I venti ignudi della cappela sistina

Speranza

These are TEN PAIRS of elastic limbed figures who frame the scenes.

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The ignudi perch on low pedetals raising from a fictive stone cornice which cordons off the lower section of the ceiling from the central panels.

If this lower part is a realm of frustration, constriction, confusion, and dispute, the vast, even outsize presence of the ignudi turns the upper realm tinto something of a debating chamber too.

Indeed, the ignudi ASK questions of God.

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The ignudi go through many and varied motions, their bodies infused with a beguiling micture of torpor and tension.

Some sit on satins cushions.

They are the male versions of Pygmalion's "Galatea" -- beautiful statues who have come to life and have stepped down from their pedestals, and are now sitting on them.

Some look as though they were waking, stretching, getting to know their bodies.

Others look weary.

In two cases, the paired ignudi are VIRTUAL MIRROR IMAGEES

But them then on onwards their poses become increasingly individuated, and they overlap the central narrative panels.

Their OSTENSIBLE FUNCTION is to secure the bronze medallions situated between each pair.

In order to do this, they hold strips of satin cloth which are threaded through the border of the medallions.

Yet they perfor their alloted task with SUCH INSOUCIANCE that we cannot be certain of the medallions' STABILITY.

This also underscores the precariousness of their own position.

If the medallions need to be secured, what is keeping the ignudi, hoisted to a vertiginous height on the ceiling, in place?

But it is their potential for movement that keeps our eyes in motion, rolling from one panel to another.

The ignudi are central to the originality -- and pathos -- of the Sistine ceiling.

More studies for the ignudi survive than for any other portions of the ceiling, and from the creation of Eve onwards, Michelangelo painted them before he painted the central narratives.

yet, in two respects, these SOLITARY NUDE FIGURES interfere with the telling of the stories.

Firstly, because the need to accomodate them reduces the available spacee by about three-quarters.

SECONDLY, because whereas the story is about creation -- and above all, about the cration of large family units that continue to expand over many generations -- these MALE FIGURES posit a different and MORE EXCLUSIVE kind of social order.

There is LITTLE CONSENSUS as to the significance of the IGNUDI.

Some scholars believe they are purely DECORATIVE.

Others think that they are ANGELS.

Others think they are mediators between the human and divine realms.