In this painting, there are two main characters, God and Adam. Adam, on the left, is laying on an hill. He looks absent because his body is entirely formed, as its naked representation shows us, but still lifeless. On the right, God seems to fly toward him. He is accompanied by many other characters that are gathered around him. They are angels from Heaven. Howeverm one of them appears particularly strange to our eyes cause it is a woman. The story says that Michelangelo wanted to represent Eve by God's side, under his arm as his protected child. Indeed, Eve had not been created at the moment, she was still an idea in God's mind. Another personnage attract our attention inside this group: God points at a child in particular who is, in Michelangelo's work, the Christ who has not come on earth yet. But the main point in this work of art is the two hands reaching for eachother, almost touching at the point, the one of God which is aiming for Adam's and Adam's which is just standing there. The difference is significant too between God's look which is concentrated on his chore, bringing the spark of life inside this body, Adam, to live and the empty look of an inanimate Adam.
The symmetry is so perfect that the end of each finger is pointing at the center of this piece of art. Indeed, Michelangelo wanted to reaffirm that God created humans at his image, as if there was a mirror in this picture reflecting God's personnage in Adam's. Also, the painting is concentrated on a few colors: red stands out as envelopping all the characters from Heaven and God is dressed in a pink robe as to be differentiated from the other bodies. The pale pink color of Adam's body stands out by itself on the green grass around him.
Michelangelo was a talented painter whose work will never be able to be reproduced by anyone again. All his life, he worked for popes and other nobilities as kings but he concentrated his paintings and sculptures to religious theme as in the Sixtine Chapel. He always tried according his ideas and beliefs to what his masters asked. As in this piece, he gave his own interpretation of the Biblical story from the Book of Genesis in which God the father breathes life into his first creation, Adam, the first man. And his interpretation is believed to be realistic and the best physical representation of this Biblical story. Indeed, Sistine Chapel is one of the most visited place on earth nowdays, and all thanks to the work of Michelangelo that depicts an impressive illustration of the Bible, found nowhere else around the world.
Michelangelo had full or nearly full freedom to select the episodes to be included, it may be supposed that it was his own idea to use a passage from the Book of Proverbs in The Creation of Adam. Perhaps it fascinated the artist-himself a poet-with its rare beauty, and in his ravishing portrayal of Divine Wisdom on the Sistine ceil- ing, he created a worthy equivalent.
Title: The Divine Wisdom of Michelangelo in "The Creation of Adam"
Author(s): Maria Rzepińska
Source: Artibus et Historiae, Vol. 15, No. 29 (1994), pp. 181-187
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