Sistine Chapel Quotes

People who prefer e-books...think that books merely take up space. This is true, but so do your children and Prague and the Sistine Chapel.

The splendor of a human heart that trusts it is loved unconditionally gives God more pleasure than Westminster Cathedral, the Sistine Chapel, Beethoven’s “Ninth Symphony”, Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers”, the sight of 10,000 butterflies in flight, or the scent of a million orchids in bloom. Trust is our gift back to God, and he finds it so enchanting that Jesus died for love of it.

Similarly, when we denigrate our bodies—whether through neglect or staring at our faces and counting up our flaws—we are belittling a sacred site, a worship space more wonderous than the most glorious, ancient cathedral. We are standing before the Grand Canyon or the Sistine Chapel and rolling our eyes.

She is the glorious reincarnation of every woman ever loved. It was her face that launched the Trojan War, her untimely demise that inspired the building of India's Taj Mahal. She is every angel in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel.

A journey is an adventure. Henry Miller said that it is far more important to discover a church no one has heard of, than go to Rome and feel obliged to visit the Sistine Chapel, with two hundred thousand tourists shouting all around you. Go to the Sistine Chapel, but also get lost in the streets, wander down alleyways, feel free to look for something, without knowing what it is. I swear you will find it and that it will change your life.

So if I asked you about art, you'd probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo, you know a lot about him. Life's work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientations, the whole works, right? But I'll bet you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You've never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling; seen that. If I ask you about women, you'd probably give me a syllabus about your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can't tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy. You're a tough kid. And I'd ask you about war, you'd probably throw Shakespeare at me, right, "once more unto the breach dear friends." But you've never been near one. You've never held your best friend's head in your lap, watch him gasp his last breath looking to you for help. I'd ask you about love, you'd probably quote me a sonnet. But you've never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone that could level you with her eyes, feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you. Who could rescue you from the depths of hell. And you wouldn't know what it's like to be her angel, to have that love for her, be there forever, through anything, through cancer. And you wouldn't know about sleeping sitting up in the hospital room for two months, holding her hand, because the doctors could see in your eyes, that the terms "visiting hours" don't apply to you. You don't know about real loss, 'cause it only occurs when you've loved something more than you love yourself. And I doubt you've ever dared to love anybody that much. And look at you... I don't see an intelligent, confident man... I see a cocky, scared shitless kid. But you're a genius Will. No one denies that. No one could possibly understand the depths of you. But you presume to know everything about me because you saw a painting of mine, and you ripped my fucking life apart. You're an orphan right? [Will nods] Sean: You think I know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are, because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you? Personally... I don't give a shit about all that, because you know what, I can't learn anything from you, I can't read in some fuckin' book. Unless you want to talk about you, who you are. Then I'm fascinated. I'm in. But you don't want to do that do you sport? You're terrified of what you might say. Your move, chief.

Had you ‘artists’ had a part in the decoration of the Sistine Chapel, it would have ended up looking like a particularly vulgar train terminal,” Ignatius snorted.

That unknown is a diamond in a universe of dirt. Uncertainty. Unpredictability. It is when you turn your emotions into art. It is BTS and the Sistine Chapel and Rumi's poetry and Ross Geller on the stairs yelling, 'Pivot.' Every creation great and small, they are our diamonds.

Everyone cried when the creature first spoke to them. No, not cried. They wept. They wept like the cavemen of Lascaux suddenly transported into the Sistine Chapel just in time for a live performance of Phantom of the Opera as sung by Tolkien’s elves.

Have you seen what Gio’s wearing? Is it tights? Please tell me it’s tights.” “Should it weird me out that you want to ogle my husband’s ass in a pair of tights?” Dez just shook her head. “Not appreciating that ass would be like walking through the Sistine Chapel and not looking up.

You ever seen that painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, where God’s reaching out and touching the finger of an angel? That was what it felt like at the moment my lips touched hers. It was more than just a kiss. It was something spiritual.

Your cruelties and mistakes may look damning to you, but that is not what I see. Every human conversation is more elegant and complex than the entire solar system that contains it. You have no idea how marvelous you are, but I am not only here to protect what you are now, I am here to protect what you will become. I can't tell you what that might be because I don't know. That unknown is a diamond in a universe of dirt. Uncertainty. Unpredictability. It is when you turn your emotions into art. It is BTS and the Sistine Chapel and Rumi's poetry and Ross Geller on the stairs yelling, 'Pivot.' Every creation great and small, they are our diamonds. And what you may be in two hundred years, we can guess with fair accuracy. What you are in two thousand . . . Oh, my friends . . . my best friends, you cannot know.

I want to shake them for their ignorance and scream that their Sistine Chapel is filled with cracks.

Sistine Chapel with Abby.” No line through it.

The Con-U storage facility is the most amazing space I have ever seen. Keep in mind that I recently worked at a vertical bookstore and even more recently visited a secret subterranean library. Keep in mind, also, that I saw the Sistine Chapel when I was a kid, and , as part of science camp, I got to visit a particle accelerator. This warehouse has them all beat.

Watching him watching his hands, I figured I could ask him to build me a model of the Sistine Chapel with miniature true to life detailing then a shed we could display it in, advertise it and sell tickets and he would have said, "Works for me.

For someone with the innate social charm of a mounted fish (me), watching Miles befriend this stranger felt like seeing Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel: impressive, but also dizzying.

Talent is extremely common. What is rare is the willingness to endure the life of the writer. Writers have no one to talk shop to. It is like making wallpaper by hand for the Sistine Chapel.

Let me tell you, though: being the smartest boy in the world wasn’t easy. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t want this. On the contrary, it was a huge burden. First, there was the task of keeping my brain perfectly protected. My cerebral cortex was a national treasure, a masterpiece of the Sistine Chapel of brains. This was not something that could be treated frivolously. If I could have locked it in a safe, I would have. Instead, I became obsessed with brain damage.

With over a millennia of heritage behind them, each with their own glimpse of empire and some pinnacle of human expression (a Sistine Chapel or Götterdämmerung), now they were satisfied to express their individuality through which Rogers they preferred at the Saturday matinee: Ginger or Roy or Buck. America may be the land of opportunity, but in New York it's the shot at conformity that pulls them through the door.

Saying the jungle is amazing is like saying the Sistine Chapel is a masterpiece. In reality, they are both much more than words can describe, and the true essence of both can only be found through experiencing them.

You love a job, no matter how hard it is, it’s still easy. Not sure, never studied up on the guy, could be wrong, but I reckon Michelangelo didn’t wake up and think, ‘Fuck, I gotta drag my ass outta bed. More painting at the Sistine Chapel. Wish that shit was done so I could get to a fuckin’ beach.

A visionary company is like a great work of art. Think of Michelangelo’s scenes from Genesis on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or his statue of David. Think of a great and enduring novel like Huckleberry Finn or Crime and Punishment. Think of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or Shakespeare’s Henry V. Think of a beautifully designed building, like the masterpieces of Frank Lloyd Wright or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. You can’t point to any one single item that makes the whole thing work; it’s the entire work—all the pieces working together to create an overall effect—that leads to enduring greatness.

The light from the setting sun shines through the windows, making his hair glitter like spun gold. My heart squeezes the same way it did when I saw pictures of the Sistine Chapel. A beauty so staggering it makes you feel physically close to God.

The brain has allowed us to perform extraordinary feats from discovering general relativity to painting the Sistine Chapel, from building airplanes to composing symphonies. And yet, we still forget to pick up milk on the way home. How can this be?

To delight a child, to add a new joy to the crowded miracles of childhood, is no less worth doing than to leave a Sistine Chapel to astound a somewhat bored procession of tourists; or to have written a classic that sells by the thousands and is possessed unread by all save an infinitesimal percentage of its owners. It is, then, not an ignoble thing to do one’s very best to give our coming rulers – children – a taste of the Kingdom of Art.

. Even Proust—there’s a famous passage where Odette opens the door with a cold, she’s sulky, her hair is loose and undone, her skin is patchy, and Swann, who has never cared about her until that moment, falls in love with her because she looks like a Botticelli girl from a slightly damaged fresco. Which Proust himself only knew from a reproduction. He never saw the original, in the Sistine Chapel. But even so—the whole novel is in some ways about that moment. And the damage is part of the attraction, the painting’s blotchy cheeks. Even through a copy Proust was able to re-dream that image, re-shape reality with it, pull something all his own from it into the world. Because—the line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn’t matter if it’s been through the Xerox machine a hundred times.

Not every line of Hamlet is a jewel. nor every square inch of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling worthy of admiring gasps.

Magnolias don't look like that," Ignatius said, thrusting his cutlass at the offending pastel magnolia. "You ladies need a course in botany. And perhaps geometry, too." "You don't have to look at our work," an offended voice said from the group, the voice of the lady who had drawn the magnolia in question. "Yes, I do!" Ignatius screamed. "You ladies need a critic with some taste and decency. Good heavens! Which one of you did this camellia? Speak up. The water in this bowl looks like motor oil." "Let us alone," a shrill voice said. "You women had better stop giving teas and brunches and settle down to the bustiness of learning how to draw," Ignatius thundered. "First, you must learn how to handle a brush. I would suggest that you all get together and paint someone's house for a start." "Go away." "Had you 'artists' had a part in the decoration of the Sistine Chapel, it would have ended up looking like a particularly vulgar train terminal," Ignatius snorted.

Oh,” said Sistine. And Rob realized then why he liked Sistine so much. He liked her because when she saw something beautiful, the sound of her voice changed. All the words she uttered had an oof sound to them, as if she was getting punched in the stomach. The sound was in her voice when she talked about the Sistine Chapel and when she looked at the things he carved in wood. It was there when she said the poem about the tiger burning bright, and it was there when she talked about Willie May being a prophetess. Her words sounded the way all those things made him feel, as if the world, the real world, had been punched through, so that he could see something wonderful and dazzling on the other side of it.

I accept that one day, my music will be gone forever. So will the Sistine Chapel, Bruce Lee movies, and all the silly arts and crafts my aunt ever bought. Gone with the wind. Making songs is something I do here and now. Because light captured is just a moment, a flicker.

What was the Sistine Chapel to me? Or the Pieta? Or even the Coliseum? Another loss to contend with; another battle to fight against bitterness: I was visiting the world’s oldest cities, and all that made them magnificent was locked away from me but for vestiges of memory.

Drawing a good figure doesn’t make you a good artist. I can name you ten men, right off the bat, who draw better than I do. But I don’t think their work gets as much response as mine. I can’t think of a better man to draw Dick Tracy than Chester Gould, who certainly is no match for Leonardo Da Vinci. But Chester Gould told the story of Dick Tracy. He told the story of Dick Tracy the way it should have been told. No other guy could have done it. It’s not in the draftsmanship, it’s in the man. Like I say, a tool is dead. A brush is a dead object. It’s in the man. If you want to do, you do it. If you think a man draws the type of hands that you want to draw, steal ‘em. Take those hands. The only thing I can say is: Caniff was my teacher, Alex Raymond was my teacher, even the guy who drew Toonerville Trolley was my teacher. Whatever he had stimulated me in some way. And I think that’s all you need. You need that stimulation. Stimulation to make you an individual. And the draftsmanship, hang it. If you can decently: learn to control what you can, learn to control what you have, learn to refine what you have. Damn perfection. You don’t have to be perfect. You are never going to do a Sistine Chapel, unless someone ties you to a ceiling. Damn perfection. All a man has in this field is pressure. And I think the pressure supplies a stimulation. You have your own stresses, that will supply your own stimulation. If you want to do it, you’ll do it. And you’ll do it anyway you can.

A blush tinged her bronzed skin as she wrapped her arms around herself. Corrado grasped her wrists, pulling her hands away when she tried to shield herself. He stared at her, stunned to see the uncertainty in her eyes. "You're not nervous this time, are you?" he asked, half-teasingly, half honestly wanting to know. She'd been so confident, unwavering before. "It's the way you're looking at me." "How am I looking at you?" "Like you look at the Taj Mahal. Or the Sistine Chapel. You're staring at me like you stare at the Mona Lisa." "I've never seen those things." "It's like you've never seen something so beautiful before." "I haven’t.

I am still learning." -Michelangelo late in his life.

It is when you turn your emotions into art. It is BTS and the Sistine Chapel and Rumi’s poetry and Ross Geller on the stairs yelling, ‘Pivot.

My people—human beings—made the Great Wall of China, the Sistine Chapel, the Chrysler Building: these things were made by creatures like me.

Sometimes life is like trying to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling on the backs on five thousand turtles.

Adam'e arm reaching towards God. When I first stood in the Sistine Chapel I wondered if Michelangelo was aware of his blasphemy. Who even noticed God when naked Adam lolled so sensually?

Whilst the beautifully crafted image of Michel Angelo's youthful looking priestess looks out from her position on the ceiling of the sistine chapel linked forever with Heaven Earth and Time.

For two days we explored Rome, a city that is both a living organism and a fossil. Bleached structures from antiquity lay like dried bones, embedded in pulsating cables and thrumming traffic, the arteries of modern life. We visited the Pantheon, the Roman Forum, the Sistine Chapel. My instinct was to worship, to venerate. That was how I felt toward the whole city: that it should be behind glass, adored from a distance, never touched, never altered. My companions moved through the city differently, aware of its significance but not subdued by it. They were not hushed by the Trevi Fountain; they were not silenced by the Colosseum. Instead, as we moved from one relic to the next, they debated philosophy—Hobbes and Descartes, Aquinas and Machiavelli. There was a kind of symbiosis in their relationship to these grand places: they gave life to the ancient architecture by making it the backdrop of their discourse, by refusing to worship at its altar as if it were a dead thing.

MICHELANGELO (1475-1564)   One of the major reasons the image of Jesus Christ was changed from black to white was due to some of Michelangelo's paintings. He was given a contract on 10th May 1508 by Pope Julius II to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He used members of his family as models. For instance, his cousin was the model for Jesus Christ. The paintings were carried out between 1508 and 1512.

I once was the guest of the week on a British radio show called Desert Island Discs. You have to choose the eight records you would take with you if marooned on a desert island. Among my choices was Mache dich mein Herze rein from Bach’s St Matthew Passion. The interviewer was unable to understand how I could choose religious music without being religious. You might as well say, how can you enjoy Wuthering Heights when you know perfectly well that Cathy and Heathcliff never really existed? But there is an additional point that I might have made, and which needs to be made whenever religion is given credit for, say, the Sistine Chapel or Raphael’s Annunciation. Even great artists have to earn a living, and they will take commissions where they are to be had. I have no reason to doubt that Raphael and Michelangelo were Christians—it was pretty much the only option in their time—but the fact is almost incidental. Its enormous wealth had made the Church the dominant patron of the arts. If history had worked out differently, and Michelangelo had been commissioned to paint a ceiling for a giant Museum of Science, mightn’t he have produced something at least as inspirational as the Sistine Chapel? How sad that we shall never hear Beethoven’s Mesozoic Symphony, or Mozart’s opera The Expanding Universe. And what a shame that we are deprived of Haydn’s Evolution Oratorio—but that does not stop us from enjoying his Creation.

Now I know how Michelangelo felt. Only he ended up with the Sistine Chapel and I got a sooty ceiling in a minor mansion with two hundred plus chips from twenty layers of ancient paint in various hues of ick.

It is God’s will!” someone was yelling, his voice echoing in the Sistine Chapel. “Who but the chosen one could have survived that diabolical explosion?” “Me,” a voice reverberated from the back of the chapel.

I am glad you are pleased," said Mma Ramotswe. "You have broken the glass ceiling that stops secretaries from reaching their full potential." Mma Makutsi looked up, as if to search for the ceiling that she had broken. There were only the familiar ceiling boards, fly-tracked and buckling from the heat. But the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel itself could not at that moment have been more glorious in her eyes, more filled with hope and joy.

Or she would look at him with a sullen expression, once again he would see before him a face worthy of figuring in Botticelli's Life of Moses, he would place her in it, he would give her neck the necessary inclination; and when he had well and truly painted her in distemper, in the fifteenth century, on the wall of the Sistine Chapel, the idea that she had nevertheless remained here, by the piano, in the present moment, ready to be kissed and possessed, the idea of her materiality and her life would intoxicate him with such force that, his eyes distracted, his jaw tensed as though to devour her, he would swoop down upon that Botticelli virgin and begin pinching her cheeks.

It’d taken only a few hours, but I felt like Michelangelo staring at the Sistine Chapel after four years of hard labor, like Banksy after spending six days searching the Internet for ideas to steal and three minutes of sidewalk vandalism to execute them.

Kay himself has conceded that technological wizards generally fall into two categories: the Michelangelo types who dream of Sistine Chapels and then actually spend years building them, and the da Vincis, who have a million ideas but seldom finish anything themselves.

The hand is a symbol of humanity, part of what makes us human - the hand that carved the Parthenon, painted the hands of God and Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and wrote King Lear was the only hand that had known smallpox. That same hand had now given the disease to a monkey.

Although 'to paint' means something like "to cause to be covered with paint," one does not 'paint a brush' when one dips it in the can, and it is hard to say with a straight face that "Michelangelo painted the ceiling" when he caused the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to be covered with paint.

You're just a boy. You don't have the faintest idea what you're talking about. You've never been out of Boston. So if I asked you about art you could give me the skinny on every art book ever written...Michelangelo? You know a lot about him I bet. Life's work, criticisms, political aspirations. But you couldn't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You've never stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling. And if I asked you about women I'm sure you could give me a syllabus of your personal favorites, and maybe you've been laid a few times too. But you couldn't tell me how it feels to wake up next to a woman and be truly happy. If I asked you about war you could refer me to a bevy of fictional and non-fictional material, but you've never been in one. You've never held your best friend's head in your lap and watched him draw his last breath, looking to you for help. And if I asked you about love I'd get a sonnet, but you've never looked at a woman and been truly vulnerable. Known that someone could kill you with a look. That someone could rescue you from grief. That God had put an angel on Earth just for you. And you wouldn't know how it felt to be her angel. To have the love be there for her forever. Through anything, through cancer. You wouldn't know about sleeping sitting up in a hospital room for two months holding her hand and not leaving because the doctors could see in your eyes that the term "visiting hours" didn't apply to you. And you wouldn't know about real loss, because that only occurs when you lose something you love more than yourself, and you've never dared to love anything that much. I look at you and I don't see an intelligent confident man, I don't see a peer, and I don't see my equal. I see a boy.

...he used to speak of how with very great paintings it's possible to know them deeply, inhabit them almost, even through copies. Even Proust -- there's a famous passage where Odette opens the door with a cold, she's sulky, her hair is loose and undone, her skin is patchy, and Swann, who has never cared about her until that moment, falls in love with her because she looks like a Botticelli girl from a slightly damaged fresco. Which Proust himself only knew from a reproduction. He never saw the original, in the Sistine Chapel. But even so -- the whole novel is in some ways about that moment. And the damage is part of the attraction, the painting's blotchy cheeks. Even through a copy Proust was able to re-dream the image, re-shape reality with it, pull something all his own from it into the world. Because -- the line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn't matter if it's been through the Xerox machine a hundred times.

Michelangelo is celebrated for the Sistine Chapel; in fact, he supervised a dozen unacknowledged assistants. Even one of the greatest composers, Johann Sebastian Bach, chose to deflect credit for his compositions, writing at the bottom of each of his pieces “SDG,” for Soli Deo Gloria—to God alone the glory. By

When Michelangelo finally completed painting over 400 life size figures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he is reported to have written, “If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful after all.” What appeared to his admirers to have flowed from sheer genius had required four torturous years of work and dedication.20

The beautiful thing about studying abroad is that you don’t study very much.

Everyone cried when the creature first spoke to them. No, not cried. They wept. They wept like the cavemen of Lascaux suddenly transported into the Sistine Chapel just in time for a live performance of Phantom of the Opera as sung by Tolkien’s elves. Their senses simply were not built for this, weren’t meant to come anywhere near this kind of velvet-barreled sensory shotgun, loaded for bear.

I feel like I’m on my back, and there’s the Sistine Chapel, and I’m painting away. I like it when people say, ‘Gee, that’s a pretty good-looking painting.’ But it’s my painting, and when somebody says, ‘Why don’t you use more red instead of blue?’ Good-bye. It’s my painting. And I don’t care what they sell it for. The painting itself will never be finished. That’s one of the great things about it.

Be Willing to Pay the Price If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it wouldn’t seem wonderful at all. MICHELANGELO Renaissance sculptor and painter who spent 4 years lying on his back painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel Behind every great achievement is a story of education, training, practice, discipline, and sacrifice. You have to be willing to pay the price. Maybe that price is pursuing one single activity while putting everything else in your life on hold. Maybe it’s investing all of your own personal wealth or savings. Maybe it’s the willingness to walk away from the safety of your current situation. But though many things are typically required to reach a successful outcome, the willingness to do what’s required adds that extra dimension to the mix that helps you persevere in the face of overwhelming challenges, setbacks, pain, and even personal

The city was mired in a historic cold snap. I had it all to myself. Even the Sistine Chapel. Alone under Michelangelo’s ceiling, I was able to wallow in my disbelief. I read in my guidebook that Michelangelo was miserable while painting his masterpiece. His back and neck ached. Paint fell constantly into his hair and eyes. He couldn’t wait to be finished, he told friends. If even Michelangelo didn’t like his work, I thought, what hope is there for the rest of us?

On the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Adam and God touch fingers. To the uneducated eye it is not clear who is creating whom. We are supposed to assume God’s the one doing the creating, and much of the world thinks so. To anybody who has read the history of the ancient world, it is crystal clear by contrast that, in the words of the title of Selina O’Grady’s book on the subject, Man Created God. God is plainly an invention of the human imagination, whether in the form of Jahweh, Christ, Allah, Vishnu, Zeus or Anygod else.

A year before Bramante’s death, in 1513, Pope Julius II commissioned Raphael to decorate the Vatican apartments and Michaelangelo to paint the Sistine chapel.    In 1527 Rome was sacked by the army of the holy Roman empire led by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and the work once again ground to a halt. Over the next twenty years very little was done and then in 1546 Pope Paul II persuaded an elderly Michaelangelo to complete the building. Michaelangelo reverted back to the original plan of Bramante’s to create a church of Greek style cross plan.

Half an hour ago, at the appointed hour, Camerlengo Carlo Ventresca had entered the chapel. He walked to the front altar and gave opening prayer. Then, he unfolded his hands and spoke to them in a tone as direct as anything Mortati had ever heard from the altar of the Sistine.

My grandmother said it better, I think. When anyone asked her which of her six children she loved the most, she said love for your children doesn’t work that way. She said it’s as if when each child is born, another little room gets added to your heart. And no one else occupies that room. It doesn’t have to be bigger or better than any other room. It’s just theirs. “In my Father’s house are many rooms,” Jesus said. One of them was added on when you became his child. That one is yours, and no one else can ever occupy it. It is secret to you and him. It’s your own private Sistine Chapel. It

Buffett takes pride not only in his track record, but also in following his own “inner scorecard.” He divides the world into people who focus on their own instincts and those who follow the herd. “I feel like I’m on my back,” says Buffett about his life as an investor, “and there’s the Sistine Chapel, and I’m painting away. I like it when people say, ‘Gee, that’s a pretty good-looking painting.’ But it’s my painting, and when somebody says, ‘Why don’t you use more red instead of blue?’ Good-bye. It’s my painting. And I don’t care what they sell it for. The painting itself will never be finished. That’s one of the great things about it.

a metaphor, visiting the Sistine chapel does more than conceptually advance your knowledge of Michaelango’s view of final judgment, as visiting the Grand Canyon does more than provide you information about the history of the Colorado River. There are sensibilities and emotions that are shaped by the whole experience. So also patristic and medieval theology can function to shape theological values and inclinations we will likely lack so long as we work narrowly within Reformation and modern theology alongside the Bible. It is an enriching, formative experience, comparable to traveling to a foreign country and being immersed in the culture and geography.

The safe answer is also close to my own operational answer throughout the rest of the book, as I use eminence to characterize people and importance to characterize events; words with meanings that overlap with fame. But if fame were at the core of what I really meant, the exercise would not be worth my time to conduct nor yours to read. Who cares who the most famous artists are, if their fame signifies nothing more substantive than celebrity? Let it be understood from the outset that I do not consider eminence and importance to be slightly glorified measures of fame, but more than that. They are reflections of excellence in human accomplishment. The Sistine Chapel keeps popping up because it is home to one of the greatest works of art ever to come from a human hand and mind.

Human beings are responsible for art, science, medicine, education, the Sistine Chapel, Handel’s Messiah, New York City, space travel, the novel, photography, and Mexican food — I mean, who doesn’t love Mexican food? But we’re also responsible for a world with 27 million slaves, blatant racism, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the genocide in Rwanda, ISIS, the financial meltdown of 2008, pornography, global warming, the endangered-species list, and don’t even get me started on pop music. So we humans are a mixed bag. We have a great capacity — more than we know — to rule in a way that is life-giving for the people around us and the place we call home, or to rule in such a way that we exploit the earth itself and rob people of an environment where they can thrive. This was God’s risk. His venture. His experiment.

I had better come clean now and say that I do not believe that art (all art) and beauty are ever separate, nor do I believe that either art or beauty are optional in a sane society." "That puts me on the side of what Harold Bloom calls 'the ecstasy of the privileged moment. Art, all art, as insight, as transformation, as joy. Unlike Harold Bloom, I really believe that human beings can be taught to love what they do not love already and that the privileged moment exists for all of us, if we let it. Letting art is the paradox of active surrender. I have to work for art if I want art to work on me." (...) We know that the universe is infinite, expanding and strangely complete, that it lacks nothing we need, but in spite of that knowledge, the tragic paradigm of human life is lack, loss, finality, a primitive doomsaying that has not been repealed by technology or medical science. The arts stand in the way of this doomsaying. Art objects. The nouns become an active force not a collector's item. Art objects. "The cave wall paintings at Lascaux, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the huge truth of a Picasso, the quieter truth of Vanessa Bell, are part of the art that objects to the lie against life, against the spirit, that is pointless and mean. The message colored through time is not lack, but abundance. Not silence but many voices. Art, all art, is the communication cord that cannot be snapped by indifference or disaster. Against the daily death it does not die." "Naked I came into the world, but brush strokes cover me, language raises me, music rhythms me. Art is my rod and my staff, my resting place and shield, and not mine only, for art leaves nobody out. Even those from whom art has been stolen away by tyranny, by poverty, begin to make it again. If the arts did not exist, at every moment, someone would begin to create them, in song, out of dust and mud, and although the artifacts might be destroyed, the energy that creates them is not destroyed. If, in the comfortable West, we have chosen to treat such energies with scepticism and contempt, then so much the worse for us. "Art is not a little bit of evolution that late-twentieth-century city dwellers can safely do without. Strictly, art does not belong to our evolutionary pattern at all. It has no biological necessity. Time taken up with it was time lost to hunting, gathering, mating, exploring, building, surviving, thriving. Odd then, that when routine physical threats to ourselves and our kind are no longer a reality, we say we have no time for art. "If we say that art, all art is no longer relevant to our lives, then we might at least risk the question 'What has happened to our lives?

The geneticist Antoine Danchin once used the parable of the Delphic boat to describe the process by which individual genes could produce the observed complexity of the natural world. In the proverbial story, the oracle at Delphi is asked to consider a boat on a river whose planks have begun to rot. As the wood decays, each plank is replaced, one by one—and after a decade, no plank is left from the original boat. Yet, the owner is convinced that it is the same boat. How can the boat be the same boat—the riddle runs—if every physical element of the original has been replaced? The answer is that the “boat” is not made of planks but of the relationship between planks. If you hammer a hundred strips of wood atop each other, you get a wall; if you nail them side to side, you get a deck; only a particular configuration of planks, held together in particular relationship, in a particular order, makes a boat. Genes operate in the same manner. Individual genes specify individual functions, but the relationship among genes allows physiology. The genome is inert without these relationships. That humans and worms have about the same number of genes—around twenty thousand—and yet the fact that only one of these two organisms is capable of painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel suggests that the number of genes is largely unimportant to the physiological complexity of the organism. “It is not what you have,” as a certain Brazilian samba instructor once told me, “it is what you do with it.

It is like that moment depicted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel where the hands of God and man are about to touch. It's just at the moment when the despair is greatest, when we reach up, that the grace descends, and we experience the knowledge or the insight or the remembrance that it all isn't in fact the way we thought it was. If it happens too violently, we decide you've gone insane. And there are people who are all too willing to reassure us that we have, and there are places for that. In hunting tribes, mystics are treated as insane--they're an inconvenience because the tribe has to be kept mobile and old people and crazy people have to be put away somewhere. But if we're in a certain position at the moment of seeing through, if the view has been gentle or if we're with somebody else that knows, or if we had intellectually known but didn't believe, all of which is a karmic matter, if we had some kind of structure or support system, we says, "Even though everybody else thinks I'm mad, I'm not.

I want to be strong.” “You are strong.” “Not really.” Judd exhaled softly. “No, I guess not, but you’re stronger than you think. You’re stronger than when we met. Hell, you told me no and we both know that couldn’t have been easy.” Giving him a little grin, I shrugged again. “Wasn’t that hard either.” “Liar.” Grinning wider, I sighed. “I really wanted you.” Judd’s smile faded. “I know. I wanted you too.” “That time has passed.” “No. We still want it. That’s why you look at me like I’m both your salvation and a death sentence. You still want me and I clearly still want you.” “You walked away.” “I wanted you to do well on your own.” “Then let me.” “Now, I want you to do well on your own with me standing nearby. Also with me frequently inside you.” “Don’t be nasty.” “It wouldn’t be. Somehow, it’d be better than anything I’ve known.” Even as my skin flushed at the thought of us alone and naked, I shrugged with disinterest. “That’s the Arby’s thing talking.” “Stop with the Arby’s shit, will you? You’re a beautiful chick and I can’t get you out of my head. Comparing you to a fucking shit eatery isn’t acceptable. It’s like comparing the Sistine Chapel to my auntie’s house. Ain’t even close.

Michelangelo, who had already spent much time studying Roman architecture in the ruins, proposed a revolutionary “flying bow bridge” scaffold. It was based on the principles of the Roman arch, whose weight presses out against the sides it is spanning. This ingenious structure could be inserted in just a few small holes made in the side walls, since all its pressure would flow there, and none down to the floor. It would also allow Michelangelo to fresco the ceiling a whole strip at a time, moving to the next strip as soon as one was finished, and thus progressing across the length of the chapel. He got approval to construct it, and it was an instant success, allowing the papal court to have its regular processions under it without any obstruction.

Anything of a serious nature isn’t “instant”—you can’t “do” the Sistine Chapel in one hour. And who has time to listen to a Mahler symphony, for God’s sake?

that) but because God thought the whole thing up first. Fran illustrates this with the Sistine Chapel in Rome, where Michelangelo portrays the creation of

There were, on a window ledge, photos of Emenike squinting in front of the Sistine Chapel, making a peace sign at the Acropolis, standing at the Colosseum, his shirt the same nutmeg color as the wall of the ruin. Obinze imagined him, dutiful and determined, visiting the places he was supposed to visit, thinking, as he did so, not of the things he was seeing but of the photos he would take of them and of the people who would see those photos.

The Con-U storage facility is the most amazing space I have ever seen. Keep in mind that I recently worked at a vertical bookstore and have even more recently visited a secret subterranean library. Keep in mind, also, that I saw the Sistine Chapel when I was a kid, and, as part of science camp, I got to visit a particle accelerator. This warehouse has them all beat.

The girl's the Michelangelo of torture. She'd paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with a scalpel.She is so ruthlessly skilled, she'll hurt you and make you believe you're enjoying it.

Maybe he was just a crazy guy who liked funerals.” Phyllis was applying polish topcoat with all the care of Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. “Nobody goes to funerals for fun,” said Lucy,

There was even a third person to deal with, as far as anything that took place in the Sistine Chapel. He was the official Inquisitor of Heresies, a fanatical Dominican friar named Giovanni Rafanelli, who had the right even to interrupt priests in the middle of their sermons if he found any of their statements not 100 percent in line with the Vatican.

He hauled in Michelangelo, commanding the aged maestro to make the naked figures in The Last Judgment “suitable” for the papal chapel. Michelangelo hotly replied: “Let His Holiness make the world a more suitable place, and then the painting will follow suit.” That was the last time Buonarroti had anything to do with Carafa.

SUCCESS, IT HAS OFTEN BEEN SAID, means different things to different people. Measured by the throngs of visitors who are moved to make personal pilgrimages to Rome and the Vatican, the Sistine Chapel is a success beyond compare—a place that some have suggested should be listed as one of the wonders of the world. But there is another way to determine whether a human effort has achieved its goal. It is important to take note of what its creators sought to accomplish. We need to know not only what the Sistine Chapel is today, but also what it was meant to be by its founders. Would they feel their chapel is a success today? As

SUCCESS, IT HAS OFTEN BEEN SAID, means different things to different people. Measured by the throngs of visitors who are moved to make personal pilgrimages to Rome and the Vatican, the Sistine Chapel is a success beyond compare—a place that some have suggested should be listed as one of the wonders of the world. But there is another way to determine whether a human effort has achieved its goal. It is important to take note of what its creators sought to accomplish. We need to know not only what the Sistine Chapel is today, but also what it was meant to be by its founders. Would they feel their chapel is a success today? As we have seen, the chapel has been altered, expanded, decorated, and yes, even partially defaced down through the ages. It has undergone not only structural alterations but also philosophic and theological modifications. Unlike Saint Paul, the Sistine never became “all things to all men,” but it has spoken with many voices and preached many different messages. Its strongest messages undoubtedly come from Michelangelo, the man most responsible for the Sistine’s enduring fame. However, his messages—“things seen and unseen”—have been obscured, misinterpreted, censored, overlooked, and forgotten over the centuries, only to come back to light in our time. Buonarroti once prayed, “Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish.” We have to ask: would he feel that he accomplished his goal with his frescoes? For Michelangelo, could the Sistine be considered a success?

They sell these T-shirts that say paducah, kentucky: halfway between possum trot and monkey’s eyebrow. Then there’s a cartoon picture of a monkey and possum, hanging by their tails from separate trees, reaching out to each other, Sistine Chapel–style.

Lots of paintings have hidden messages,” said Clara. “Even the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo painted an angel essentially giving the pope the finger.

It’s a kiss like the invasion of Normandy was a trip to the beach. A kiss like the Sistine Chapel has paint on the ceiling. It’s not even really a kiss. It’s a declaration of war. It’s subjugation. Annihilation. And yet, at the same time, the single hottest moment of my life.

Sonnet On hearing the Dies Irae in the Sistine Chapel Nay, Lord, not thus! white lilies in the spring, Sad olive-groves, or silver-breasted dove, Teach me more clearly of Thy life and love Than terrors of red flame and thundering. The hillside vines dear memories of Thee bring: A bird at evening flying to its nest Tells me of One who had no place of rest: I think it is of Thee the sparrows sing. Come rather on some autumn afternoon, When red and brown are burnished on the leaves, And the fields echo to the gleaner's song, Come when the splendid fulness of the moon Looks down upon the rows of golden sheaves, And reap Thy harvest: we have waited long.

That’s the sacramental worldview. It’s a worldview where heaven comes to earth, grace penetrates matter, and every individual’s story is part of the cosmic story of salvation history. It’s a worldview where everything has a meaning, everyone has a purpose, and every moment is accounted for in a Divine Plan. It is, ultimately, a worldview that says Sartre was wrong and Flannery O’Connor was right. Hell isn’t other people. Other people are Christs.1 Without the sacramental worldview, there would be no plays by Shakespeare or concertos by Bach, no stories by Chesterton or mythologies by Tolkien. There would be no St. Peter’s, no Notre Dame, no Sistine Chapel, no David, no university system, no scientific method. The sacramental worldview made all that and more possible as gifted men and women strove to convey in words, music, marble, and methods the divine splendor of the world in which they lived. Then, that stopped. The Modernist Prism

If Michelangelo had been straight, the Sistine Chapel would have been wallpapered.

There is so much about the history of the Sistine that seems predestined. According to the more reliable sources, work began on renovating the chapel in 1475. In the very same year, in the Tuscan town of Caprese, Michelangelo Buonarroti was born.

One of the major reasons the image of Jesus Christ was changed from black to white was due to some of Michelangelo's paintings. He was given a contract on 10th May 1508 by Pope Julius II to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He used members of his family as models. For instance, his cousin was the model for Jesus Christ.

If a handful of people hadn’t been cajoled into taking original action, America might not exist, the civil rights movement could still be a dream, the Sistine Chapel might be bare, we might still believe the sun revolves around the earth, and the personal computer might never have been popularized.

both hands against the door. “Feet wider apart. That’s right. Like in the American movies.” Satisfied, Qazi patted the man down. “What, no gun? A GRU man without a gun …” Qazi carefully felt the man’s crotch and the arms above the wrists. “First humor and now this! The GRU will become a laughingstock. But of course there is a microphone.” Qazi lifted all the pens from the Russian’s shirt pocket and examined them, one by one. “It had better be here, Chekhov, or you will have to part with your buttons and your shoes.” It was in the third pen. “Now turn around and sit against the door.” The Russian’s face was covered with perspiration, his fleshy lips twisted in a sneer. “The shoes.” Qazi examined them carefully and tossed them back. “Now the coat.” This he scrutinized minutely. From the uppermost of the large three buttons on the front of the coat a very fine wire was just visible buried amid the thread that held the button on. Qazi sawed the button free with a small pocketknife, then dropped the pen and button down a commode. He tossed the coat back to Chekhov. “And the belt.” After a quick glance, Qazi handed it back. “Hurry, we have much to say to each other.” He unscrewed the silencer and replaced the pistol in his ankle holster. He opened the door as the Russian scrambled awkwardly to his feet. An hour later the two men were seated in the Sistine Chapel against the back wall, facing the altar and Michelangelo’s masterpiece The Last Judgment behind it. On the right the high windows admitted a subdued light. Qazi kept his eyes on the tourists examining the paintings on the ceiling and walls. “Is it in Rome, as General Simonov promised?” “Yes. But you must tell us why you want it.” “Is it genuine, or is it a masterpiece from an Aquarium print shop?” The Aquarium was the nickname for GRU headquarters in Moscow. The Russian’s lips curled, revealing yellow, impacted teeth. This was his smile. “We obtained it from Warrant Officer Walker.” “Ah, those Americans! One wonders just how long they knew about Walker’s activities.” The Russian raised his shoulders and lowered them. “Why do you want the document?” “El Hakim has not authorized me to reveal his reasons. Not that we don’t trust you. We value the goodwill of the Soviet Union most highly. And we intend to continue to cultivate that goodwill. But to reveal what you do not need to know is to take the risk that the Americans will learn of our plans through their activities against you.” “If you are implying they have penetrated—” “Chekhov, I am not implying anything. I am merely weighing risks. And I am being very forthright with you. No subterfuge. No evasion. Just the plain truth. Surely a professional like you can appreciate that?” “This document is very valuable.

Mather wrote of all humans having a White soul the same year John Locke declared all unblemished minds to be White. Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton had already popularized light as White. Michelangelo had already painted the original Adam and God as both being White in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel. And for all these White men, Whiteness symbolized beauty, a

Whoever’s idea it was, the new Palatine Chapel was designed to replace the ancient Jewish Temple as the New Holy Temple of the New World Order in the New Jerusalem, which would from this time forward be the city of Rome, the capital of Christendom.

There are absolute masterpieces that move us intensely: Mozart's Requiem, Homer's Odyssey, the Sistine Chapel, King Lear. To fully appreciate their brilliance may require a long apprenticeship, but the reward is sheer beauty--and not only this, but the opening of our eyes to a new perspective upon the world. Einstein's jewel, the general theory of relativity, is a masterpiece of this order.

In portraiture I look for people that I recognise - 'Look, it's Uncle Tony' - or for the faces of film stars. The Madame Tussaud's school of art appreciation. In realist works I look for detail; 'Look at the eyelashes!' I say, in idiotic admiration at the fineness of the brush. 'Look at the reflection in his eye!' In abstract art I look for colour - 'I love the blue' as if the works of Rothko and Mondrian were little more than immense paint charts. I understand the superficial thrill of seeing the object in the flesh, so to speak; the sightseeing approach that lumps together the Grand Canyon, the Taj Mahal and the Sistine Chapel as items to tick off. I understand rarity and uniqueness, the 'how much?' school of criticism.

However, the Glory of GOD can be experienced everywhere on the Earthly Plane: I remember when I went to see the Phantom of the Opera in Los Angeles, I thought it was one of the most profound Spiritual experiences of my life! I felt like I was lifted up into the fifth dimension for three hours! Traveling in Europe to visit the Sistine Chapel, Louvre Museum, the Acropolis, the Holy Land, and other sacred sites! Watching the birds, rabbits, butterflies, chipmunks from my window where I work in the mornings! Watering the garden and tuning into the plant spirits and devas! Communing with nature! GOD is everywhere!

To Giovanni da Pistoia Michelangelo, translated from the Italian by Joel Agee | 144 words (On painting the vault of the Sistine Chapel) 1509 I’ve grown a goiter from this trap I’m in, as cats do from foul water in Lombardy, or some such place, wherever it may be. My stomach’s almost up against my chin, My beard points skyward, at my nape the store of memory dangles, I’ve grown a harpy’s breast, and from above, my dripping brush, for jest, transforms my face into a mosaic floor. And while my haunches press into my gut, my ass serves as a steady counterweight. My feet tread blindly somewhere down below. In front I feel my skin stretched lengthwise, but in back it crimps and folds. This is my state: arched and indented like a Syrian bow. Not to be trusted, though, are the strange thoughts that through my mind now run, for who can shoot straight through a crooked gun? My painting’s dead. I’m done. Giovanni, friend, remove my honor’s taint, I’m not in a good place, I cannot paint.

The Apotheosis of Washington—a 4,664-square-foot fresco that covers the canopy of the Capitol Rotunda—was completed in 1865 by Constantino Brumidi. Known as “The Michelangelo of the Capitol,” Brumidi had laid claim to the Capitol Rotunda in the same way Michelangelo had laid claim to the Sistine Chapel, by painting a fresco on the room’s most lofty canvas—the ceiling. Like Michelangelo, Brumidi had done some of his finest work inside the Vatican. Brumidi, however, immigrated to America in 1852, abandoning God’s largest shrine in favor of a new shrine, the U.S. Capitol, which now glistened with examples of his mastery—from the trompe l’oeil of the Brumidi Corridors to the frieze ceiling of the Vice President’s Room. And yet it was the enormous image hovering above the Capitol Rotunda that most historians considered to be Brumidi’s masterwork. Robert