Michelangelo: The Sistine Chapel Ceiling, Rome

This elegant, small volume (73/8"" 10"") offers more than a guided tour of Michelangelo's ceiling frescoes on the Sistine Chapel in Rome, unfolding in 36 excellent color reproductions supplemented by 30 black-and-white plates. Synthesizing contemporary scholarship and adding his own interpretations, Partridge, an art history professor at UC Berkeley, argues that Michelangelo laid out his scenes of the Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah, Christ's incarnation, the prophets, sibyls and so forth in a narrative structure that directly mirrors Renaissance Christian thinking, embodying a belief in a linear unfolding of events according to divine plan. Moreover, he finds that Michelangelo's contrapuntal arrangement of scenes suggests a struggle between good and evil, sin and salvation, life and death. According to Partridge, the frescoes simultaneously convey multiple, overlapping, even conflicting messages, including allusions to the imperial authority of Michelangelo's sponsor, Pope Julius II. Partridge draws on the recent restoration of the frescoes to provide an exact picture of Michelangelo's working methods. (Dec.)