THE TWO WITNESSES

(Peter) went out and went to another place.
Acts 12:17

I have kept the faith.
2 Ti 4:7

What message did Michelangelo Buonarroti leave us? There is no doubt, that of the body, that is, the unrivalled Master has written a theology of the body in pictorial terms. And if the body is the only true Michelangelo landscape, his stylistic vocabulary is the nude. He, like many artists of the time, not only studied anatomy with passion, so much so that he even identified the exact positions of the muscle bundles, but he also sought aesthetic perfection and ideal beauty. In short, for Our Man the beauty that springs from the contemplation of the body is the door to the divine, the very visibility of God. It is no coincidence that if we carefully observe the scene of the creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel we can notice how the figure of God is convex and that of man is concave. It is not a coincidence. The human body is a sort of cast of the divine body. This body, we have said, is naked and virile. In the virile nude, Michelangelo – heir of classicism – sees the virtuous man elevated to the rank of a god, as were the heroes and athletes in ancient Greece. Nudity is the garment of innocence: a body so overflowing with the glory of God, so full of light that it literally bursts into amazing muscles. And the body is also the protagonist in the Pauline Chapel, where Michelangelo painted The Conversion of St. Paul (1542-1545) and The Crucifixion of St. Peter (1545-1550), the two columns of the Church of Christ. Since the 12th century, Paul has been depicted in the act of falling from his horse, blinded by the light of the Risen Christ. Michelangelo sees them at an older age, defeated by an athletic, beautiful Christ surrounded by frightened and turbulent figures. It seems like we are in front of the fresco of the Last Judgement. In short, God bursts in and strikes down the fanaticism of the future apostle of the Gentiles. Grace (charis), as Paul himself will say (in particular in the Letter to the Romans) has enlightened him to the point of transforming him from an enemy to a faithful and convinced witness to the point of martyrdom. Next to Paul, here is Peter as he is about to be crucified like his Master. According to legend, he felt unworthy of dying like Jesus and so asked to be crucified upside down. The gaze is striking, which fixes the onlookers in a ferociously inquisitive way. Is it a warning? Certainly, especially for the Pope who in the Catholic tradition is the successor of Peter. We must not forget that Michelangelo lived within a papal institution that was highly worldly and far from evangelical ideals.

Commentary by b. Sandro Carotta, osb
Abbazia di Praglia (Italy)

Translation by f. Mark Hargreaves,
Prinknash Abbey