The Modern Copy: Dante, Ariosto, and Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling

Abstract

AT THE CENTER OF THE SISTINE CHAPEL CEILING , Michelangelo has painted God creating Eve from Adam’s side (fig. 1). About to go on sabbatical, God hands creativity off to the human couple. He blesses and bids them to increase and multiply, to reproduce and make copies of themselves. In this central scene Michelangelo has himself created an emblem of modernity: the condition of human making that knows itself to be secondary and distinct from a historically prior and authoritative act of creation. This is the self-aware modernity that emerged in and has come to define Michelangelo’s own epoch. Men and women of the Renaissance recognized their difference and distance from classical antiquity and its godlike creators, and, in that same moment, they recognized themselves as the makers of their own culture. Modernity has been the condition of Western culture ever since, and it comports a double, Janusfaced attitude, toward past and future. The modern maker feels his or her works to be so many copies of past creations. Because the latter belong to a now closedoff past, they coalesce into the unity, prestige, and sacrality of a canon: the historical remove of modernity can thus seem like an ontological one. So many copies: because the modern is also oriented to a open-ended future, this secondary creativity acknowledges its own tendency toward proliferation and multiplicity. It acknowledges, too, its own supersession in the course of time. The modern’s creations fall into an indefinitely expanding series, like the generations of human reproduction itself, whose offspring, all based on the same model of