In the age of social media tourism, the Sistine Chapel still lives up to the hype | Canada Voices

In an Italian museum on a recent afternoon, the crowds walk right by a large wall hanging by Henri Matisse without a single glance in its direction. In Paris or New York, they might queue to see the French master’s work, but not here in the Vatican Museums in Rome, where the long walk through galleries of antiquities and Renaissance art has one ultimate goal: the Sistine Chapel.

The footsore tourists are within a few rooms of what they have travelled miles and crossed oceans to see, and they’re not going to be bothered with a small collection of modern art, even if it includes works by Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali. The sense of expectation is palpable as people squeeze down the final corridor to emerge at the far end of the chapel beside Michelangelo’s Last Judgment.

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What follows? Rapturous fulfilment of a lifetime ambition, dutiful box-ticking of a famed masterpiece or unspoken disappointment? The social-media age has so inflated classic tourism experiences that one wonders if many visitors don’t feel some letdown after they have lined up for half an hour to take a selfie in front of the Trevi Fountain or wiggled their way into the best photo op at the Colosseum. Been there; done that.

Of course, photography is forbidden in the Sistine Chapel. As hundreds tilt their heads upward to look at the ceiling, crowd control is difficult enough without a thousand iPhones held high.

This is my first visit to the Sistine Chapel, a very belated in-person encounter with some of the most famous images in Western art. To my surprise, it takes a moment to locate the best-known part, of God reaching out his hand to the newly created Adam. It’s up there at the centre but surrounded by other panels depicting the story of Genesis. The panels showing the separation of night and day, and land from water, are beautiful things, leading to this bold moment where God reaches out to Adam, their two fingers almost touching. That detail is now as widely reproduced as the full panel, which has been interpreted as the ultimate statement of Renaissance humanism, placing man at the centre of the world.

The real thing lives up to all the reproductions; there is the human in all his glory, as large and as muscular as his god. People often complain the Mona Lisa is disappointingly small – like most portraits, she’s to scale, the size of a person’s head and shoulders – but nobody can block your view of larger-than-life figures on a ceiling more than 18 metres above your head. Humankind is enshrined on high like a god in a pantheon.

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As your eyes shift to the next panel, however, you may run into some difficulties. Eve is shown kneeling like a supplicant before God while Adam lounges flaccidly on the ground. Maybe he’s feeling a bit off-colour, someone jokes, having just had a rib removed. Best to move on to the dramatic bits, the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and Noah and the flood.

The ceiling is a vivid depiction of the Judeo-Christian creation myth magnificently executed. Its current fame is no doubt greatly enhanced by the cleaning that took place in the 1980s. It was controversial in its day; some feared it would damage the frescoes or argued it went too far. Preconceptions of a dark masterpiece were being dashed, but it reinvigorated global appreciation for these images as living art rather than dusty relics.

The Last Judgment was also restored but it was executed 25 years later toward the end of Michelangelo’s life after the Protestant Reformation had shaken the church to its foundations and the unpaid soldiers of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V had sacked Rome: Its tone is utterly different. It is a dark vision of heaven and hell in which a very human-looking Christ raises his arm as if in anger to banish the damned for eternity. That figure is often reproduced but so, too, is the crouching figure with one hand over his face as if suffering horrified regret. As the U.S. travel writer Rick Steves jokingly captioned it, “Why did I cheat on my wife?!”

Confronted by the real thing and sensing one can’t miss this opportunity, it’s time to really appreciate the details. The damned are tormented by demons and serpents while the good rise to heaven more dutifully than ecstatically. And those much repeated draperies, slung over several figures’ genitalia with the identical folds? They were added on the orders of a later, more puritanical pope. Some were removed by restorers in the 1990s, but perhaps some future restoration might finish the job – for how better to depict people cowering before judgment than to show them completely naked?

My travelling companion later confessed she was disappointed by the Sistine Chapel frescoes; she better appreciated Michelangelo’s figure of Moses in the basilica of St. Peter-in-Chains, an impressive three-dimensional marble figure that you can see up close.

For my part, I’ve never understood the obsessive reproducing of the Mona Lisa and remain unmoved by her supposedly enigmatic smile, but I was deeply satisfied by the Sistine ceiling. I had a sense of accomplishment seeing the real thing, an experience that offered a freshness missing from all those reproductions.

Perceiving its glory, I saw what all the fuss was about.