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The alchemy of timeJosefina Alczaraa Research fellow at the Centre for Theater Studies, National Institute of Fine Arts, Mexico City

To cite this Article Alczar, Josefina(1994) 'The alchemy of time', Third Text, 8: 27, 3 6To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/09528829408576482URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528829408576482

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The Alchemy of TimeJosefina Alczar

The Tiber, the cosmic river from whence all comes and to which all returns , h asbeen, according to legend, a mute witness to the alchemy of postmodern timeswhich allows Michelangelo, the genius of the Renaissance, to be reborn.For centuries the Sistine Chapel has sheltered M ichelangelo's famous frescoes.Like the sham an, Michelangelo reaches the sky in a single s tride; to him, saysMircea Eliade, there is no great distance between the sky and the earth; hecommunicates with the gods as man did before the Fall when he lived in paradise.But man, expelled from eternity, encountered time; and time, merciless evenagainst works of art, left its unmistakable trace on those voluptuous and stronglydefined bodies that inhabit the celestial vault.The votive fire of tapers and candles offered in prayers to attain grace fromGod, and the incense smoke charged with raising the prayer to the sky,impregnated the Chapel's walls with soot, and the monumental figuresMichelangelo formed became shaded . And from the heavens descended the dewof clouds, wetting its walls as if they were an open, thirsty mouth. And thatspiritual air which is inhaled in the Chapel, that b reath of life which Michelangelowould masterly condense in the union of two forefingers joining the divine withthe worldly, mingled for years with dirt and dust; thus, slowly, the four elementsjoined into Michelangelo's work in silent tribute. Throughout the centuries, themonum ental murals transformed themselves: to Michelangelo's capricious shapeswere added the caprices of time. Works of art undergo, in their own way, asMarguerite Yourcenar says, the equivalent to weariness, to ageing, to m isfortune.At the age of thirty-three, Michelangelo began work on the Chapel at PopeJulius H's instance. While painting his immortal frescoes, lying on his back onhigh platforms, his head always facing upwards and the paint falling in his eyesand face, Michelangelo did not imagine that his work would have so long alifetime, nor, perhaps, did he imagine that he himself would live for so manyyears.In his latter days, Michelangelo perceived that the inward fire which in thepast had kindled his passionate spirit was slowly going out; that his dry andcrooked body was becoming slow and awkw ard; and that his face was changingas Rilke said: "ther e are m en wh o use the same face for years, naturally it wears

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off, it gets dirty, wrinkled, it stretches like the gloves we have used on a tr ip ".It was not until he grew old that Michelangelo was able to fully understandthe Cumaean Sibyl, one of the five Sibyls who, along with the seven prophets,are the largest figures in the S istine Chapel's vault; each sitting on an ample throneinside a niche, they stand out individually and reflect great vitality of m ovementand elevated spirit.The enigmatic character of the Sibyls, prophetesses of antiquity, alwaysfascinated Michelangelo. It was believed that sibyls came from Asia, where Apollohad numerous oracles. In the Book of Proverbs of the Old Testament, wisdomis represented by the feminine personification of the prophetic spirit. The sayingsabout wom en are one of the m any sources from which m essianic prophecies wereextracted among both Jews, and later, Christians. Michelangelo was able to choosefrom a score of sibyls whose names and legends occurred in popular imagery.Yet the Sibyl who captivated M ichelangelo the most was the Cum aean Sibyl.It is said that Apollo was greatly in love with her, and that on one occasion hepromised to grant her a wish; the Sibyl asked of him as many years of life asgrains of sand that she could hold in her hand. Apollo granted her wish, butthe prophetess forgot to ask him for everlasting youth at the same time. So theSibyl reached old age but could not die.In a poem alluding to the fact that time w ould not be able to destroy the Sibyl,Goethe says:

Thus must you remain,for you cannot escape from yourself;thus spoke the Sibyls,thus the prophets.It is said that the Cumaean Sibyl reached the age of one thousand years andthat she wrote her prophetic sentences on palm leaves which she left by the

entrance to her cave, at the mercy of the wind. Michelangelo was thirty-five yearsold whe n he pain ted the Sibyl. Devotee as he was of human beau ty as a symbolof divinity, it was difficult for him to imagine a faded and w ithered body in whichthe divine breath with th e vigour and vitality pertaining to a prophetess could dwell. He could not even conceive of the changes and damage that timewould w ork on a hum an body after a thousand years, and with great restlessnesshe asked himself w hethe r time wou ld also damage the soul. Finally, Michelangelodecided to represent the Cumaean Sibyl as a slovenly woman of withered face,but enormous and strong musculature, apparently engrossed in spiritual tasks.When Michelangelo grew old he was able to observe in his own body themetamorphosis, the true transmutation that time wrought on him. How manytimes, sitting on a fountain's rim, was he not surprised at seeing his own reflectionup on the crystalline water, and thou ght he saw an intruder, a stranger u surpinghis body.Michelangelo made use of m emory to look at his life, as in a game of mirrorsupo n w hich the essence of his being was reflected in multiple ways in an endlesssuccession of masks where he appea red fragm ented, split. However, despite hislong life, it seemed to him to have passed away in the w inking of an eye; time'sfleetingness amazed him, the limited duration of hum an beings. But in this comingand going of memories, he invoked Michelangelo the sculptor, Michelangelo thepoet, Michelangelo the architect, Michelangelo the painter, and then he reflectedon the creating and fertile principle of time: time passes, but creates in passing.

As he walked along the banks of the Tiber, bearing his eighty-nine years upo nhimself, Michelangelo remembered his young body's beauty and sensuality; a

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beauty he would so much adm ire, as those twenty naked epicurean youths w holook on history from the Chapel's vault attest. The images of his youth wouldthrong into his mem ory, and with great am azement and disquiet at finding himselfso different he would ask himself: Am I the same or another? Can there be identityin so much difference?... Meanwhile, the murmuring Tiber whispered outHeraclitus' sentence: One cannot bathe twice in the same river.Memory has the power of reproducing remembrances, of recollecting themagain and again, but with so much coming and going, remembrances are rubbedaway, w orn off, they get blurry or are simply forgotten. Then their restorationbegins: something is added h ere, som ething m ended there, this is deleted, thatis botched; after a while, patches get confused with real remembrances, memorydoes not distinguish any more the original from the added; but do thoseremembrances move us the less? No they excite and h urt the same or m orethan before, for now m emories adjust or adapt themselves to wishes, to whims,to the necessities of each m om ent. The past is restored reinve nted.Collective memory must restore its memories if it wants to avoid their beinglost in Lethe's waters or perished, overwhelmed by tim e's deluge. Social memoryis like No ah 's A rk: it safeguards the m emories required for its cyclic restoration.

But each age, each culture, each tradition, as Herm ann Hesse says, has its owntone, has the sweetness and atrocities, beauties and cruelties it needs. In theCouncil of Trent, still in Michelangelo's lifetime, the morality of the frescoes inthe apse known as the Last Judgment was discussed: they w ere includedin the 'Index of Forbidden Images', and it was ordered that their naked bodiesbe covered with veils and vine leaves. A braghetoni (as painters in charge of sucha prud ish task w ere called), Daniel da Volterra, pain ted veils over M ichelangelo'snudes. Furthermore, in the eighteenth century, this chaste coating was completedby the brush of Esteban Pozzi. Thus Michelangelo's murals gradually adapted,adjusted themselves to the taste of different times.Michelangelo himself recovered for his own age what he considered mostimportant from Greek cu lture. The very idea of the Renaissance is based on thefact that history moves on in cycles and is therefore reborn. Influenced by theGreek scholars who arrived in Italy after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 andwho gave a decisive impulse to the knowledge of Greek classics such as H omer,Plato, Herodotus, Xenophon and others who were translated into Latin,Michelangelo was able to rediscover humanity and place man in the centre ofhistory as a privileged source of meaning.The nude must have seemed the true secret of Greek culture to Michelangelo.Beautiful naked bodies like Adam and Eve in paradise, broad-shouldered, withfleshy, full members, who, in a real delirium of movement, become lewd andsensual: symbols of a timeless, everlastingly vigorous and exceptional beauty.

Michelangelo's epoch rescues Greek humanism: it adapts it, moulds it ontoculture, onto the new Renaissance spirit: it is the beginning of the modern world.The fundamental purpose of Renaissance art is that of communication betweenmen, and the fresco is one of the most important means of visual communicationof the age. In the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo uses fresco but he undermines,transgresses the laws of perspective, of proportion, and of architectural structure.The vault's design is a visual sham. It gives the impression of carved columns andenormous arches from wall to wall. It puts violence into proportion by usingdifferent scales for the human figure: the Prophets and Sibyls are the mostprom inent figures. By means of these contrivances, Michelangelo breaks with thetraditional idea of narrative sequence, he achieves a unitary image where figuresrelate to each other, where light and colour express depth and allow the spectatorto be in the centre of those images that appear before him in the open sky.

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Almost five hun dre d years after Michelangelo fashioned in the Sistine Chapel'svault a human race resembling that of Eden and the pre-Christian world, as remoteand out of time as possible, the collective m emory at the thresho ld of the thirdmillennium decided to recover, to restore the paintings.Apollo, in love with the C umaean Sibyl, granted her the w ish that time shouldnot destroy her. The postmodern era, captivated by the past, makes use of scienceand technology to rescue the past from time's stealth.In 1980, the work on the restoration of the vault of the Sistine Chapel was begununder the sponsorship of Nippon Television Network; in 1990, it was the turnof the frescoes of the Last Judgment, located in the apse of the Chapel. In April1994, Pope John Paul II headed the inauguration of the works and their openingto the public.For centuries, generation after generation, it was believed that Michelangelowas a painter of dark and gloomy images. Restorers of past centuries added shadesand sheens they supposed that time had blotted out. The postmodern era,however, is sure of possessing the necessary technique to uncover the 'real'Michelangelo.After a decade of cleaning and restoration, light, bright colours appeared wherethere had only been shadows; and after removing the veils and mantles withwhich the chaste, prudish sixteenth and seventeenth century vision had wrappedsome of the lively bodies that M ichelangelo painted , generous feminine breastsas well as placid virile organs appeared. Centuries of dust, soot, soil and humiditydisappeared. Michelangelo's frescoes rejuvenated by more than 400 years. Thealchemy of time closes another circle: a new Michelangelo surfaces.The Italian Renaissance inaugurated the modern world bent on rescuing Greekculture. The postmo dern w orld recovers its infancy in an obsessive m anner, andin the origins of m odernity looks for causes to explain its own destiny, becausein its desire to reach the future, modernity lost sight of its en ds . The collectivemem ory of postm odern times ha s radically transformed its capacity to store andrecover its own memories, Noah's Ark has become a set of silicon computermicrocircuits.Every single step in the restoration of Michelangelo's frescoes to the smallestdetail has been recorded by the Japanese television com pany 's camera lenses.In the age of image and spectacle, the new Michelangelo may be acquired in theform that one chooses: on video, poster, m agazine, t-shirt, postcard, or key ring.Technological achievements allow postmodern times to reconstruct their past andto repeat it in an unceasing simulacrum.Time and space in the postmodern era acquire different coordinates. Time seemsto disappear by repeating itself again and again, and becomes the metaphor ofnonsense . Space shows itself ubiquitous, the here and the there link via satellite.Postmodern m emory recovers the 'rea l', the 'original' Michelangelo he whodiscovered in old age his image reflected in the water and thought he saw astranger us urping his body; he w ho w ould surely repeat, after Rimbaud: "I amanother" , if only he could contemplate the different facets that h is work has takenover 500 years.The Sistine Chapel's vault is still sheltering Michelangelo's frescoes: where therewas darkness and deep shadows now appear luminous and shining colours:history is rewritten. The Tiber, cosmic river from whence all comes an d to whichall returns, has been , according to legend, a mute w itness to the alchemy of time...Translated from the Spanishby Ar Bartra

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