This book systematically examines the ways in which the sun was understood metaphorically, symbolically, and scientifically in a range of texts and images available to Michelangelo during the period in which he designed and painted the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel (1534-41). Observing that Michelangelo’s Last Judgment differs from previous renditions in that it offers a circular composition with figures rising and falling in a clockwise pattern around a figure of Christ before a sun-like mandorla, Valerie Shrimplin hypothesizes that the artist might have had a heliocentric model of the universe in mind. Each of her ten chapters addresses one or more aspects of solar symbolism and/or cosmology in relation to the Last Judgment theme. While all of the chapters effectively synthesize current scholarship and provide new insights, some are more successful than others in relating their contents to Michelangelo’s fresco. The author also addresses topics outside her main theme that help elucidate Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. Some of these observations are quite illuminating.

After an introductory chapter that lays out general themes, Shrimplin illustrates the ways in which cosmology affected Christian iconography and, in particular, visual representations of the Last Judgment. The author shows how Last Judgment scenes reflected the actual physical positions of earth, Heaven (above), and Hell (below) according to the antiquated “flat-earth” cosmological model in use when the iconography was first developed in the sixth century. In these traditional compositions, Heaven and Hell are physical places in which pleasurable events or torment occur. She shows that by the early sixteenth century, the physical connections were much diminished. Not only was there a different cosmological topography, but more emphasis was placed on psychological rather than physical concerns. The author links this change to the growing importance of Protestant-Catholic debates that focused on man’s interior being and on the nature of salvation. As she puts it:

…from the time of the medieval acceptance of the spherical earth, the timing and location of the Last Judgment event became increasingly questioned as traditional concepts were rendered somewhat untenable in physical terms. Deriving perhaps from an emphasis on universal salvation as opposed to the punishment of the damned, the idea of Heaven and Hell as psychological states rather than physical places seems to have been examined by Michelangelo in an interpretation reflecting Renaissance spirituality rather than medieval threat (31-32).

Shrimplin usefully traces the cosmological elements in a series of previous Last Judgments (even more of which are listed in a marvelous appendix with dates and photographic references for those not reproduced in her book), noting the increasing emphasis in the Late Middle Ages on left and right vs. up and down, which she attributes to the general “relaxation of strict cosmological structures” (72) as well as to an “increased questioning of biblical cosmology” (73). She concludes that “some departures from the established ‘world order’ become evident, and these adjustments, with the growing debate on the traditional view of the cosmos, provide a plausible precedent for Michelangelo’s adjustment of the iconography of his own version of the Last Judgment scene in accordance with the increasing cosmological debate in the sixteenth century” (73). Of course it is possible that artists were not questioning traditional cosmology, but were rather simply paying less and less overall attention to cosmological issues. More discussion of artistic motivations for compositional and iconographic change, including more analysis of prior Last Judgments exhibiting circular configurations of the blessed around Christ (as on a medal by Bertoldo di Giovanni or Fra Angelico’s Last Judgment in the Museo di San Marco, Florence) or subsequent Last Judgments adopting characteristics of this format from Michelangelo (as in Pontormo’s San Lorenzo frescos or Bastianino’s in the Cathedral of Ferrara), would also have been welcome. Such comparisons suggest that even more striking than the circular groupings around Christ is the fact that Michelangelo represented these figures in motion.

The fourth chapter on Michelangelo’s version concentrates on three features: the grouping of the figures in two concentric circles around Christ; Christ’s sun-like halo; and the compositional emphasis on Christ’s thigh. Shrimplin reiterates previous scholars’ interpretations of these features, noting that most do not adequately emphasize cosmology or the important Early Christian analogy between Christ and Apollo as the Sol Iustitiae. The following four chapters attempt to address these observations—especially Christ’s solar mandorla—from the points of view of religious symbolism, literature, philosophy, and science. The author discusses how the Early Christian beardless Christ developed from the pagan Apollo, citing many examples—like a beautiful fifth-century Syrian ivory (fig. 76)—unfortunately, however, Michelangelo could have seen few of them. Equally perplexing are the more general discussions of classical imagery, such as the ancient paintings in the Domus Aurea (142-43). While it is known that Michelangelo visited these (along with many other artists, after they were discovered in the late fifteenth century), it is not clear to this reader how such works are relevant to the argument at hand. Highly relevant for Michelangelo, however, were Florentine representations of the beardless Christ from the Quattrocento and early Cinquecento (such as the one in Andrea da Castagno’s Resurrection in the refectory of Sant’Apollonia, Florence), though these bear little relationship to ancient solar symbolism.

Shrimplin’s discussion of literary sources reasonably concentrates on Dante, long acknowledged as an important reference point for Michelangelo—both as artist and poet. She admirably delves into the complicated subject of Dante’s geocentric cosmology, concluding that Michelangelo’s solar Christ might be usefully compared to Dante’s “central point of light” (Paradiso 23:95) around which the spirits revolve, and which had been represented in solar terms by previous illustrators of Dante’s text (one cannot help but wonder what Cristoforo Landino’s Neoplatonic commentary had to say about some of the passages to which she refers). Similarly, her discussion of Neoplatonic sources collects the many “solar” metaphors used by Ficino and others to describe the idea of “the one” as a central point. Although at times she takes some of these analogies too far in associating the cave in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment with Plato’s cave, her basic conclusion that Christian Neoplatonism also plays a role in Michelangelo’s late works is sound and worth emphasizing. Her work here raises the interesting issue of how philosophical metaphors may be translated into visual images.

In some respects these chapters on philosophical and literary sources pave the way for Shrimplin’s main argument, which is that Michelangelo could indeed have known and incorporated Copernicus’s heliocentric theory, even though De revolutionibus was not published until 1543. Following the interpretation of S. K. Heninger, she discusses the Neoplatonic undercurrent in Copernicus’s cosmology. She convincingly argues that his theory was known to the intellectual and cultural elite, including reformers Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon, and especially to Pope Clement VII, who, according to a book inscription in a manuscript in Munich, asked to have it explained to him just before commissioning Michelangelo’s fresco. Less sustainable is her contention that, “During the years 1533-41, which saw the inception and completion of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, Copernicus’ theory of the sun-centered universe was not only well known in the Vatican, but quite simply was not regarded as being in conflict with Catholic doctrine” (273) and her conclusion that “Copernicus’ scientific theory acted as a precipitating factor” (274) to pull together in the mind of Michelangelo the abundant body of solar symbolism then circulating in Italy. In other words, Vatican circles and Michelangelo would have approved of Copernicus’s heliocentric universe to the extent that they regarded it as a suitable replacement for the geocentric cosmology normally found in Last Judgment scenes: “like the earlier examples of the Last Judgment, the ordering of the complex scene was achieved by relating it to the contemporary view of the cosmological structure of the universe. It was simply the cosmological framework that had changed” (274).

To this reader, taking the step from knowledge of or interest in Copernicus’s theories to approval is risky in this context given the almost total absence of positive documentation regarding the theory’s acceptance by anyone other than those involved in its publication. The most that can be claimed is that it was not condemned publicly and in print by Catholics—though in a manuscript text published by Eugenio Garin, written about 1544, it appears that a measure of public opposition at the Council of Trent was planned but not followed through upon—possibly because other more pressing issues of heresy were engaging the Catholic church at the time. If one were to use this same “negative” reasoning, one could say that the fact that Michelangelo’s contemporaries did not criticize his Last Judgment for its "heliocentricity"—even though they criticized it for various other reasons, including breaches of decorum—shows that the work was not understood in these terms. For further discussion of these issues, the interested reader might look at Eugenio Garin, “Alle origini della polemica anticopernicana,” Studia Copernicana 6 (1973): 31-42; Edward Rosen, “Was Copernicus’ Revolutions approved by the Pope?” Journal of the History of Ideas 36 (1975): 531-42; and more recently, Robert S. Westman, “The Copernicans and the Churches,” God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science, ed. David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), 76-113.

The concluding chapters return to the concept of the central point in relation both to heliocentric cosmology and to the passage in Revelation 19:16 that describes Christ’s thigh as a metaphor for his kingship. She proposes a discolored point on Christ’s right thigh as the place at which the fresco’s plumb line was hung and the pivot around which the concentric circles revolve. The biblical passage is a highly suggestive and original contribution to Michelangelo scholarship, though her analysis might have been enhanced by a review of relevant medieval and Renaissance commentaries (as well as a more thorough discussion of earlier images emphasizing Christ’s thigh, even outside of Last Judgment contexts). Her original proposal that Dante recognized Satan’s thigh as an antithesis to this heavenly point might also have been further supported by such documentation. What importance might this reference have had for Michelangelo’s contemporaries? In the same regard, the author’s references to the All Saints’ Eve Mass said at the unveiling of the frescos should have been to pre-Tridentine rites.

Overall Sun Symbolism and Cosmology in Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment” successfully illustrates the history and general importance of solar symbolism in the Italian Renaissance—it is the first general study of this important topic—while suggesting the influence such symbolic genres might have had on Michelangelo. Moreover, the idea of a heavenly central point (as in Dante’s or Ficino’s geocentric universe) is well documented, at least on a conceptual level in literature and philosophy, as are broader cosmological patterns in Last Judgment iconography. Shrimplin furthermore demonstrates the plausibilty of Michelangelo’s having known of heliocentric cosmological theories, including that of Copernicus, though, for this reader at least, she does not succeed in showing that he was in a position to use them in his art.