Sistina
It's hard to stop thinking about the Sistine Chapel, especially when my own ceiling is so austere and empty. The art is nothing short of genius: within that cavernous hush, the walls hum with those deep rusty colours that braved the centuries, the quiet pride in human form, that intricacy of the paint strokes. I hardly dared to speak, fearing fragility.
But I'll say this much: I didn't like the Sistine. Yes, the art made me want to weep for its beauty. Michaelangelo, Michael of Angels, indeed. But it's a macabre kind of genius. Everything was ornate to the point of desperation, grandiose to the cusp of ostentatious. It was a presumptuous beauty, as though it were sufficient, that the columns soared skyward and arched into gracious ceilings, to convince me of God. As though sheer aesthetic detail could intimate the divine presence, as though I could - should! - be cowed into belief.
It takes a while to realize it, but there are no truly happy faces in the whole of the Sistine; or if there are, they're a severe minority. Even the angels don't smile, only stare soberly, sternly. And at worst, there are those chillingly human faces, agape with condemnation and horror. Bearing in mind my hedonism, the realization struck a dissonance in me. Thus, I was glad to step out from the chapel, deeply unsettled, into that everpresent consumerism: prints of the Sistine ceiling for 10 euros, or Michaelangelo's genius bastardized into keychains, postcards, mugs, and those shiny glass shelves of pseudo-relics. I liked the commercial mockery for its secularity, for the affirmation that we are no longer that breed of cowed Christians. Or so I hope.
But I read an article this morning, that football is the "new religion". To that I say: As far as I'm concerned, people can worship incontinent lemmings if they want, as long as there remains art, and all that is beautiful, in this misguided world of ours.