The Sacrifice of Noah
Michelangelo, 1510
For now, just to look at
The photograph we have of this work is not sharp enough to print at the quality we want, so we are not selling it for now. We are looking for a better one.
About the work
- Artist
- Michelangelo
- Date
- 1510
- Medium
- Fresco painting
- Collection
- Sistine Chapel, Vatican Museums, Vatican City
- Reference
- XDV-3208
What the museum label doesn't tell you
Look closely: a bull, a ram, a lamb being dragged forward. Michelangelo packs this scene with animals. Odd, because nowhere else in the entire Sistine ceiling do animals appear again. Not even in The Flood, arc and all. Only here, as if the sacrifice needed animal flesh to give it weight. There is another oddity: biblically this sacrifice happens after the flood, yet Michelangelo placed it earlier in the sequence. Some read it as a theological mirror: Incarnation, Baptism, Sacrifice of Christ. A rushed genius's slip, or a calculated symbolic reversal?
