Michelangelo's Last Judgment: Resurrection of the Body and Predestination *

The earliest record of Michelangelo’s commission for the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel refers to it as a “Resurrection” (Fig. 1). ¹ It has been assumed that this meant Resurrection of Chnst and Tolnay has proposed that the original conception was for a rather modest undertaking that, like the ceiling and other of Michelangelo’s projects, was expanded by the artist to its final grandiose proportions. We are left with a cumbersome hypothesis, fraught with difficulties, of a change in the conception of the commission in terms both of subject and of scale. A much simpler solution will explain this early reference, namely, that the Resurrection was not to be that of Christ, which was already represented in its logical place in the life of Christ frescoes on the walls; ² rather it was to represent the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body. 1 Michelangelo, Last Judgement. Sistine Chapel, Vatican https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203063439/70c941d4-1d92-4b80-89c3-59c86e6c83d2/content/fig21_1_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>