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Samenvatting
- Michelangelo painted The Creation of Adam in about 1511 on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City, in the second half of the work he finished by 31 October 1512.
- It is the fourth scene from Genesis counting from the altar, and in it God, carried by angels, reaches his finger toward Adam, who lies on a bare hillside already made.
- Genesis says God breathed the breath of life into Adam, and the Vatican Museums read the meeting of the fingers as the moment that breath passes to him.
- Condivi, Michelangelo’s friend and pupil, wrote in 1553 that God’s outstretched arm is giving Adam his commandments, and neither he nor Vasari says a word about a spark, a woman or a brain.
- The fingers stop about three-quarters of an inch apart, and the idea of a spark jumping between them goes back to the painter Henry Fuseli in 1801.
- Nobody noticed the woman under God’s arm until photographs of the ceiling were published in the 1870s; she is most often read as Eve, and others see Wisdom from Proverbs 8 or the Virgin Mary.
- Catholics paint God the Father, the Reformed churches teach that God may not be pictured at all, and the Synod of Moscow forbade icons of the Father in 1667, because the Son is the image of the Father.
Bibliografie (Klik om te tonen)
- The Holy Bible, King James Version (public domain): Genesis 1:26–27, 1:31, 2:7, 2:16–17 and 2:21–22; Exodus 20:4; Proverbs 8:22–31; John 14:9; Romans 5:14; 1 Corinthians 15:45; Colossians 1:15. Text from BibleGateway, King James Version.
- Vatican Museums, Creation of Adam, Sistine Chapel, Central Stories.
- Vatican Museums, Central Stories of the Sistine Chapel vault.
- Vatican Museums, The Vault (the commission and dates of the ceiling).
- Vatican Museums, History of the Sistine Chapel.
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Vatican City.
- The British Museum, Michelangelo, studies of a reclining male nude: Adam in the fresco “The Creation of Man”, c. 1511, museum number 1926,1009.1.
- Ascanio Condivi, Life of Michelangelo (1553), in Charles Holroyd, Michael Angelo Buonarroti (London: Duckworth, 1903), Holroyd’s translation.
- Giorgio Vasari, Life of Michelagnolo Buonarroti (1568 edition), in Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, vol. 9, translated by Gaston du C. de Vere (1912–15).
- Walter Pater, “The Poetry of Michelangelo”, in Studies in the History of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1873); later editions as The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry.
- Leo Steinberg, “Who’s Who in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam: A Chronology of the Picture’s Reluctant Self-Revelation”, The Art Bulletin 74, no. 4 (1992): 552–566.
- Maria Rzepińska, “The Divine Wisdom of Michelangelo in The Creation of Adam”, Artibus et Historiae 15, no. 29 (1994).
- Tom Lubbock, “Buonarroti, Michelangelo: The Creation of Adam (1510)”, The Independent, 5 January 2007.
- Frank Lynn Meshberger, “An interpretation of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam based on neuroanatomy”, JAMA 264, no. 14 (1990): 1837–41; as summarised in J. Wesson Ashford and Sue Binkley Tatem, “Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Frescoes: communications about the brain”, Neurocase 26, no. 5 (2020): 293–298.
- Stefano Di Bella and others, “The ‘delivery’ of Adam: a medical interpretation of Michelangelo”, Mayo Clinic Proceedings 90, no. 4 (2015): 505–8.
- Katerina Poprelka, Maria Stefanatou and Stylianos Gatzonis, “Hidden Neuroanatomy in the Sistine Chapel: Did Michelangelo Encode a Brain, or Do We Construct It?”, The Neuroscientist (22 July 2026).
- ItalianRenaissance.org, “Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam”.
- Paus Johannes Paulus II, Homily at the Mass for the unveiling of the restorations of Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, 8 April 1994.
- The Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Day 35, Questions 96–98 (Christian Classics Ethereal Library).
- St Elisabeth Convent, Minsk, “May or May not God the Father Be Depicted in Orthodox Iconography?” (2018).
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