Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel - Plot & Excerpts
Michelangelo chose to decorate these awkward spaces with four more scenes from the Old Testament, creating a subordinate level of narrative below his story of the origins of the world and of human existence. They all depict episodes in which the people of Israel are miraculously saved from evil, or persecution, or their own weakness. The first two show David and Goliath and Judith and Holofernes. The subjects of the second pair are The Death of Haman and The Brazen Serpent. Each of these scenes of salvation, in accordance with the general pattern of the ceiling’s meanings, is to be regarded as a prefiguration of the saving of all mankind by Jesus Christ. The four paintings also serve to unify the many disparate images in the whole lower zone of the vault, to which they belong – images of the prophets and the sibyls and the ancestors of Christ. As stories of Israel’s salvation, they bear witness to God’s perpetual presence in the life of all his people, and the constant renewal of the promise of redemption.
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