cappella Paolina, Michelangelo's last paintings begun in November 1542 almost immediately after the Last Judgment, show from the start a major change in style, away from grace and aesthetic effect to an exclusive concern with illustrating the narrative, with no regard for beauty.
Last Judgment Christ fresco Second Coming Second Coming of Christ Cappella Paolina decorum Anthony Blunt Michelangelo Kenneth Clark S.J. Freedberg