The Creation of Adam

In 1511, the year Michelangelo painted this scene, another work of his was destroyed in Bologna. Three years earlier his bronze statue of Pope Julius II, a seated figure weighing more than six tonnes, had been hoisted above the main door of the church of San Petronio. When the city slipped out of papal hands, its returning rulers pulled the statue down on the 30th of December, and the Duke of Ferrara cast the metal into a cannon he named the Giulia, after the pope.

That same doorway matters here. Its frame is carved with reliefs by the Sienese sculptor Jacopo della Quercia, made almost a century before, and one of them shows Adam lying naked on the ground while God stands over him. Art historians have long pointed to it as a source for this Adam, stretched out on a bare slope with one knee raised. What Michelangelo changed was the meeting. In Genesis, God breathes life into Adam's nostrils. Here God sweeps in through the air, wrapped in a billowing cloak full of figures, and the two never actually touch. Between the tips of their fingers there is a gap of about two centimetres. Under God's left arm a young woman looks across at Adam, and she is usually read as Eve, still waiting to be created.