Michelangelo and Copernicus: A Note on the Sistine Last Judgment

Cited by Murray Linda , Michelangelo, his life, work and times (London, 1984), 157; see Barocchi Paola and Ristori Renzo (eds), Il carteggio di Michelangelo (Florence, 1965–83), iv, 910 for the original Italian source.

The meeting was recorded by Michelangelo in a letter cited by Murray , ibid. See Milanesi Gaetano , Le lettere di Michelangelo Buonarroti (Florence, 1875), 604 for the original source.

See for example Schiller Gertrud . Ikonographie der Christelichen Kunst, iii (Gutersloh, 1966).

Lovejoy Arthur O. , The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), 102.

de Tolnay Charles , Michelangelo (Princeton, 1943–60), v, 49 and 122.

For Dante, see Alighieri Dante , The Divine Comedy , transl. by Mandelbaum A. (New York, 1984), espec. the Paradiso; for Ficino, see Ficino Marsilio , De amore, Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love (Dallas, 1985), and Cassirer Ernst , The individual and the cosmos in Renaissance philosophy (Oxford, 1963).

Translation in Rosen Edward , Three Copernican treatises (rev. edn, New York, 1971).

Ibid., 375–8.

Luther Martin , Table talks, ed. by Tappert G. (Philadelphia, 1967), liv, 358–9.

Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, Codex Graecus Monacensi 151. See also von Pastor Ludwig , History of the popes (London, 1901–28), x, 336 and xii, 549, and Prowe Leopold , Nicholas Copernicus (Berlin, 1883), i, 273.

Illustrated in Tolnay , op. cit., v.

Schönberg's letter is translated from the 1543 text of Copernicus's De revolutionibus on p. xvii of J. Dobrzycki's English edition (London, 1968).

For information on the cleaning and restoration, see Mancinelli F. , Michelangelo e la Sistina: La technica, il restauro, il mito (Rome, 1990).

For further details see my “Sun-symbolism and cosmology in Michelangelo's Last Judgment”. Sixteenth century journal, xxi (1990), 607–43, and my book of the same title, vol. xlvi of Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies (Truman State University Press, Kirksville, Mo., 1999).