By Jeannie Marshall (Bibliosis, 2023)
REVIEW Adele Weder
For much of the past millennium, Christian iconography has dominated the Western world’s art and architecture, often fusing the two fields together in one building. The fresco-packed Sistine Chapel, embedded within the Pope’s official residence in Vatican City, is one of the most renowned of such structures. In her book All Things Move: Learning to Look at the Sistine Chapel, Jeannie Marshall makes a unique case for considering the Chapel as something other than a religious enclave, scholarly artifact, or checklist tourist attraction. It’s all those, of course, but its otherworldly qualities transcend religious, academic, or tour-bus affiliations.
Built in the late 15th century, the Chapel is mostly celebrated for being lined with masterpiece frescoes of Biblical scenes, painted by many of the best Renaissance artists. But the building itself cannot be separated from those embedded images on its walls and ceilings—neither conceptually nor literally. It is difficult to even think of the Sistine Chapel scrubbed of its art: it would transform into a different building altogether. The circulation passages, the trompe-l’oeil cornices painted onto the ceilings and corners: all of this this underpins the author’s engagement with the building’s famed frescoes.
Marshall has spent the past 20 years living in Rome, periodically visited the Chapel, and has interwoven history, memoir, and journalistic observation to explore new ways to engage with this vaunted landmark. Significantly—or not—she is a self-described “agnostic, looking at art for its beauty and secular meaning.”
Although Michelangelo’s prowess as an architect equalled his renown as an artist, he didn’t design the physical building. But his commission to illustrate the Chapel interior with the story of the creation of humanity can be called a design brief for the ages. A procession of discrete frescoed galleries in the larger building eventually leads to the climactic ceiling tableau of God reaching out His index finger to create Adam, lying supine on a bed of clouds. “It is just a room,” she reiterates, “but it feels like its own universe.”
The Apostolic Palace, which houses the Chapel, is the Pope’s official residence; it doubles as one of the world’s top art galleries. The building itself is rarely promoted in tourism campaigns or analyzed in architectural history texts, not because it has failed as art-gallery architecture, but precisely because it has succeeded. That is, if you believe the role of a gallery is to carry the art in a way that encourages the visitor to engage with the interior life of the art rather than as a visual meme.
To be sure, architecture is just one of many sub-themes in this book, which toggles between personal philosophy, art history, family drama, political history, and contemporary literature. The wonderfully evocative title derives from American poet Heather McHugh’s poem “What He Thought,” about the burning at the stake of Giordano Bruno in 1600 for heresy. Bruno averred that God did not stand at a fixed point at the centre of an orbiting universe “but rather is poured in waves through all things. All things move.”
Bruno was later exonerated and celebrated by scientists, because—of course—all things do move, literally, as our puny earth orbits the sun, which in turn orbits our galaxy, and so forth. But all things move conceptually as well: the Sistine Chapel has “moved” so far away from its original purpose as religious pedantry and proviso, as this unique memoir eloquently reveals. Yet no one—including the most Godless pagan—would suggest it be demolished. We can apply that philosophy to heritage architecture as well: it can rarely serve its original historic purpose, and yet it can move on to become a vessel carrying so much more meaning than its initial program.
I would love for some curious scribe, or perhaps Marshall herself, to use this book as a springboard for a deep dive into the Chapel’s architecture and strategic “interior design” (though it sounds almost blasphemous to call it by such a pagan term). The actual architect of the Chapel, Baccio Pontelli, isn’t even mentioned in the book, let alone credited. Who was he, and what else did he build? Did he confer with Michelangelo and the other Renaissance artists on the frescoes lining his building, or like some other architects, was he envious of their acclaim—or dismayed that their work didn’t align with his design intentions?
In Marshall’s book, I read and recollected wistfully how the ceiling tableau of Adam and God is so far from the ground and at such an angle that one cranes one’s neck uncomfortably just to catch a somewhat anticlimactic glimpse of those Boys. Did Michelangelo, or his client, intend this? What else can we know about the perspectival effects, the trompe l’oeil, the labyrinthine circulation pattern that lures us to this hallowed room? I would love a follow-up book to delve into all of that.
The book concludes with Marshall’s thoughts about the significance of viewer engagement with art, that it “answers a human yearning, a basic need to engage at a level beyond the rational and beyond the spiritual.” It’s a thought that applies equally to the architecture that contains it, and a pertinent thought for every reader and designer on every project—for the ages, including for our own age.