Michelangelo: The Last Judgement

The Last Judgement is a fresco painting by Michelangelo covering the whole altar wall of Sistine Chapel in Vatican City. This masterpiece is a depiction of the Second Coming of Christ and the final and eternal judgment by God of all humanity. The painting consists a total of 300 figures. In the painting, the souls of humans rise and descend to their fates, as judged by Christ who is surrounded by prominent saints. It is possible the grandest painting ever made.

The Last Judgement by Michelangelo

Central Group around Christ

To complete this masterpiece of great grandeur, it took Michelangelo a period of over four years. By the time this painting was completed, Michelangelo had hit 67th mark of his age. Again, it is a painting of grand scale consisting of 300 figures with no visible error in the slightest of details. No wonder, why it took Michelangelo four years to complete this painting. In the lower part of the fresco, he showed the ascending at the left and the damned descending at the right. In the upper part, the inhabitants of Heaven are joined by the newly saved. The majority of angels and males are nude. The fresco is dominated by the tones of flesh and sky.

In terms of theme, their is a very strong reason why this painting sets itself apart from the same kind of numerous works made during that era. While traditional compositions generally depicted an ordered, harmonious heavenly world above with the tumultuous events taking place in the earthly zone below, in contrasting Michelangelo's conception the arrangement and posing of the figures across the entire painting give an impression of agitation and even in the upper parts there is a profound disturbance, tension and commotion among the figures. At the center of the work is Christ, shown as the individual verdicts of the Last Judgement are pronounced. He looks down towards the damned. The depiction of Christ is also different as he is shown beardless while most of the tradition works during that time showed him with a beard. I guess Michelangelo didn't find Christ's beard game to be strong. Christ also has the wounds of his Crucifixion.

Bartholomew with the face of Michelangelo

Surrounding Christ in a slow rotary movement are figures, identified as the saints of God. On a similar scale to Christ are John the Baptist on the left, and on the right Saint Peter, holding the keys of Heaven and offering them back to Christ. Several of the main saints appear to be showing Christ their attributes, the evidence of the martyrdom. This is interpreted as if the saints are themselves not certain of their own verdicts, and are trying at the last moment to remind Christ of their sufferings. Other prominent saints include Saint Bartholomew below Peter, holding the attribute of his martyrdom, his own skin. Now this is one of the Easter eggs of this complex painting as the face on Saint Bartholomew is a self-portrait of Michelangelo. I mean WOW! Michelangelo was making the grandest painting of all time with 300 figures in it so he just thought why not paint myself too in my own work. Maybe he wanted to live eternally not only by his own painting but also in his own painting. He gave art experts a hard time to recognize his own face among 299 other figures

Biagio da Cesena as Minos

The movements of the souls reflect the traditional pattern. They arise from their graves at bottom left, and some continue upwards, helped in several cases by angels in the air or others on clouds, pulling them up. Others, the dammed, apparently pass over to the right. There is a zone in the lower middle that is empty of souls. A boat rowed by an aggressive Charon, who ferried souls to the Underworld in classical mythology brings souls to land beside the entrance to Hell. The painting lacks the devil of hell, Satan. Many people found this unusual too. To fill Satan's role, painting consists of another classical devil, Minos, who supervises the admission of the Damned into Hell. Another Easter Egg, Minoshas the face of Biagio da Cesena, a critic of Michelangelo in the Papal court. According to records, Michelangelo hated this person. Maybe he thought if I cannot send this guy to hell in reality, then I will just let him to forever rot in hell in my own painting. Michelangelo - 1, Biagio da Cesena - 0.  A feeling of chaos is further generated by the depiction Devils pulling down many damned souls while angels push some of them from the sky.

The painting has a very chaotic tone  to it. But, I love it as to me it depicts that human beings commit sins very casually but when the Judgement Bell rings, they reduce to nothing but despicable cowards trapped in their eternal misery. Anyhow, it was a long review because why not? It is The Last Judgement. And, my Last Judgement to this painting is that it is OVERQUALIFIED nonetheless, my favorite painting to be ever made. 

Charon with his boat of damned souls

Salvador Dali: Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening

Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening is a surrealist painting by Salvador Dali. Well, before I start analyzing and reviewing the painting, I must say that Dali could have give this masterpiece a bit shorter name. Since Dali didn't do that, his fans gave it a shorter name Dream Caused by the Flight of Bee. He painted this painting in 1944 while he and his wife, Gala were living in America.

The Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee by Salvador Dali

The painting itself is as complicated as the title. Dali defined this painting as "hand-painted dream photograph". In the painting, there is a seascape of distant horizons and calm waters. The naked lady amidst the horizon is his wife Gala. Next to the naked body of the sleeping woman, which levitates above a flat rock that floats above the sea, Dali depicts two suspended droplets of water and a pomegranate which is a Christian symbol of fertility and resurrection. Above the pomegranate flies a bee, an insect that traditionally symbolizes the Virgin. In the upper left of the painting what seems to be a rockfish bursts out of the pomegranate, and in turn spews out a tiger that then spews out another tiger and a rifle with a bayonet that is about to sting Gala in the arm. Above them is an elephant with long flamingo legs, found in his later compositions such as The Temptation of St. Anthony. The elephant carries on its back an obelisk.

Famous Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud had a very strong influence on Dali's mind which can be seen through his idiosyncratic artwork. In this painting, Dali's attempted to explore the world of dreams in a dreamscape. The bayonet, as a symbol of the stinging bee, represents the woman's abrupt awakening from her otherwise peaceful dream. In 1962, Dali said this painting was intended "to express for the first time in images Freud's discovery of the typical dream with a lengthy narrative, the consequence of the instantaneousness of a chance event which causes the sleeper to wake up. Thus, as a bar might fall on the neck of a sleeping person, causing them to wake up and for a long dream to end with the guillotine blade falling on them, the noise of the bee here provokes the sensation of the sting which will awaken Gala." To many people including myself, the painting also seems like "a surrealist interpretation of the Theory of Evolution." It shows the evolution of creatures but in a randomized surrealist manner in which any creature can evolve to any creature. Nevertheless, this weird surrealist masterpiece perfectly shows Dali's intense imagination while portraying a logical point of abrupt awakening from a dream due to an external chance event. 

Pablo Picasso: The Accordionist

Pablo Picasso developed a new art style called cubism from 1907 to 1914 which is widely regarded as the most innovative and influential artistic style of the 20th century. The style includes the division of three-dimensional forms into a two-dimensional plane. The Accordionist is one the paintings painted by Picasso that truly captures the essence of cubism. As the title states, the painting is meant to portray a man playing an accordion.

The Accordionist by Pablo Picasso

Despite painting's goal to depict a man playing an Accordionist, it is a painting on the verge on complete abstraction. The monochromatic shade and effect further camouflages the subject. Surfaces are broken into sharply defined planes but are not yet complexly fragmented; forms still retain an illusion of volume; and perspective, though dramatically shortened, is not obliterated. At its climax, Picasso bought this painting almost to the point of complete abstraction but mercifully left a line of vague distinction enough to see the subject. This was the true beauty of his cubist paintings. Even though on the verge of abstraction, if seen carefully one could see the subject matter clearly. It was almost as if Picasso was trying to judge the beholder's ability to see the true art in his paintings instead of just mere shapes and shades. The Accordionist is 51.25 inches tall and 35.25 inches wide, painted in oil on canvas. The composition consists of a multitude of geometric shapes of various sizes and content. The shapes most densely populate the middle of the painting. Since there is no obvious subject, this composition leads the viewer’s eye around the painting in an attempt to decipher the content. Also focused toward the center of the painting are the dark colors, which aid in drawing the viewer in to explore the painting. Picasso utilized the drab, muted tones in order to place the emphasis on the subject. Picasso’s dull palette also lends itself well to the piecing together of the different perspectives of the same subject. With diligence, one can distinguish the general outlines of the seated accordionist, denoted by a series of shifting vertically aligned triangular planes, semicircular shapes, and right angles; the centrally located folds of the accordion and its keys; and, in the lower portion of the canvas, the volutes of an armchair. But Picasso’s elusive references to recognizable forms and objects cannot always be precisely identified and, as the Museum of Modern Art’s founding director Alfred H. Barr, Jr. observed, “the mysterious tension between painted image and ‘reality’ remains.” This tension between what our eyes perceive and what they should perceive is what truly makes this painting one of the greatest ever. It is a work of art that truly tests the vision of another artist.