'The Last Judgment' By Michelangelo Buonarroti

The Last Judgment is a fresco by Michelangelo Buonarroti in Sistine Chapel around 1534-1541, depicting one of the most famous scenes in Hebrew Bible. The Last Judgment is about Christ judging human sins. In this fresco,Michelangelo exhibits the beauty of human beings and his desire for a just and fair society. His desire can be seen in every detail in this fresco. In describing the beauty of human world, he uses strict mathematical support in depicting the 3 dimensional space, and he uses the chiaroscuro which can describe humans’ world more pictorially. Also, the overwhelmingly impressive nudeness of human and divinity can not only manifest the human beauty, but also can express the equality of all humans.
The whole fresco can be vertically
He depicts the 3 dimensional space with skills of vantage point, especially in depicting the people lining up, waiting for the judgments. Even more impressively, Michelangelo draws more complex shapes in describing the people who are lining up, such as branches. By making the branches blur, Michelangelo leaves readers a leeway of imagination of how many people are waiting for the judgments. Also, by setting lining up people as reference, the clouds or even the blue sky are three dimensional. Moreover, Michelangelo tries to keeps the proportion in the perspective when people are standing below the fresco and looking up. Under his portrait, the figures in the top are slightly larger and the figures in the bottom are slightly smaller. Similar to the skill of vanishing point, the slight variation of figure’s body can not only keep the proportions for people looking up, but also exhibit the holiness of people sent to heaven and divinity, and evilness of
Even more than that, Michelangelo expresses his wish for the fairness and equality in the fresco. Michelangelo does not divide the goodness and evilness into obviously separate group; dissimilar to most of the previous art work of the last judgments, he mixes those together, creating a chaos of all divert people. Further, irrelevant to the social statues, all males, females and even angels are almost nude. Even, people thought it offended the holiness of Christianity and Jesus. Michelangelo describes his craving for the equality by displaying nakedness all characters, regardless of their social statues or identities. The human emotions are portrayed vividly by depicting the human bodies. The divergence of human reactions is life-likely illustrated: people who are judged to Heaven are stretching their hands, eagerly for the entrance; people who are sent to Heaven are shading their faces, regretting for their behaviors; nervousnesses of people waiting for the judgment can be easily discovered by stretching heads or turning around to avoiding seeing the crucial and impersonal judgment. This feature can not only be found in depicting the human being, but also in depicting the divinity. Unlike most of the other illustration of Jesus, Michelangelo depicts Jesus as a strong young man. The strong human-like body is less merciful but more august, which represents Michelangelo’s desire of fairness and justice.