The Brazen Serpent

By 1511 Michelangelo had been up on the scaffold of the Sistine Chapel for about three years, and the scenes he painted toward the end grew more violent and crowded than the calm ones he began with. This is one of the four corner spandrels, and it takes a grim episode from the Book of Numbers. On the left the Israelites, punished with a plague of snakes, writhe in a tangle of twisting bodies. On the right is the cure: Moses has raised a bronze serpent on a pole, and anyone bitten who looks up at it is healed. Michelangelo packs the whole thing into an awkward triangle, which is why the figures are bent and foreshortened into such extreme poses.