Jonah in the Sistine Chapel
Enter the Sistine Chapel through the main door (which you are not allowed to do these days) and you will be confronted with Michelangelo's Day of Judgement above the altar. At the bottom left the dead are being resurrected from their graves. Above them, the saved are on their way upwards: on the right the damned are being taken by Charon over the river Styx to face Minos, judge of the damned.
Almost more striking, on the ceiling above the image of Christ, is a vast image of Jonah.
Jonah, being nibbled by a fish that is surely too small to have swallowed him, lies back under the gourd tree and looks at the ceiling showing those scenes from Genesis.   So, as on those early sarcophagi, the story of Jonah is linked very powerfully to the idea of resurrection, shown here by the raising of the dead and the image of the resurrected Christ himself. And as we have seen on the Jonah sarcophagus, Michelangelo and his patrons were comfortable with including pagan references to help the story along. But what about those persistent early images of water?
The final panel on that ceiling being gazed at by Jonah is an image of the Flood. As we have seen on the Jonah sarcophagus, the story of Noah shows the world swept clean and reborn.
A footnote to the Sistine Chapel frescoes, and particularly to the dominant position of Jonah. In his book Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel Andrew Graham-Dixon considers the biblical portrayal of Jonah: a difficult, recalcitrant character, unwilling to obey orders. Could Michelangelo, Graham-Dixon wonders, be portraying himelf?
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