Chapter One - Public
Criticism, Penance, and the Portrait Medal
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2023
Summary
The story behind the man suffering a particularly gruesome torment in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment fresco comes to us from the artist’s biographer Giorgio Vasari, but every tourist who enters the Sistine Chapel today has heard it.1 While Michelangelo was painting the massive fresco, one of the members of the papal court took exception to the way Michelangelo conceptualized the subject. The artist took his revenge by painting his critic with an ass’s ears, in hell, being enveloped by a massive serpent. That the serpent is also taking a rather intimate bite out of the man only adds to the comedic enjoyment of the anecdote.
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- Michelangelo's Art of Devotion in the Age of Reform , pp. 11 - 38Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023