The Rudolf Steiner Archive

6. Michelangelo and His Time from the Perspective of the Spiritual Sciences

[ 1 ] Today’s lecture is intended, in a sense, to serve as an episode within the lectures of this winter series. It is meant to do so in a manner similar to the lectures from last year’s series on Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael. My goal, particularly with such an episodic lecture from the field of cultural or art history, is to show how spiritual science seeks to penetrate the essence of historical development and the human personalities involved in it. In today’s lecture in particular, I would ask you to bear in mind that, given the nature of the matter—since spiritual science is, in a sense, still in its infancy today—even a lecture such as this must be regarded as a preliminary attempt.

[ 2 ] In our time, history—like the other sciences—is regarded as a true science. Nevertheless, a very notable contemporary book denies history the right to call itself a science, on the grounds that history is, after all, merely a compilation of individual events and facts which, in the way they appear to us in history, do not occur a second or third time; so that a witty contemporary thinker, who opposes the scientific character of history, says: If one knows anything about a raindrop, one can say something scientific about it based on the laws it follows, because other raindrops follow the same laws. One can do the same with every beetle and with everything in the world that, in a sense, repeats itself. Historical facts stand alone; one can recount them, but one cannot base anything on them that could be called science in the true sense of the word. — If one takes those concepts and ideas that are today called scientific—and by which science is judged—then one must actually agree with the man. The matter is different, however, when historical consideration is taken in the sense that has often been hinted at here, and for which, in essence, none other than Lessing is the standard-bearer of modern times. I have already pointed out how Lessing, too, regards history as a development—or, as we might say today, as an upward ascent of all humanity—in such a way that it is the human souls themselves that carry the influence from one epoch to the next. Meaning and coherence enter history at the moment when we no longer need to view it merely as a sum of successive events that do not repeat themselves, but rather when we can view history in such a way that souls live out their lives again and again in successive earthly lives, so that what influenced the souls in ancient times is carried over by these souls, passes through the spiritual world between death and a new birth, and is nourished there, only to reappear in a new earthly life in such a way that real progress and development within the sequence of historical events is possible. Thus, through spiritual science, history once again becomes a science—not because laws repeat themselves in it as they do in external nature, but because we may view history as that which approaches human souls in successive lives from epoch to epoch, so that in fact it is not the laws, but rather the souls who repeat their lives, that enter into life again and again. But then the study of epochs becomes meaningful; then the character of an epoch reveals itself to us as significant for what souls coming over from earlier epochs can experience anew—things they could not have experienced before—and which they now carry over again into later epochs.

[ 3 ] I would like to say: perhaps not in a theoretical or abstract sense, but intuitively, through an idealistic and artistic perspective, a person may come to believe in such a course of human history when he or she contemplates the great eras of artistic development and the great artists as they evolved. Such a conviction—such as that regarding the return of the soul, regarding the complete life of the human being, which unfolds in such a way that we must distinguish between one part of existence between birth and death and that other part between death and a new birth in the spiritual world—the conviction of these repeated earthly lives cannot be gained through any kind of abstract contemplation. But whoever engages in the contemplation of life, whoever attempts to make sense of the mysteries of existence from every angle, will find that—as I said, not in a tumultuous rush—this conviction may suddenly come to them; yet within the soul, this conviction of repeated earthly lives must take shape more and more the more one contemplates reality in its entirety. I would like to present such a chapter on the contemplation of reality, leaving it, as it were, up to each individual to draw their own conclusions, by attempting today to examine the way in which Michelangelo engaged with Western intellectual life.

[ 4 ] If we consider this Western spiritual life—indeed, if we consider the entire spiritual life of humanity—from the perspective of repeated earthly lives, then we must acknowledge: There is a good reason in the development of humanity that the successive epochs are fundamentally different, and that souls experience ever-changing realities within these epochs. Only those who view human history with a rather short-sighted perspective can succumb to the view that the human soul, as it is today, has actually always been this way since it more or less rose above the animal realm. Anyone who delves more deeply into the times of ancient history, and who, in particular, approaches pre-Christian times through the methods of spiritual science itself, will find that the entire fundamental mood and disposition—the constitution of the human soul—was different in earlier times and has changed significantly in the course of human development right up to our own time, so that the configuration of the soul has become different in each successive epoch of human development. We encounter this fact in a particularly striking way, however, when we take an artist as significant as Michelangelo in his own time, the sixteenth century, and compare him, for example, with artists who, in earlier epochs of human history, achieved similar feats in a field similar to his own. After all, Greek sculpture and what Michelangelo has given us naturally present themselves side by side in our historical perspective. But for those who examine more closely what is at stake here, even a consideration of what exists merely as historical fact reveals a vast difference between Greek sculpture and Michelangelo’s creations. To understand this, we must briefly consider the particular way—which is scarcely noticed today—in which Greek sculpture can actually affect us.

[ 5 ] It is indeed quite regrettable that a lecture of this kind cannot be accompanied by slides or other visual aids; however, as for the substance of the development of art, we already have such excellent reproductions of numerous works available today that it is easy for anyone to gain an insight—even through images—into what I shall take the liberty of expounding upon today. — When Herman Grimm set out to write his marvelous work on Michelangelo in the 1850s, he could not have imagined enriching his work with illustrations; yet when it was republished forty years later, it was accompanied by illustrations, which made it possible to it can be said without exaggeration that unprecedented secrets about Michelangelo were revealed—secrets that could not be gleaned from what was previously available solely through Herman Grimm’s account of “The Life of Michelangelo.” Photography and photolithography have advanced so much in recent decades that it is now truly possible—for the very salvation of humanity—to gain insight into at least what has been the configuration of ideas, the configuration of form, and the like in the development of art through the ages.

[ 6 ] When one allows Greek art—specifically sculpture—to take effect on oneself, one must say: It affects us in such a way that we cannot shake the feeling that the very best of Greek visual art—which perhaps no longer even exists today—must have spoken to people like a message from another world. I do not mean the external aspect—for I do not wish to offer an unartistic analysis—that the Greeks mostly depicted gods, the deeds of gods, and superhuman acts. I do not mean that, nor do I mean the content of the art, but rather the artistic quality of the art itself, the shaping of form. How did this come about? It came about because the Greeks carried within their souls something they had not derived directly from nature through their external senses. The Greeks possessed an inner, intuitive knowledge of the nature and structure of the human organism. Everything that Greece had to offer in terms of the education of the human soul contributed to this; but it was also due to the fact that the Greeks lived in a different epoch of human history, in which the soul still felt intimately intertwined with its organism, where human beings felt in an entirely different way: Now you move your hand; now your hand or your arm forms an acute angle, now a right angle, now an obtuse angle; now your hand or your leg stretches this or that muscle. This “being-within-oneself” in the soul, this interpenetration, this mutual resonance of the organic with the soul—that is Greek feeling, Greek sensibility. Therefore, one must say—and this can certainly be affirmed, even if it is perhaps not widely acknowledged today—that the Greek possesses a direct, inner, intuitively felt knowledge of his own organism. And the artist did not shape his figures through external observation of nature, nor from an external model; rather, through inner knowledge he gained insight into this or that muscular position and posture and their connection to the soul, by imbuing his own organism with a soul mood and bringing this to full bloom in his soul life.

[ 7 ] One can certainly discern from what still remains: When the Greek sculpted his Zeus, he inwardly placed himself in the mood of Zeus; his soul became imbued with the feeling of Zeus. Then he knew what inner tensions the feeling of Zeus—or the feeling of Hera—triggered, and from within he imprinted his form upon the material. He poured his soul into the material. It is only natural that our present age no longer has much feeling for this very different Greek sensibility. But because it was so different, the remnants of Greek visual art appear quite differently to the eye that can perceive such things than all later works of visual art: they stand before us in such a way that they speak to us of what human beings experience as their inner world. They express what is spiritual, and everything in Greek sculpture expresses what is spiritual. One can completely disregard whether this is Zeus, this is Hera, or other gods; that is not at all important, for that would lead one away from artistic contemplation and into the realm of fiction. What matters, rather, is that the way the Greeks shaped their Zeus and their Hera—the way they stand before us—they are self-contained, just as our inner life is self-contained within us, and we feel enclosed within it when, through the organic reflex in muscle tension, we sense what the soul does within the organism as it experiences itself in this state of mind. This quality—more or less self-contained within the soul, yet reaching out into space, revealing itself outward into space—is characteristic of Greek sculpture. And when we look at such a Greek work of art, we say to ourselves: Yes, it is self-contained; it is a world that, just as it stands there, wishes to reveal itself. The group sculptures should also be understood in this way, right up to the Laocoön. It stands there to let us sense something of a spiritual world, and all around it is the rest of humanity, the world—that is where we ourselves stand. Only by turning our soul toward the work of art does it have a relationship with us. But this work of art does not belong to the same space, the same world, in which we walk about and in which we speak to one another every day; it falls outside of this world.

[ 8 ] If we now turn our attention from Greek works of art—I mean to Michelangelo’s “Moses,” which was, after all, intended to be part of the unbuilt “Pope Julius Monument”—then we will truly have to admit: No artist has ever expressed the biblical passage stating that the Jewish people were given a prophet in Moses—one whom no other will ever equal, who saw God face to face—and no artist has ever conveyed this biblical passage about the powerful effects of Moses’s will as Michelangelo did. Everything shows us the leader who permeates a people with his spirit, who lets his will radiate over an entire people and, far beyond his own lifetime, becomes the teacher of that people. This Moses is brimming with strength—so brimming with human power that we come to believe something about him that is unrealistic. As is well known, he has two horns on his head. To say that these are symbols of strength does not tell the whole story. If a less significant artist than Michelangelo were to sculpt a figure and attach two horns to it, they might be the same symbols; but we probably would not admire them, because we could not believe in them. Michelangelo presents his Moses, so imbued with will, in such a way that we know: there is a power within him that is allowed to reveal itself through something peculiar. We believe that Moses has horns—that is what matters. —What matters is not what is depicted, but that we believe in the details of what is depicted, even if they are unrealistic.

[ 9 ] Let us turn our attention from Moses to the “giant,” il Gigante, to David. We will return to this David from another perspective later; for now, let us consider him in comparison with Greek sculpture. How does he stand there? He stands there expressing the moment in his state of mind when he realizes what Goliath has in store for him. He reaches for his sling; it is the moment when he is about to carry out his deed. The figure of the youthful David had been depicted several times before—by Donatello and Verrocchio, for example—but always in such a way that the deed had already been accomplished. In both Donatello’s and Verrocchio’s works, David is depicted with Goliath’s head at his feet. Michelangelo chooses a different moment: the one in which David’s soul realizes what it must do. This moment is magnificently captured. Who could believe that it merely captures, as in a Greek work, an inner state, a mental disposition? But just as with Moses, this is not the only aspect of this David; something else is also expressed. This Moses and this David stand before us in such a way that we can believe Moses might also rise and continue on his way; he lives in the same space, in the same world as we do, the one into which we ourselves direct our steps; he is placed within the very same space in which we live. Thus, taken out of the purely spiritual realm and placed into the world that surrounds us, these figures stand before us. Having seen David, we would not be at all surprised if, in the very next moment, he were actually to take a swing.

[ 10 ] This is the significant transition from the old to the new era—and from this perspective, Michelangelo is its most significant representative—this is the significant transition in that the Greek artists created works of art that speak to us in such a way that they, as it were, negate the external world, standing on their own, as if self-contained, and affecting our souls as if from another world. Michelangelo, on the other hand, places his figures in the very same world in which we ourselves are placed; they live there with us. And in a figurative sense, one could say: while Greek sculptures breathe only the air of the soul, the air of the gods, Michelangelo’s figures breathe the air of the world in which we ourselves live. What matters is not whether one uses the buzzwords “idealism” or “realism,” but that one recognizes how Michelangelo is the most significant artist who draws figures out of the soul and places them fully within earthly existence, so that they stand among people as living beings.

[ 11 ] If we assume that Michelangelo was, as it were, entrusted with a special task through the spiritual progress of humanity, then we are no longer surprised to see how, from his earliest youth, he brought with him into life the abilities necessary for this task—abilities drawn directly from the spiritual world. Let the proponents of hereditary theory try to make sense of their theory when it comes to Michelangelo! He came from a family of the nobility—though it had become bourgeois—that later fell into poverty; we know this from his biography, for he continually supported them. It was a family that certainly possessed none of the qualities that constituted Michelangelo’s specific calling. At first, he was destined to become a schoolboy like any other. But he was always drawing. And he drew in such a peculiar way that one could not quite tell where he got it from; and eventually, his father had no choice but to send him to Ghirlandajo as an apprentice. But the boy could not learn much there, even though Ghirlandaio was a great artist. What Michelangelo drew sprang quite naturally from his very being. But another opportunity presented itself to him. Because his drawings had drawn attention to his talent, the Medici prince, Lorenzo de’ Medici, took him into his household, and he grew up there over the course of three years. Michelangelo was born on March 6, 1475; he lived in the house of Lorenzo de’Medici from 1489 to 1492. What he sought out—what was of particular significance to him—were the remnants of antiquity, the ancient art of sculpture, though these were, admittedly, only minor here. But very soon—and this is what characterizes him—he combined what he saw and what made a deep impression on him with a diligent, intensive study of anatomy. And now we see how a precise knowledge of the internal structure of the human body takes root in Michelangelo’s soul. It is evident in everything he created how he applied his anatomical studies and how he acquired this knowledge: if the soul is to experience this or that, if it is to be in this or that mood or state of mind, then it is necessary to know how this or that muscle is positioned.

[ 12 ] Now we see how two currents converge in Michelangelo’s soul. He saw what was different from anything the talent of his time could ever produce—because humanity had now advanced to a different epoch—and what had constituted the distinctiveness of Greek art; but since the ability to feel the characteristics of the body—as Greek art had been able to do—had vanished by his time, he needed to observe the structure of the body from the outside, to look at its external form. What the Greeks had experienced within themselves through their inner sense of life, Michelangelo had to experience through his external senses, by observing nature. He had to draw from nature through his external senses what the Greek artist had been able to gain from within himself through the sense of life that was still active within him. — In such a case, we see how the soul’s development in humanity progresses, how the soul in one age cannot do what it can in another, and how, if the greatest achievement is to be attained, the soul must achieve this through different means in different epochs.

[ 13 ] When we now see how Michelangelo, building on what he had already acquired in the manner just described, completed—as a very young man in 1498—that marvelous work that greets us immediately on the right as we enter St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome—his marvelous Pietà— when we see what he had already achieved with the means at his disposal in this early work—which still bears some traces of the Italian artistic tradition stemming from Cimabue and Giotto, and which still retains almost a touch of Byzantine character—we nevertheless see how what results from a precise observation of the human form flows into this work. And even at this early stage, Michelangelo succeeds in using external observation to create a sculpture that can truly hold its own against Greek art. What had become necessary? External observation had become necessary. This can be studied particularly in the work of the Pietà. Let us consider how, in the continuous course of human development since the Greek era, something entirely foreign to that Greek culture has come to influence it. The Greeks possessed a sense of life that arose from within themselves. This naturally gave rise to the ability to reveal what the human form looks like in this or that mood. Now, from the Greek era onward, a worldview had flowed into the West that originated in Judaism and reached its zenith in Christianity—a worldview that always carries within it something of the commandment: “You shall not make for yourself an image of what is spiritual!”

[ 14 ] I don’t know how many people have considered that between the Greek era and the age of Michelangelo there lies a period in which it actually became practical not to form any image of the divine. The early Christians did not depict Christ figuratively. They used symbols—the fish symbol, the monogram of Christ—but no image—just as the Jews did not create an image of their God; and among the Ten Commandments, one explicitly states: “You shall not make for yourself an image of God, your Lord!” And lo and behold—we step into the Sistine Chapel, that chapel which is the most significant in all of Christendom, and find that Michelangelo has transgressed this commandment! That pinnacle of artistic expression which Michelangelo reached when he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—and even painted the image of God the Father several times over—this highest flowering of Christian art could only have been achieved by transgressing this commandment. But between these two epochs lay the period in which all of this first had to be prepared—the period that so vividly illustrates to us how we truly do not need an external comparison, nor something that represents a mere analogy, when we say: The successive epochs of human history unfold in such a way that “times of night” truly fall between the “times of day” of history, during which certain capacities of humanity must pass into a state of rest, as if in sleep, so that they may later reemerge strengthened. What was achieved in Greek sculpture had to pass through an epoch in which the commandment “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image” applied even to art. Sculpture, too, had to pass through a “time of sleep”—and we then have the “time of day,” the awakening, but in a different form, once again in Michelangelo. But while in nature everything repeats itself in the same way—one day is like the next, the next plant is like the one before it—it is precisely the defining characteristic of human progress that souls, as they carry their fruits from one epoch into the next, simultaneously undergo an ascent, a metamorphosis, a transformation. But one must pass through an epoch of dormancy of human abilities in this or another field.

[ 15 ] Thus we see how, during the interim in which art has, so to speak, been at rest, the Christian ideal has emerged—not in a denominational sense, but from a perspective that is entirely interdenominational, one that everyone must acknowledge, regardless of denomination—the spiritual disposition of inwardness, of internalization. How infinitely more inward is that which is expressed in the young mother holding her deceased son on her lap, in that Pietà group—how infinitely more inward, ultimately, than anything contained in Greek works of art! It is more inward, and it had to be created at a time when the organic was no longer recreated through the inner meaning of life, but when the soul had to turn inward, and the secrets of nature had to be discerned through the external senses.

[ 16 ] How different Michelangelo stands from the Greek sculptors at the dawn of the modern era, in the dawn of the modern materialistic age, when people’s senses were directed outward toward external nature. Human souls had to pass through a period in which the senses were developed to the highest degree and strained to the utmost. We are still in the midst of it. But everything in human development must have a counterbalance. Thus we see Michelangelo, on the one hand, as the artist who must pour out his soul into the external world in order to glean his forms from nature. But so that he might not merely shape the external—that which the senses perceive—he shapes, out of the ongoing flow of development, that which has flowed to humanity as an inner deepening of the soul. Michelangelo had to express this inner deepening of the soul through external means: into what he discerned in external nature, he was able to pour the infinite inner life of the human soul. And so we see the body of Christ Jesus lying there in the lap of the youthful Mother, and we believe we are looking at stone: Yes, this body is a beautiful human body, just as nature intended it; Michelangelo was able to capture that. But something else also meets our gaze, revealing, as it were, two aspects: What peace of death has been poured out over this body! And as we behold the whole scene—the face of the youthful mother holding the adult, already dead Christ in her lap—and yet she is so young that she could never, in outward, realistic reality, be the mother of this man—at the same time, we sense from the sculpted stone: that which is dead here is the guarantee of the eternal life of the human soul! The deepest inner life, the highest mysteries lying beyond nature, expressed realistically through the means of nature, which Michelangelo must surely have studied!

[ 17 ] And when we see Michelangelo returning from Rome to Florence, we witness a remarkable sight. An old block of marble lies there. A sculptor had wanted to carve something out of it; he had not succeeded. Michelangelo is given the task of making something out of it. It is precisely from this block, which had been intended for something else, that he creates the David during this period. If one takes this into account, and then adds what he had gleaned of the mysteries of external nature through his external senses, one can now trace how Michelangelo actually works, and how, through his work, he truly shows us that, with a part of his sensibility, he looks back to times that still carry with them something of humanity’s inner knowledge of certain mysteries. On the one hand, Michelangelo certainly stands at the very beginning of the modern era. But at this starting point of an era that must rely entirely on external sensory observation, he is great only insofar as he has carried over into his soul something from his experience of earlier epochs—something that enables him to still intuitively sense, within himself, what Goethe calls the “spirit of bodies,” the “spirit of external nature.”

[ 18 ] Here I would like to point out something that is one of those things that receive far too little attention today. Once one has acquired a certain perspective—including for the imagination—through spiritual science, and one walks—not even through a field of marble, but simply through any mass of rock—one has the sensation, when faced with the manifold rock formations, that they must become this or that. One can already tell from the stone that one encounters what it is meant to become. And it is no coincidence that one finds so many tales of enchanted knights on horseback or otherwise among the people of such regions; for when here or there a boulder protrudes from the rock in a peculiar way, the people become sculptors and tell the story that a knight committed a misdeed there and was turned to stone as a result. The sculptor’s imagination engages with the stone in such a way that one says to oneself: with a little effort, you must transform it into what lives in nature as a human or animal form. Through this, one senses something of what Goethe calls the “spirit of nature.” Minerals are not all the same; each material demands its own particular treatment. The material contains certain secrets that we must listen for. And on a soul like that of Michelangelo, a block standing before him has the effect that he sets to work on it, using it merely as a model for his thoughts. But the model has no other significance than that it initially serves as a vehicle for his own idea. What he creates is, in essence, dictated to him by the stone itself. He stands before the stone—to put it rather radically—and just as the stone is, so he perceives it: this is how the hand must rest, this is how the leg must be positioned; everything must be this way and no other. Michelangelo is, moreover, an artist who did not waste a single piece of the stone—that is, he did not chisel away anything unnecessarily. That is why he begins all around the stone, where the main front is, and where the human form has its center of gravity, working the surface gently at first—as if drawing in relief—so that initially something stands there like a kind of ghost of what is to come. Only then does the work with the hand drill begin—Michelangelo was not yet familiar with the power drill—and only then does he begin to chisel out further recesses. Only then does the ongoing work with the pointed hammer and chisel begin, and finally, the impression arises that the block revealed itself of its own accord, after what did not belong to it—what it could yield of its own accord—had been removed. That is why an artist like Michelangelo would never render any motif in bronze or any other material in the same way that he renders it in stone. What one perceives as the expression of the face in the poetic or novelistic sense does not, after all, belong to the plastic arts. Sculpture encompasses what I have just attempted to characterize: unraveling what is enchanted within the stone; drawing out from the stone itself what the collective consciousness senses when it sees, here or there, in this or that stone, an enchanted knight or the like. To bring that out, however, Michelangelo had to possess a precise knowledge of what anatomy could provide him, because he had to adapt to the material through his external senses, since he no longer possessed the inner sense of life that was still characteristic of Greek art. And through this careful study of anatomy, he stands at the starting point of the modern era in the same relationship to nature—and likewise to art—as that to which the natural sciences have also led. It is no coincidence that the anniversary of Michelangelo’s death coincides with the birthday of Galileo, one of the founders of modern natural science. When Michelangelo artistically synthesizes what has come down from an earlier era, yet as an artist infuses it with the perspective of his own time, he simultaneously stands in the same relationship to nature as the modern natural scientist does in his own way—only in the realm of science. This is the other perspective that one can particularly bear in mind when considering his David, because Michelangelo was working with a block of stone that was already there and had been intended for something entirely different, and he had to discern the secret of what it was meant to be; from this emerged the marvelous David.

[ 19 ] Thus we see this man completely immersed in the innermost nature of his time—in that which links his era to the one that preceded it and, in turn, serves as the starting point for the one that followed. What I have set forth is the true essence of Michelangelo. That he paints Madonnas, that he depicts this or that Christian motif, is part of the culture as a whole; it is given to him from the outside—perhaps more so than to any other artist. What he brought into his era with his soul is what I have attempted to characterize, and this is evident in many other ways as well. His world of art is one with the world in which we live. His works of art stand in the very same space in which we ourselves stand. This is, in fact, the leitmotif of Michelangelo’s oeuvre. Everything he does is shaped by this leitmotif. Consider Michelangelo’s Madonnas, the Madonna and Child. In depictions of the Madonna, the child usually rests, very small, on the mother’s lap. In the Medici Chapel, after having gone through this phase, Michelangelo shifts to depicting the child so large that it stands beside the mother, able to stride out with its feet, because he also wants to place it within the space, within the world in which we exist. He creates in the Child a being equal to us in the real sense; therefore, he must lift it out of stillness, out of inner seclusion; he must set it in motion so that—except for the fact that it stands in marble or is captured in a painting—it lives in exactly the same world in which we live. And even when we later see how he painted the Sistine Chapel—that marvelous ceiling where he depicted the entire pre-Christian era together with the creation of the world in a magnificent way—when we see the ancient prophets and sibyls depicted on the sides, when we let all of this sink in and then ask ourselves: What interests us more—what is expressed there, or the way Michelangelo did it? — then one sometimes has the feeling that the foreshortening of this or that leg, this or that posture of the body—which directly expresses what I have just attempted to describe as the essence of Michelangelo’s art—interests us even more than everything else that is expressed in terms of content or narrative, which can be unraveled in one way or another.

[ 20 ] Is it any wonder, then, that this artist set himself the task—and was initially supported in it by Pope Julius II—of creating something that, in its entire configuration, is connected to the immediate life of the time? Not connected in the same way that Zeus, Hera, and Apollo—even in the form depicted by the Apollo of Belvedere—are embedded in the Greek world; they remain so deeply embedded in the Greek world that they, as it were, belong to another space, that they reveal themselves from another space; no, Michelangelo wants to create a work—truly a gigantic work—that is to grow out of the times in such a way that, as it were, the entire course of the times, the inner becoming of the times, the fundamental character, and the primordial nature of his era flow into this work as a current. Before Michelangelo and before many of his contemporaries stood Pope Julius II as the mighty embodiment of the age—this pope who liked to compare himself to Paul. He saw himself as the mighty ruler of the age; that is how he stood before his time. What moved the age found its full expression in his soul and in his deeds. When a soul stands thus ahead of its time, that soul has a connection to the forces that influence souls. Everything that represented the innermost nerve of the age was to converge and be preserved as if petrified in this work, so that the cultural current expressed in Pope Julius II would be preserved in stone, in the gigantic “Pope Julius Monument,” which Michelangelo had set out to create and on which he intended to depict not only the likeness of Pope Julius II, but also Moses, Paul, and numerous other figures, all of whom could represent the power that worked through such an imposing, powerful personality into the times, stirring the very core of time. Just as the forces themselves worked, just as they found expression through a soul, so were they to be poured into the stone. The stone was to carry forward what was alive there and what was to be immortalized into future ages, so that generations yet to come might look upon this monument and find in it the great earthly symbol of the continuing flow of Michelangelo’s cultural era. A truly gigantic undertaking! Is it any wonder that Michelangelo’s soul—which dared to undertake such a task—appeared to his contemporaries as “terribile,” causing them to fear him? There was something within him that was incomprehensible.

[ 21 ] Pope Julius II had discussed the plans for this tomb with him. In 1505, Michelangelo returned to Rome. However, the Pope had been dissuaded from the plan by all sorts of people, because, for example, he was told that it would bring bad luck to have work done on one’s tomb while still alive, and other such things. Envy and jealousy were at play, and Bramante, the architect of St. Peter’s Basilica, in particular, was constantly nagging the Pope. And so it came to pass that, although the work on the monument was entrusted to Michelangelo, he was kept waiting. Indeed, he had to endure the bitter experience of being denied an audience with the Pope on one occasion when he went to seek information one day. Consequently, he fled Rome and returned only after receiving special assurances from the Pope.

[ 22 ] I cannot go into every detail, but I would like to discuss what is significant in terms of his impact on his time. Michelangelo worked on many of the figures for the monument. What remains, for example, are the slave figures, but above all the magnificent Moses, which was intended to be part of this monument. However, this monument was never completed as it was intended; only the pitiful remnants, which are displayed around Moses in a church in Rome, remain—and because of the small size of the space, it is impossible to fully grasp the significance of Moses.

[ 23 ] When Michelangelo was in Rome, and people felt, as it were, ashamed that they had not given him the opportunity to continue work on the monument, they sought, as it were, to make an advance payment to him. Michelangelo had previously tried his hand at painting on several occasions and had, in fact, achieved great things; but he never really considered himself a painter. Now they sought to console him by entrusting him with the task of painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Without being sufficiently prepared for the task by his own standards, he set to work on it. He worked on it for four years, from 1508 to 1512. One need only recall what he had to say about this time, drawn from the depths of his troubled soul—while he was working up there on the ceiling, constantly tilting his head so far back that afterward, even for months on end, he still had to hold it in a crooked position; he could not hold his head upright again, and the direction of his gaze had become so fixed that he could read only while tilting his head to one side. At the same time, he was kept waiting for his payments. On top of that, he had to send every penny he could spare back home to his needy family. It is profoundly distressing to consider the manner in which Michelangelo, during those four years, created one of the greatest works of art of all time—for that is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo set for himself the greatest challenge one could have faced given the state of artistic development at the time: to depict the course of human evolution from the creation of the world up to what ultimately culminates in the mystery of Golgotha, in the appearance of Christ on earth. And Michelangelo succeeded in transferring what permeated his entire work—his principle, though not one grasped in abstract thought—from sculpture to painting. Truly, when one first looks up at the ceiling—at how this mighty structure rises, which we believe grows out of the masses of clouds filled with angelic figures, and in the midst of which, hurtling through the still chaotic space, is what is called God the Father—when one looks up at that, one truly has the feeling: Yes, God the Father rushes through the still chaotic space, conjuring the world out of that chaos through his word. But this space and this figure—even all the details, down to the flowing hair, down to the gaze and the gesture—all of this exists within the same world, within the same space in which we ourselves are placed. Michelangelo, as it were, always places us right into the world in which he sets his creations. We live alongside this God the Father, and we feel his creative word rippling through and weaving itself into the world.

[ 24 ] The way in which the ancient traditions of human wisdom still resonate in Michelangelo becomes particularly evident when we gaze upon that painting depicting the Creation of Adam. The scene unfolds as follows: God the Father, rushing through the cosmos, extends His hand, and this hand almost touches the hand of Adam, who is still enveloped in sleep; we see the sleeping Adam, and sleep, as it were, fleeing through the ray that passes from God’s index finger into Adam’s index finger, and Adam awakening from the sleep of the world into human existence. And when we look back at God the Father, we see, together with him, figures—enveloped in his robe and in clouds, so that even the robe is still upheld by the powers that also order space—angelic figures; but one figure stands out: a female figure who has grown to the age of youth, awake and looking curiously at Adam, who has just awakened. When we examine, through spiritual science, how the female and male soul essences relate to one another—when we understand that the female soul essence must be sought in its origin in times more ancient than the male soul essence—then we grasp what Michelangelo intended to portray in this tradition he is painting. According to the Bible, Adam is there first; Eve is taken from him. In Michelangelo’s depiction, Eve is brought to Adam from times past; God the Father shelters her in his robe. Michelangelo looks deeper into the mysteries of the world than the biblical tradition does. And so it continues: We see the Fall, the expulsion from Paradise, all the way to Noah’s Flood.

[ 25 ] And then the images on the pages! I can only describe them very sketchily: on one side, the images of the prophets; on the other, those of the Sibyls; both—prophets and Sibyls—appearing as if they were about to announce what is to come to humanity: the mystery of Golgotha, Christ Jesus. He is to be proclaimed to the Gentiles through the souls of the Sibyls, and to the Jews through the souls of the prophets. But what Michelangelo portrays here is not conceived purely as a narrative device; rather, he has depicted these Jewish prophets from a purely artistic perspective. When we see them sitting there—one bent thoughtfully over a book, another pensive, and perhaps one even zealous—they all point to one thing, which only becomes fully clear when we turn our gaze to the Sibyls. These Sibyls—they are peculiar figures. Contemporary Christianity no longer wishes to have much to do with these pagan forerunners of Jesus Christ. What kind of figures are they?

[ 26 ] Greek philosophers emerged in the sixth century B.C.E. As for earlier times, only fantasists, such as Deußen, can speak of the existence of philosophy. It began in Ionia. There, human thought attempted for the first time to comprehend the world through itself. It was there that humanity’s reflection on thought took place—a reflection that later found such marvelous expression in the great Plato and Aristotle. The Sibyls appear as a shadow of this spirit that brings thought to its highest clarity. The first one appeared in Ionia. Subconscious, eerie soul forces—what we would call today psychic soul forces—welled up within them; sometimes in a chaotic manner, they clothe what is given to them in words. Some things are proclaimed to humanity through them in a chaotic way, others with wisdom. For the most part, what the Sibyls say to people are oracular utterances that can be interpreted in various ways; often not much wiser than what is found with modern mediums. But in between, something else emerges from them: allusions to the Christ event, which must be taken just as deeply by the Sibyls as, from another perspective, the references of the Jewish prophets. But how did these allusions come about? In such a way that, in the case of the Sibyls, the prophecies flowed from the depths of the soul—from that which is not brought to clarity in human self-consciousness through reflection—as it were, through mediumistic, oracular means, so that the Sibyls themselves could not control it, nor did those who received these prophecies wish to control it. Thus it came to pass, though always amid much chaos and folly, that hints emerged of that momentous event which divides human development into two parts. If one examines, from a spiritual-scientific perspective, the source of these Sibyls’ powers, one must say: they come from what one might call the spiritual forces of the Earth itself, which are more closely connected to the depths of the human soul. When wind and weather play upon us, those who can truly sense this experience what Goethe calls the spirit of nature; they feel how spirit surges through the world in all the elements. The Sibyls were moved by this spirit of the lowest order, which nevertheless carried within itself the power that pointed toward the appearance of Christ.

[ 27 ] The prophets fought against this spirit. They sought to attain what they desired solely through reflection, through the clear “I.” They rejected everything subconscious and sibylline; and when they wished to prophesy the highest things, it had to live within their full consciousness. Like the North Pole and the South Pole, the Sibyls and the prophets stand in opposition to one another: the Sibyls possessed by the spirit of the earth—the prophets seized by the cosmic spirit, which expresses itself not through subconscious experience but through the full consciousness of the soul. Thus prophets and sibyls stood in opposition to one another, a fact that ultimately led those who proclaimed the life of Christ to place such great importance on his expelling these demonic forces from those through whom such sibylline powers had been at work. This is the aftereffect of the prophets’ power; they wished to rely on that which lies above the Sibylline. That is why those who proclaimed the life of Christ Jesus also placed such great importance on his expelling the powers of the Sibyls as demonic forces.

[ 28 ] Thus, foreshadowing the Christ impulse, we see on the one hand the prophetic tradition and on the other the Sibylline tradition. This is the substantive, novel aspect of the matter. What does Michelangelo make of it? Let us look at the Sibyls, beginning with the Persian Sibyl. Holding a book directly before her face, this Persian Sibyl is entirely possessed by the elemental forces—the lowest spiritual forces—in order to foretell the future from the messages contained in this book. Then the Erythraean Sibyl: she stands before us in such a way that we can see in her countenance how the forces connected with spiritual development are at work within her—forces that, however, seize upon her subconscious, not her fully conscious, soul forces. A boy above her lights a lamp with a torch; in every one of her movements, the elemental forces within her are expressed. The Delphic Sibyl: we see her reaching for a scroll; elemental power is expressed in her countenance. We see her interwoven with the element of earth, the wind sweeping over her; we see it in her fluttering hair, in her fluttering robe. Michelangelo paints her in such a way that we see her directly interwoven with the elemental forces of the earth. We see how her soul is seized by the forces of the earth with mediumistic intensity, and from this she draws her prophecies, her prophetic vision. In this way, Michelangelo also places the Sibyls directly within the earthly existence in which we ourselves live, expressing all of this through external forms. Look at the Cumaean Sibyl, how she merely babbles with her mouth half-open. Then the Libyan Sibyl. There we have the entire pagan foreshadowing of the Christ impulse through the Sibyls.

[ 29 ] Now let us turn to the prophets. Their souls are deeply moved: we can see it in their solemn countenances, in the troubled expressions some of them wear, in their gestures, and in the way some of them read—so much so that we believe they will never again take their eyes off what they are reading. We see them moved by the prophetic truths that stretch through the ages. One cannot imagine a greater artistic expression—one that conveys its intended meaning so directly through its outward form—than this juxtaposition of the prophets and the Sibyls—both depicted with the same sense of necessity, so that we can immediately discern the intended meaning from the depiction itself. Then we need no commentary, no Bible, and nothing else: from what Michelangelo painted on the ceiling there, we can discern how it represents a foreshadowing of the Christ event. — And one could say that we then see the entire pre-Christian history painted into the spandrels, from image to image: the ancestors of Mary, magnificently varied, even though there are a great number of images, each expressing the character of the era in one or another ancestor of Christ Jesus.

[ 30 ] How did Christ come into the world? The greatest answer to this question is found on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel! And how did the world come to be so that what has unfolded as human history up to the advent of Christianity could take place within it? The answer to this—which can be conveyed through imagery—is most magnificently provided by the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel!

[ 31 ] Michelangelo believed—at least after he had completed this work—that he would now be able to continue working on the Julius Monument. For many years, however, nothing came of it. He was kept waiting. There is no need for us to discuss in detail the various works he created in the meantime. But the following is important. When, due to various complications in Rome, he was no longer given the opportunity to continue work on the Julius Monument, he was once again entrusted with a painting commission. He was to paint the two side walls of the Sistine Chapel. In the end, only the rear wall was painted: the “Last Judgment” was to be depicted. When we view it today in Rome at its original location—it is easier to view this “Last Judgment” than the ceiling, since to view the ceiling one must, so to speak, lie on one’s back on the floor and look up through opera glasses—it is easier to view; but we must look at it for a long time to unravel this complex composition. However, what Michelangelo painted on that wall is, in essence, no longer there today. For not only has it been blackened by the smoke from the many altar candles that burned during Mass in the chapel—so that it has long since lost its original freshness—but this monumental painting was also, even during his lifetime, because he had painted too many figures without robes, so badly defaced and overpainted by artists of lesser rank that the individual figures were “dressed”; it was overpainted in the most hideous shades and mixtures of colors. Yet even in this painting, one can trace how Michelangelo—as the artist who had to transition into the era of Realism, where the figures the artist creates stand in the same space as we do—simultaneously linked his own era with what had to be carried over from the Greek period. If one looks closely at Christ as the Judge of the World in The Last Judgment, he is reminiscent in part of Jupiter and in part of Apollo. Herman Grimm, who was able to sketch the head of this figure from close up, had to emphasize time and again that it bears a striking resemblance to the head of the Belvedere Apollo. We need only recall that when Michelangelo arrived in Rome at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Laocoön Group and the Torso of Hercules had just been unearthed, and that these significant remnants of antiquity made an impression on him—though he infused them with what had emerged as his own creative principle.

[ 32 ] And now, in “The Last Judgment,” we see everything that people of that era felt regarding the fate of human souls at the end of the world—what was then called the fate of the blessed and the damned—magnificently emerging from the space of Michelangelo’s painting. At first, one might look at the painting with a sort of squint: one then sees cloud formations that are as natural as actual clouds. And when you look more closely, you see the figure of Christ, the figures of the trumpeting angels, the martyrs, and all those who are led partly to bliss and partly cast into hell emerging naturally from these cloud formations; and you then see how all of this emerges—again, as if by nature—from the world we know. Thus, in this very wonderful image, Michelangelo allows the most mysterious thing he wishes to depict—the deeply hidden destiny of the human soul—to emerge from the world we know: he lets it emerge from what we know, from what the senses reveal.

[ 33 ] Thus Michelangelo was completely—and I mean completely—immersed in his time. And those of you in the audience who remember how I tried to portray Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael last winter will have noticed that I spoke about Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael in a completely different tone—as it were, with a completely different “how”—than I have tried to speak about Michelangelo today. In Michelangelo, we see how he is intimately intertwined with what I have characterized as the principle of his time. Michelangelo grew old, reaching the advanced age of nearly ninety; he died in 1564. He arrived at his creations in such a way that we can say: Every stage of life contributes to these creations what a person can draw from the various stages of life. His personality is intimately intertwined with what he has to give to the world. How different it is with Raphael! Raphael died almost in the middle of his thirties, at that stage of life when we—and especially the artist—can only begin to gain what gives him his own distinctive character. Thus Raphael stands before us in such a way that nothing personal flows into his works; everything in his art appears as a revelation of supernatural powers. With Raphael, one always stands as before a supernatural revelation, whereas with Michelangelo everything has become entirely personal. Michelangelo presents himself to us as the antithesis of Raphael: Raphael entirely impersonal—Michelangelo entirely personal. Anyone who seeks to judge everything by some fixed template—as modern artists so often do—cannot appreciate the unique character of one or the other; they will favor one over the other, whereas both—and indeed the third, Leonardo—must each be judged by their own standards. But the way Michelangelo imbued his creations—whether sculptural or painterly—with a distinctive artistic quality that is the very expression of the artistic spirit of his time shows precisely that the essence is to be found in this unique immersion in his own era, as it appears to us in Michelangelo. Hence the comprehensiveness of his works, enabling him to express what lives within him in a truly universal way.

[ 34 ] There is still something left from Michelangelo’s final years—I have, after all, been able here only to outline the broad development of his spirit, not to list all his works—namely, first of all, a small model, which was later enlarged into a wooden model, of the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, that marvel of artistic mechanics. Here, in architecture, space was a direct challenge for Michelangelo. He only lived to see the cylindrical section—known as the “drum”—rising; he did not live to see the completion of the dome. But he still depicted it in a model. It was meant to convey what, architecturally speaking, expresses the very essence of space. It was meant to naturally enclose the space in which a devout congregation could gather, so that they could live and breathe within that enclosed space, alongside the works of art that Michelangelo had just created. His sense of space—his ability to bring the artistic into the very world in which we live—led him to conceive this marvelous architectural mechanism of space. The present form of St. Peter’s Basilica’s dome is, in essence, attributable to Michelangelo.

[ 35 ] Thus, in Michelangelo, we see a spirit standing before us who enters the world of physical existence as if with a mature soul, and who devotes this mature soul entirely to advancing human development a little further, initially in the realm of art. What this means becomes particularly clear to us in the case of Michelangelo—who, despite having achieved greatness as an artist, led a life full of reasons for hypochondria, for seeking solitude, and for dissatisfaction with the world and existence. And when one allows oneself to be moved by what I have, as it were, only stammered to suggest regarding the significance of Michelangelo, and compares it with words that Michelangelo must have written in the last days of his life about the way he felt with his soul within human life—with this soul of his, which knew how to imprint such profound things from spiritual realms onto the world of space and matter—then one truly gains a sense of the relationship between the human soul and its surroundings—and especially, in the case of a soul as great as Michelangelo’s, in relation to his time. He stood within his time, but he stood within it as a great figure of his time. As a human being, he was even considered terrifying. Pope Leo X often did not dare to let him come; he feared him! Such was the effect the greatness of his soul had on people who were truly not of a fearful disposition. But he was not understood in terms of his inner life. If one wishes to explain Michelangelo’s soul, one must view it in the context of his time, of the greatness of his time. The soul itself, however, looking back on its life, spoke the following words, from which we can also see how true, in Michelangelo’s soul, was everything that entered his creations as the greatness of the Christian impulse. He felt as at one with this greatness of the Christian impulse as one could possibly feel at that time, in his era—an era that was still connected to the past and was at the same time the dawn of a later age. One need only place what speaks to us so magnificently in the Last Judgment—despite all its deterioration—in Munich alongside the certainly significant work of the great Peter Cornelius, the Last Judgment created in the 1830s “Last Judgment” in the Ludwigskirche, and one will be unable to reconcile the abstract, the pale, and the unmoving aspects of that painting with what speaks to us from Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment.” Peter Cornelius was a devout man—as devout, in relation to the Christ impulse, as a person in the nineteenth century could possibly be. Michelangelo lived in an era when the ancient Christian impulses, in terms of their content and grandeur, could still exert an influence on his soul, and from them he then created precisely that which, in form and artistic style, already belongs entirely to the era in which we ourselves now live. This gave rise within him to the mood of that poem, which shows us how we must relate to him and allow him to influence us as a human being—those verses that may well have been written in the last days of his life:

I lie in the harbor we all reach,
The boat that carried me was frail,
The journey was stormy, but now it is time, in the book
Of life, to settle my accounts.

Once, art was my joy; its intoxicating
nectar, foaming so alluringly,
was my idol and goddess, and I dreamed,
until, awakening, I saw what it had given me!

Destruction rolls toward me twofold;
Death, which now takes me away without mercy,
And after it, that eternal death full of terror!

Marble and colors offer no peace,
Only one thing brings comfort: to gaze upon those poor souls,
Who reach out to us from the cross.

[ 36 ] Michelangelo was also a great poet. Even the few of his poems that have come down to us reveal the same spirit that we find in his sculptures and paintings. And this is how he felt at the end of his life! And yet, from this poem, we see what lived—and had to live—in his soul so that it could take on the form that so eloquently tells us of the world’s greatest mystery—as in The Prophets and Sibyls, The Creation of the World, The Last Judgment, David, Moses, and The Pietà.

[ 37 ] The last three lines of the sonnet just read show that there was, after all, something within him that could not come to terms with the world’s progress; and that was, in essence, a constant presence within him throughout his life. For he stands, one might say, as a phenomenon of his time—still in the old and already in the new. This is also particularly evident in the work he subsequently carried out in Florence under the influence of a later pope: the Medici tombs, which were again entrusted to him as a consolation for a larger project—namely, the continuation of work on the monument to Julius II. He was to erect tombs for two members of the Medici family, Giuliano and Lorenzo. Not only does this chapel, which houses the two tombs, reveal to us in these two sculptures—originally there were to have been four—the Michelangelo we have come to know today, one figure entirely contemplative, the other embodying resolute will and dignity. But it is also such that we have the feeling: at any moment, the two figures could rise and act, carrying out what Michelangelo has imbued them with. Yet we see something else in this chapel: those four figures, arranged in pairs, known as “Day” and “Night,” “Dawn” and “Dusk.” I have often looked at them, over and over again. They are among the things that, out of an inner spiritual obligation, I have always gazed upon the longest whenever I was fortunate enough to be in Florence. And I cannot help it—no matter how fanciful one or the other may find it—I cannot simply see these figures as powerless and lifeless allegories. I tried to reflect on this using every means that spiritual science has to offer: If one is convinced, with regard to the human being, that at night what spiritual science calls the “I” and the astral body of the human being leave the physical body and the etheric body, and the etheric body remains behind and powerfully permeates the physical body—how can one depict this? How must one choose the gesture of this etheric body so that this truth, which emerges precisely through spiritual science, is also vividly represented outwardly? How must one depict the sleeping human being if one truly feels him in the sense of the spiritual-scientific representation? Well, one must depict him just as Michelangelo depicted “Night”! Reality—but reality in the spiritual sense—not an allegory or a symbol of the night, but the real sleeping human being, as understood through spiritual research, lies before us in this female figure—right down to the gestures of the hand, the arms, and the leg. The man who knew so well how to place the figures of his works of art in the very same space in which we ourselves stand—he also knew what significance it holds in space when the spiritual-soul aspect of a human being has left the physical-bodily aspect, while the latter is still alive. And when I examine how the individual limbs of the human being are arranged, and then look at the other figures, I see how they correspond to what I once called “spiritual chemistry” here, as I have expounded this spiritual chemistry; thus they stand before me in this creation of Michelangelo. Spiritual realism in the highest degree!

[ 38 ] Even to those who stand on the ground of spiritual science in the narrower sense—those who long for these spiritual-scientific truths to be imprinted upon human culture—Michelangelo remains close, because he stands at the starting point of that era which, after other, earlier times had had different tasks, was tasked precisely with seeking that innerization which initially lay only in the religious innerization of Christianity, and which today lies in finding the human soul, within its own “I,” connected to the soul that surges and swells through the universe. Michelangelo stands at the starting point of this era—there, where he stood isolated from the outside world in the secluded Medici Chapel, working all alone, often at night, undermining his health to such an extent that people were frightened by his appearance, for he had become emaciated and could barely move his legs. Yet he was strong enough that he was later able to return to Rome and carry out his other works. As he worked there, the forces we are once again seeking through spiritual science were already at work within him. That is why he stands so close to us. And perhaps he is closest to us when we immerse ourselves completely in these four figures—which are not allegorical but realistic—that allow the spiritual in human beings to be as much a part of our very being and life as Michelangelo once did in connection with the outer body in his Moses and David, and as he succeeded in imprinting color and form upon his sculptures in the Sistine Chapel.

[ 39 ] So we may well say, as I have often mentioned: Spiritual science feels itself to be in harmony with the highest longings and hopes of those spirits of humanity who were themselves close to the spiritual being and activity. In Michelangelo, this confronts us in a magnificent way. If we start from this point of view and wish to draw close to him personally in his soul, then we must say to ourselves: At first, this human soul could only believe that it was placed into earthly existence just once and could not carry the fruits of this earthly existence over into the future of human development. This transitional phase had to be passed through first before the teaching of repeated earthly lives could take effect—a teaching that present-day humanity can truly be ready to receive, if it so chooses. So let us look to Michelangelo and remind ourselves once more how he himself—already bearing within him the distinct characteristics of the era into which we now feel transported—was nevertheless unable to come to terms with the world process to which he himself had contributed so much:

I lie in the harbor we all reach,
The boat that carried me was frail,
The journey was stormy, but now it is time, in the book
Of life, to settle my accounts.
Marble and colors offer no peace,
Only one thing brings comfort: to look upon those poor souls,
Who reach out to us from the cross.

[ 40 ] In addition to all this, we have the certainty that spiritual science can provide: that what is given to the process of humanity in such a significant way, as was given through Michelangelo, is imperishable; that its fruits will live on, further and further, in other lives of this unique soul itself; and that what is once imprinted upon the Earth cannot be lost.

[ 41 ] Just as our present age understands this teaching of repeated earthly lives no more than Michelangelo’s contemporaries understood his paintings in the Sistine Chapel—by clothing the unclothed figures—so too, no matter how much our age may regard this truth as ridiculous and fanciful: it is precisely the greatest minds who vividly teach us how the meaning of life is fulfilled by our ability to look toward repeated earthly lives and to carry forward what has been experienced in humanity’s ancient epochs into the new and ever-new epochs. And if Goethe said that nature invented death so that it might have abundant life, then spiritual science says: Not only did the world invent death so that it might have abundant life, but so that it might have an ever richer and more exalted life! This, however, is the only thought we can deem worthy of standing alongside such ideas as those that arise when we contemplate works of art, such as those of Michelangelo.