I always tell people to look at the loincloths before they look at anything else. Not because they are the most interesting part of the Last Judgment, but because once you notice them, you cannot stop noticing them: painted swags of grey and ochre cloth draped across bodies that were clearly not painted to wear any. Michelangelo built this fresco out of nearly four hundred figures twisting and falling and rising in the nude. A later hand went back in and dressed some of them. Once you know that, the wall stops looking like one artist’s vision and starts looking like an argument that never fully resolved.
A wall of naked bodies, unveiled in 1541
Michelangelo worked on the Last Judgment for roughly five years and unveiled it in October 1541, more than two decades after he had finished the ceiling above it. He was in his late sixties, painting for a Church that was, at that exact moment, under attack from the Reformation and in no mood to look complacent about sin. The composition he delivered showed nearly everyone nude, including the saints and martyrs standing closest to Christ, and it drew a reaction from inside the Vatican before it drew one from the wider public. According to Giorgio Vasari, the papal Master of Ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena, objected to the fresco while it was still being finished, calling it disgraceful that “in so sacred a place there should have been depicted all those nude figures, exposing themselves so shamefully,” and adding that it belonged in “the public baths and taverns” rather than a papal chapel. Vasari wrote that account decades after the fact, so treat it as the story Rome told about itself rather than a transcript, but the outline of it, an official objecting to the nudity on the spot, is not in serious dispute.
Minos, donkey ears, and a joke that stuck
Michelangelo’s answer to that complaint is one of the better-known stories in Renaissance art, and it is worth repeating because you can still find it on the wall. He painted Cesena’s face into the lower right corner of the fresco as Minos, mythological judge of the underworld, wearing donkey’s ears and standing in Hell with a serpent biting his exposed body. Cesena appealed to the pope to have it removed. Paul III is said to have replied that his authority did not reach into Hell, so the portrait would have to stay. It has stayed. Restorers cleaning the fresco in the twentieth century found that the snake was biting Minos in the genitals, a detail centuries of grime had obscured. I like this story less for the joke than for what it says about how differently Michelangelo and the Church weighed an insult against a body. Cesena’s complaint was about flesh. Michelangelo’s revenge was about a face, painted permanently into damnation, and it is telling that the face survived every later round of censorship without anyone ever proposing to paint it out.
The order that came after Michelangelo’s death
The complaint that eventually succeeded was not Cesena’s. It came from the Council of Trent, which met in stages through the middle of the sixteenth century to answer the Protestant Reformation with reforms of its own, including new rules for religious art. In its final session in December 1563 the council ruled that sacred images should carry no “beauty exciting to lust” and that anything obscene in a church should be covered or removed. Pope Pius IV acted on that instruction directly: on 21 January 1564 he ordered the nudity in the Last Judgment covered. Michelangelo died less than a month later, on 18 February 1564, and never saw what was done to the fresco in response. It is worth sitting with that timing for a moment. The order came while its own author was still alive to argue against it, and it went ahead anyway once he no longer could.
Il Braghettone, the breeches-maker
The job of covering the fresco went to Daniele da Volterra, a painter who had trained under Michelangelo and admired him enough that, by most accounts, he took no pleasure in the assignment. Work did not begin until 1565, and by several accounts Daniele painted in strips of cloth and drifting fabric with as light a touch as the commission allowed, adding only what he had to and reportedly having to be pushed to add more. He was still working through it, in fits and starts, when Pius IV died at the end of 1565 and the scaffolding had to come down in a hurry. Daniele himself died on 4 April 1566, only months later. History remembers him by a nickname that has outlived almost everything else he painted: il Braghettone, the breeches-maker.
Not every fix he made was a painted scrap of fabric. Two figures beside Christ, Saint Blaise and Saint Catherine of Alexandria, had originally been arranged so that Blaise appeared to be looking directly at Catherine’s naked body from behind, in a pose some viewers read as suggestively intimate for two people about to face judgment. Rather than paint drapery over the problem, Daniele chiselled away the plaster and repainted the greater part of Catherine and the whole of Blaise from scratch, turning Blaise’s gaze upward toward Christ instead. It is the one place on the wall where censorship did not just add cloth. It rebuilt the fresco underneath it.
The censors who came after him
Daniele’s death did not end the covering-up. Further rounds of overpainting followed under later popes, including Pius V, Gregory XIII, and probably Clement VIII, and these later additions tended to be cruder than his. By the time the practice more or less stopped, close to forty figures on the wall had gained some form of painted drapery beyond the two that Daniele had physically reworked. Some of that later paint was applied by artists with far less regard for Michelangelo’s original lines than Daniele had shown, and it shows in the clumsier folds and flatter shading if you know where to look. Each pope who ordered another round was, in effect, deciding again that the fresco was still not modest enough, decades after the argument had supposedly been settled. Nobody drew a line under the project. It simply stopped getting attention once the fashions and anxieties that drove it moved on to other targets.
What the 1980s restoration undid, and what it left alone
The long cleaning of the Sistine Chapel that ran through the 1980s and into the early 1990s, and that unveiled the restored Last Judgment on 8 April 1994, gave conservators a chance to reconsider four centuries of added cloth. They did not strip it all away. Working figure by figure, the restoration team removed roughly half of the accumulated overpainting, concentrating on the additions made after 1600, while deliberately leaving the sixteenth-century layer, Daniele’s own work, in place. The reasoning was straightforward: Daniele’s drapery was close enough in time and in touch to Michelangelo’s own hand that removing it would mean guessing at brushwork nobody alive had ever seen, while the later, cruder additions had no such claim on the fresco’s history.
That decision is why the wall you see today is not the wall Michelangelo painted, and also not the wall the Council of Trent’s censors left behind. It is something in between: a compromise a restoration committee reached in the 1990s about how much of a compromise reached in the 1560s deserved to survive.
Standing in front of it now
None of this is hidden information. It is printed in guidebooks and repeated by every guide who has stood under that wall more than a few times. What changes, once you actually know the sequence, is how you read the bodies themselves. A figure with cloth wrapped tightly and awkwardly around the hips was probably touched by a later, less careful hand. A figure with a thinner, more naturalistic swag closer to the body was more likely Daniele’s own, working under pressure from a friend’s memory rather than a stranger’s disapproval. The fresco carries its own editorial history on its surface, in different handwriting, if you look at it as a document rather than just an image.
I find that the loincloths are, in the end, more interesting than a version of the fresco without them would have been. They are proof that the wall was fought over, by a painter who kept a promise to his teacher’s memory and by others who did not much care about it. If you want to work that out for yourself rather than take a guide’s word for it, our Sistine Chapel tickets get you into the room, where the differences in that painted cloth are still there to compare in person.