A picture where fingers touch. The Creation of Adam is one of the most famous images in the history of world painting. Michelangelo

The most famous fragment of the ceiling painting Sistine Chapel is The Creation of Adam, a fresco painting painted by Michelangelo Buonarroti.

The greatest emphasis is placed on the figures of God and Adam. God is shown, as it were, in a form floating in the fog, composed of draperies and other figures. The form rests on angels who fly without wings. Their movement is visible in the drapery that flutters beneath them. God is depicted as an elderly but muscular man with gray hair And long beard, which also emphasizes forward movement. This image is very different from the imperial images of God that have been created in the West since late antiquity. Instead of the royal robes of an all-powerful ruler, he is dressed in a light tunic that leaves most of his arms and legs open. You could say it's much closer to an ordinary person a portrait of God, because he is not shown as an untouchable person far from ordinary people.

In contrast to the active figure of God, Adam is depicted as almost inactive. He responds sluggishly to God's inevitable touch. A touch that would not only give life force to Adam, but would give life to all of humanity. Adam's body forms a concave shape, which seems to reflect the shape of God's body, which is, on the contrary, in a convex position. Perhaps this correspondence of forms emphasizes the idea that man is like God and was created in the image and likeness of God.

Many people wonder - who is depicted in the picture to the right of God? Female figure, which is presumably important given its privileged location - under the hand of God. The traditional thought is that this is Eve, future wife Adam, who waits aside until she is created from his rib. Later, another theory emerged that it was actually the Virgin Mary who occupied this place of honor. Next to her is a child, possibly the Christ child. This view is supported by the placement of God's fingers on the child. This is the type of finger movement the priest would use to lift the Eucharist during Mass. Since Catholic theology holds that the Eucharist is the Body of Christ, this theological understanding can be embodied in this painting. If this last interpretation is correct, then the Creation of Adam is also connected with the future coming of Christ, who comes to reconcile man with God after Adam committed sin.

Overall, the picture shows several characteristic features Michelangelo's painting style: excellent rendering of the position and movement of bodies, the use of muscular, semi-rotated figures, which are often found in sculpture. It is important to remember that Michelangelo was also a good sculptor.

The creation of Adam is one of the greatest pearls Western art, although it and the rest of the Sistine Chapel ceiling suffered from the effects of centuries of smoke, causing the ceiling to darken significantly. Cleaning of the ceiling began only in 1977. The result after its completion in 1989 was amazing. Everything that seemed dark and monotonous became bright and acquired its former liveliness. Difference appearance The frescoes before and after cleaning were so large that some, at first, refused to believe that these were the same, unrestored works by Michelangelo. Today we have a wonderful opportunity to admire the colorful palette of Michelangelo and reflect on the events that he beautifully painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

The fresco painting measures 570 cm x 280 cm, painted around 1511, in Italy, in the Vatican.

Hands (fragment).

The painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican was carried out by Michelangelo Buonarroti, an outstanding master of the Renaissance, almost single-handedly from 1508 to 1512. - in record short terms for such a large-scale work. “The Creation of Adam,” one of the central frescoes of the mural, is well known not only to art connoisseurs, but also to any active Internet user: few paintings can compete with it in the number of treatments in photo editors posted on the Internet.

The most common interpretation of the plot of the fresco: God gives Adam vital energy. But other meanings can be seen in The Creation of Adam. Some interpretations are interesting, especially if the author provides convincing evidence for his version. It is known that Michelangelo was well versed in anatomy. You can’t see what you don’t know yourself, so it’s not surprising that doctors analyze the picture from the standpoint of anatomy.

In 1990, an article by Dr. Frank Lynn Meshberger1 was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Dr. Meshberger refers to Michelangelo's sonnets, in which the master assigns a dominant role to the mind when describing the act of creativity:
And the highest genius will not add
One thought to the fact that marble itself
It conceals in abundance - and that’s all we need
A hand obedient to reason will reveal.

“A hand obedient to reason” and the thought hidden in the material are the key words, according to Dr. Meshberger. He claims that on famous fresco Adam already appears alive before the viewer, that is, creation, as such, took place earlier, and the picture captures the moment Adam was endowed with intelligence. Moreover, the lines in the image of God surrounded by angels and the cloud of God’s Glory (pink “cloak”) correspond to the outlines of grooves, convolutions and other anatomical structures on a slice of the human brain.

Anatomical structures in a longitudinal section of the brain.

A look at the fresco “The Creation of Adam” from the perspective of neuroanatomy.

Dr Stefano Di Bella and colleagues2 believe that a more accurate title for the fresco would be “The Birth of Adam”. In the rocky landscape against which Adam is depicted, they see the outlines of female body, and in the outlines of the group with central figure God - the uterus after childbirth, which is located exactly above the womb of the intended woman, i.e. in the projection of the place where the uterus is located and from where a person is born.

Contours of the female body (left) and a longitudinal section of the woman’s pelvis with the uterus located there (right).

Overlay of the fresco “The Creation of Adam” on a sketch of a female body.

Overlay of the fresco “The Creation of Adam” on a sketch of a cross section of a woman’s pelvis.

Both versions look quite reasonable and plausible. At the same time, it is difficult to imagine that one person, even with diligent anatomy studies, would grasp external resemblance uterus and brain and decided to encrypt both organs in one image. Michelangelo may not have even suspected that in the fresco he created you could see a brain or a uterus, but that is the power of great work art, that it awakens the imagination, everyone finds something of their own in it. The truth is in the eyes of the beholder of such a work, and sometimes it does not necessarily coincide with the true intention of the artist.

1 Meshberger FL. An interpretation of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam based on neuroanatomy. JAMA. 1990;264(14):1837-41.
2 Di Bella S, Taglietti F, Iacobuzio A, Johnson E, Baiocchini A, Petrosillo N. The "delivery" of Adam: a medical interpretation of Michelangelo. Mayo Clin Proc. 2015;90(4):505-8.

Hands reaching out to each other is the most famous (at least from the screensaver of Nokia phones) fragment of the fresco of the Sistine Chapel. But in Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam" it is not his hands that are more important, but... his brain

FRESCO "Creation of Adam" 280 x 570 cm
Years of creation: 1511–1512
Located in the Sistine Chapel in Rome

This order was immediately disliked by the artist, who preferred sculpture to painting and had little experience in creating frescoes. Michelangelo suspected that the idea to entrust him with a job in which he was not good was given to Pope Julius II by envious people. And although you can’t argue with the most powerful customer in Europe, out of a sense of contradiction, the master signed the contract like this: “Michelangelo, sculptor.” Sculpture, according to Michelangelo’s definition, is “an art that is realized through diminution.” And if you look at the fresco through the eyes of a sculptor, “cutting off everything unnecessary” (as Rodin puts it), then unexpected outlines appear in the image.

The main part of the painting is nine scenes from Genesis, “The Creation of Adam” is the fourth of them. The action on the fresco froze a second before it started biblical history homo sapiens , when God, who created man in his own image, “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul” (Gen. 2:7). But Michelangelo has his own interpretation: in the fresco, Adam is already able to breathe and move, but is still an unfinished creation. What was missing for the first man to become like God? As art critic and professor at Temple University, USA, Marsha Hall writes: “From the point of view Italian Renaissance, endowing a person with the ability to think meant being created in the image and likeness of God.” Some researchers believe that here Michelangelo depicted the Creator as the source of intelligence literally - in the form of a brain.

1. Adam. His pose almost mirrors the pose of the Creator - Adam is like God - only it is weak-willed and relaxed. Energy and life are poured into Adam by the divine stream of consciousness.

2. Brain. American physician Frank Lynn Meshberger was the first to note the similarity of the outlines of the cloak fluttering around God and his companions with the contours human brain. This point of view was supported by a number of doctors and biologists. Michelangelo, according to his friend and biographer Giorgio Vasari, “was constantly engaged in anatomy, opening up corpses in order to discern the beginnings and connections of the skeleton, muscles, nerves and veins...” So the artist could well study in detail the contents of the skull. And during the Renaissance, there already existed ideas about the brain as the seat of the mind. It cannot be ruled out that in the fresco Michelangelo visualized the idea: the creative principle in the person of God with the angels is, first of all, a thinking center.

3. Furrows, demarcating parts of the brain. Meshberger and his followers believe that in the fresco the artist visually identified the main parts of the thinking organ and the lines corresponding to the lateral sulcus (separates the temporal lobes), the deep central sulcus (separates the frontal lobe from the parietal lobe) and the parieto-occipital sulcus (separates the parietal lobe from the occipital lobe) .

4. Varoliev Bridge. Contains pathways for nerve impulses between the spinal cord and brain. The 16th-century master hardly knew about these functions, but he depicted the outlines of the pons in a similar way.

5. Pituitary gland. Meshberger believed that the artist highlighted the anterior and posterior lobes of this organ associated with the endocrine system.

6. Two vertebral arteries. They are as sinuous as the fluttering fabric in the fresco.

7. Middle frontal gyrus. Biologist Konstantin Efetov believes that the fresco represents the outer surface of the brain. In the middle gyrus of the frontal lobe there is an oculomotor center that simultaneously rotates the head and eyes. In Michelangelo, the contours of this gyrus correspond to the outlines of the Creator's hand, which is naked, although the sleeves of the tunic are long. This is a reference to the biblical: “To whom was the arm of the Lord revealed?” (Isa. 53:1). According to Christian tradition, these words of the prophet are about Jesus, the new Adam, who will come to atone for the sin of his forefather.

8. Supramarginal gyrus. According to modern science, controls complex human movements. On the fresco, the silhouette of a woman’s head repeats the outlines of this gyrus. Marsha Hall believes that the artist here depicted Sophia, the Divine Wisdom. The Bible says that Wisdom was with God when he created the world and people (Proverbs, chapter 8).

9. Angular gyrus. Its contours follow the contours of the child's head. Art critic Leo Steinberg believes that the boy whose shoulder is touched by God is the Christ child, foreseeing his fate.

ARTIST
Michelangelo Buonarroti

1475 - Born in Caprese (now Caprese Michelangelo, Tuscany) in the family of a judge.
1488–1489 - Studied painting with Domenico Ghirlandaio.
1489–1492 - Studied at the school of sculpture of Bertoldo di Giovanni in the gardens of Lorenzo the Magnificent.
1498–1499 - Sculpted the “Pieta” for St. Peter’s Basilica.
1501 - around 1504- Created a five-meter statue of “David” from a block of marble damaged by another sculptor.
1508–1512 - Painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
1534 - Finally moved from Florence to Rome.
1536–1541 - Worked on a wall painting " Last Judgment"in the Sistine Chapel.
1564 - Died of fever in Rome. He was buried in Florence in the Church of Santa Croce.

This fresco was created in 1511 (or thereabouts). It became the fourth of nine central compositions on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, dedicated to nine scenes from the book of Genesis of the Old Testament.

Let's remember the line related to this fresco:

And God created man in His own image

(Gen. 1:27) However, this is not entirely accurate. In a good way, here man has already been created, and therefore new nuances appear in the interpretation of the fresco.

It is very likely that there is a third in the plot of this work of art. main character, and it has direct relevance to neuroscience and neuroscience. Dr. Frank Lynn Meshberger, a gynecologist at St. John's in Anderson, Indiana, in an article published in 1990 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, An Interpretation of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam Based on Neuroanatomy, believes that this hero is the human brain.

Indeed, all of Michelangelo's works in the field fine arts- both painting and sculpture speak of the master’s excellent knowledge of human anatomy. Just remember the amazing work human body in "David". Even in his Lives of Artists, Michelangelo's contemporary and colleague Giorgio Vasari recalls that the artist often observed autopsies. This is what made it possible for Meshberger to suggest the presence of some hidden message in this fresco.

Here's what he writes himself:

The Creation of Adam fresco shows Adam and God moving towards each other, their hands outstretched, their fingers almost touching. One can imagine the “spark of life” jumping from God to Adam through the “synapse” between the index fingers. However, Adam is already alive, his eyes are open, and he is fully formed; but nevertheless, the picture tells us that Adam “receives” something from God. I believe there is a third "protagonist" in the fresco that has not previously been recognized. I will try to show using anatomical drawings by Frank Netter from The CIBA Collection of Medical Illustrations, Volume I - The Nervous System.

Let's follow Meshberger's thought.

Here are four drawings, numbered 1 to 4:

As you can see, the first and second drawings are very similar, as are the third and fourth. Numbers 1 and 3 are drawn from Frank Netter's atlas of neuroanatomy

Figure 6 (numbered according to the cited article) shows the left lateral surface brain and the sulci and convolutions that are present in the hemispheres. The Sylvian fissure, or lateral fissure, is a fissure that separates the hemispheres of the brain. Figure 1 - outline this illustration.

Figure 8 is a cross-section of the brain and spinal cord shown in Figure 7. Figure 3 is obtained from Figure 8 by removing the cerebellum and midbrain structures, as well as “bending” the spinal cord back from the “standard” anatomical position.

And now - surprise! Figures 2 and 4 are drawn... from the image of God and angels in Michelangelo's fresco. Figure 2 is obtained by drawing the outer “shell” and grooves, and Figure 4 is the outer “shell” and large lines on the figures of God and angels.

Don't believe me? See:

Thus, Meshberger believes that main meaning the frescoes are not the creation of Adam as such, but the endowment of him with reason, so that he “would be able to plan the best and highest” and “try to achieve everything.”

67 911

Art critic Marina Khaikina and psychoanalyst Andrei Rossokhin look at one painting and tell us about what they know and what they feel. For what? So that, (dis)agreeing with them, we realize more clearly own attitude to the picture, the plot, the artist and to ourselves.

"The Creation of Adam"(Sistine Chapel, Vatican City, Rome, 1508–1512) - the fourth of nine central compositions of the cycle of frescoes on the theme of the creation of the world, commissioned by Michelangelo Buonarroti to decorate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel by Pope Julius II.

“To live is to create”

Marina Khaikina, art critic

“Michelangelo painted God in the ancient spirit: he is real in his bodily and divine incarnation. Dressed in a simple pink tunic, God flies over the created world, surrounded by wingless angels. The female figure to his right is Eve, she is still awaiting the hour of her creation, but has already been conceived by God. During the flight, God turns, rushes towards Adam and stretches out his hand to him.

This movement towards one's creation embodies the energy of life that the Creator intends to transmit to man. The figure of the Creator is mirrored in the pose of the reclining Adam, created in his image and likeness. But at the same time, Adam’s pose also follows the outline of the rock: he is still only part of the landscape around him. There is literally not enough spark of vitality to breathe soul into him.

Hands almost meet. Michelangelo places this gesture at the very center of the fresco and pauses to enhance the impact of the images. We practically see how energy is transferred through the brush of God to the hand of man. Choosing this very moment from the history of the creation of man - the birth of the soul, Michelangelo equates it with creative insight. In his opinion, the ability to create and create is the most valuable gift that is given to a person from above.

Between two hands stretched out to each other, a miracle is performed that is inaccessible to our vision. This gesture was already seen in Leonardo da Vinci; but if the angel in his painting “Madonna in the Grotto” only pointed to a miracle, then here the gesture of God embodies it. Subsequently, this gesture will be repeated by many other artists - agreeing or arguing with Michelangelo’s faith in man and in the power of creativity.”

“We are born at the moment of parting”

Andrey Rossokhin, psychoanalyst

“The first thing I feel here is a moment of unique meeting, which is full of energy and strength. God rushes towards Adam to breathe life into him. Now their fingers will close - and the flaccid body will be born, gain strength, life, and fire will be lit in Adam’s eyes. But at the same time, I have a subtle feeling that God and his retinue are moving in the other direction, flying away from Adam. This is indicated by the figures of a woman and a baby; they seem to push away from him, and thereby set the reverse movement.

Why? I suppose that Michelangelo unconsciously painted here not a meeting, but the moment of parting that followed it. God personifies both the paternal and maternal principles at the same time, their union leads to the birth of a child - the baby Adam. The maternal principle of God is conveyed through the red veil, which I associate with the maternal womb, with the maternal universe, the womb, in which many future lives, potential human “I”s, are born. The hands of Adam and God stretched out towards each other are like an umbilical cord that was severed a moment ago, and it is this moment of separation that I observe in the picture.

And in this case, Adam’s melancholic pose conveys not the absence of life, but the sadness of parting. He does not yet know that only thanks to such a separation can he be born as a person, as a separate “I”. The fingers of God and Adam in the picture are like a painter's brush, and I think this is very important. Michelangelo unconsciously lives the story of separation from two sides - both as Adam and as the Creator.

I see here not only the sadness of a child abandoned by a parent, and the sadness of an artist forced to say goodbye to his brainchild, his painting. But also the artist’s determination to take this step. After all, only when he finds the strength to part with his creation will the painting be completed and be able to live its own life.”

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564), Italian sculptor, artist, architect, outstanding master of the Renaissance. All over the world, the name Michelangelo is associated with the frescoes of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the statues of David and Moses, the Cathedral of St. Peter's in Rome. In the art of Michelangelo enormous power embodied as deeply human ideals High Renaissance, as well as the tragic feeling of crisis in the humanistic worldview, characteristic of the late Renaissance era.