A three-part paper reveals how Michelangelo turned the Sistine Chapel into a reflection of his own mind. His art, like all great art, is a pictorial essay on the theme that only self-knowledge is true knowledge and that reality is inside our minds, not out. This was not as sacrilegious as it now sounds because if each of us is in the image of God, as Renaissance philosophers believed, each of us is a mirror of the cosmos. This explains moreover his interest in anatomy: he was searching inside for divine secrets.

The proof is in the insights of art-loving amateurs, insights that art experts have long dismissed or ignored. Yet, when their observations are combined, the truth becomes self-evident. Among the discoveries, for instance, is the only known self-portrait of Michelangelo as Michelangelo, fused into the torso of St. Peter.

Michelangelo's Art Through Michelangelo's Eyes (Sistine Chapel)
Part 1 of 3:   Download
Part 2 of 3:   Download
Part 3 of 3:   Download

Supplements linked to insights revealed in The Art Newspaper can be accessed below.

Michelangelo's self-portrait in St. Peter's torso  (June 2007)

Last Judgment: Compositional Sketches (May 2007)

Signorelli and his metamorphic portrait of Dante (November 2007) 

Durer's Hidden Faces (July/August 2007)

Diagram of Dante's profile in The Last Judgment           Michelangelo planned to use his own head in an early sketch