The Punishment of Haman

High in a corner of the Sistine Chapel, a naked man twists on a cross and seems to fall out of the wall toward us. This is Haman, punished in the Book of Esther, and one of the last scenes Michelangelo painted on the ceiling.

The story behind the painting

The Punishment of Haman is a fresco of about 585 by 985 cm, painted by Michelangelo around 1511 to 1512 as part of the Sistine Chapel ceiling commissioned by Pope Julius II. Michelangelo worked across the vault from the ceremonial entrance door, where the pope and his court made their solemn entries, toward the altar. This scene fills the pendentive to the right of the altar, so it belongs to the very end of the campaign. It tells the story from the Book of Esther, chapter 7, in which the royal minister Haman is brought down after plotting against the Jewish people. Wikidata dates the work to 1511.

What to look for

Haman appears three times, always recognisable by his yellow robe. On the right, King Ahasuerus sends him to fetch royal garments for Mordecai, who sits on a threshold. On the left, Esther reveals Haman's plot to the king. In the centre Haman is punished: his naked body cuts diagonally across the scene, the yellow cloth now flying loose, and his dizzying gaze seems to throw him out of the picture toward the viewer. A white wall of the king's chamber, sharply foreshortened, and a doorway that Haman's moving figure passes through add to the drama. Michelangelo spent twenty-one days of fresco on the scene, three of them on Haman alone, transferring the drawing from a cartoon by direct incision because the foreshortening was so complex.

Meaning and intent

This pendentive is one of four corner scenes from the Old Testament about God protecting the people of Israel. In the Bible Haman is hanged, but Michelangelo chose crucifixion instead. According to the source, this choice underlines a parallel between the story and the Redemption through the incarnation and sacrifice of Christ, and the execution follows the way it is described in Dante's Divine Comedy. Like the scenes nearby, the fresco insists on bold views from below, because the ceiling was meant to be read mainly along the central axis, from the ceremonial door to the altar, the path of papal processions.

Legacy

The painting has not come down to us untouched. A crack made some of the plaster fall, and the pendentive was restored with additions, first by Carnevali in 1570 and then by Mazzuoli in 1710 to 1712. The repainted part is easy to see in the three figures on the left, which are darker, a sign that the frescoes were already blackening in the second half of the sixteenth century. A few dark rectangles still show the state of the paint before the modern restoration. Two red chalk sheets with nude studies for Haman survive, one in the British Museum and one in the Teyler Museum in Haarlem.