Michelangelo: The Creation of Adam (Who created Who?)

What can be more beautiful than a painting of Genesis created by one of the greatest painters of all time? Michelangelo was the greatest sculpture, painter, architect, and poet who revolutionized all the creative fields he touched during Italian Renaissance. The man painted the Sistine Chapel's ceiling over a period of four years. The Creation of Adam is what makes the work on the ceiling iconic. It is funny as Michelangelo considered painting to be a second hand art but still ended up leaving quite a few greatest paintings to be ever made.

The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo

Near touching of hands

The Creation of Adam is a fresco painting which illustrates the Biblical creation narrative from the Book of Genesis in which God breathes life into Adam, the first man. The fresco is part of a complex iconographic scheme and is chronologically the fourth in the series of panels depicting episodes from Genesis. Diving into the composition of the painting, the god doesn't allure me much as he just looks like an elderly white-bearded man wrapped in a swirling cloak. Whereas, Adam, on the lower left, is completely nude (nothing extraordinary in that since apparently artists during Renaissance were fascinated by human anatomy and nudity more than anything else).  What really fascinates me is God and Adam reaching out to each other but failing to do so by a minute inch. This minor detail is a spectacle that leaves a huge impact on the beholder (even to an atheist like me). The failure to touch each other hands represents how reality is almost within one's grasp but is still out of reach by a margin. It is also a reminder of how god created man in his own image.

Human Brain Easter Egg

However, there is one little twist, an Easter egg to be more concise, that Michelangelo left hidden in the painting that has bewildered the minds of the weird people (like me) who takes these things a little too seriously. In 1990, an Anderson, Indiana physician, Frank Meshberger, noted in the Journal of the American Medical Association that the background figures and shapes portrayed behind the figure of God appeared to be an anatomically accurate picture of the human brain. Renaissance man loved anatomy. Leonardo DaVinci used to dissect horses and dead human bodies so that he could draw/sculpt a more physically and geometrically accurate embodiment of humans/animals. So, it isn't hard to imagine that Michelangelo purposely left that easter egg for art freaks to forever scratch the hair on their head. On close examination, it was revealed that borders in the painting correlate with major sulci of the cerebrum in the inner and outer surface of the brain, the brain stem, the frontal lobe, the basilar artery, the pituitary gland and the optic chiasm. For me, the finding of human brain completely inverted the whole meaning of the painting. It made me wonder whether God engulfed in a brain like figure reflects that God is the product of human thinking and imagination. It perfectly captured the essence of typical philosophical dilemma of whether god made man or man made god. Is god just a product of human brain? Maybe, Adam failed to touch the hands of God because God is just in his mind and not in reality. Should the painting be called The Creation of God instead of The Creation of Adam? Despite of all these endless questions and interpretations, I would just like to say that the painting is awfully beautiful and has a mystical panache to it.