The Sacrifice of Noah

Saved from the Flood, Noah gives thanks at an altar while young men drag in rams, a bull and even a half-hidden elephant. Michelangelo painted this crowded, ordered scene early in his work on the Sistine ceiling.

The story behind the painting

The Sacrifice of Noah is a fresco of about 170 by 260 cm on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, commissioned by Pope Julius II and dated around 1508 to 1510; Wikidata gives 1508. Michelangelo painted the vault in two phases, because the scaffolding covered only half of the chapel and had to be taken down and rebuilt on the other side. This scene, based on Genesis 8, belongs to the first block, starting from the ceremonial entrance, and took twelve days of fresco. In 1568 part of the plaster came loose and Domenico Carnevali restored it. He seems to have followed the original closely, probably because he could see it before the damaged pieces fell.

What to look for

The composition is clear and orderly, borrowing a motif from ancient Roman reliefs of sacrifice. At the centre is the altar, and servants converge on it with animals: two rams, a bull, two horses, and an elephant barely visible in the background. Noah wears the same red tunic he wears in The Drunkenness of Noah. A young woman in green on the left lights the fire with a torch and shields her face with her hand, a figure inspired by a Roman sarcophagus with the story of Meleager. In the foreground a boy carries firewood, a naked youth sits on a freshly killed ram and takes entrails from another, and a third youth leans toward the opening of the altar, perhaps blowing on the fire. The darker figures on the left are Carnevali's restoration.

Meaning and intent

In the Bible, Noah makes his sacrifice after the Flood, to make peace with God, a key moment because his descendants lead to the people of Israel and to Christ. Yet on the ceiling this scene comes before the larger panel of the Flood. The source suggests Michelangelo inverted the order to reserve a major panel for the Flood. Because of this, some, including Ascanio Condivi, identified the scene as the sacrifice of Cain and Abel. The Genesis scenes show humanity before the law of Moses, and each can also be read backwards as a prefiguring of Holy Week, celebrated in the chapel with a procession to the altar.

Legacy

Michelangelo enriched a rather plain biblical account with vivid ritual details, perhaps taken from Leviticus. Older scholarship saw formal sources in versions of the subject by Paolo Uccello and Jacopo della Quercia, and Ernst Gombrich linked the woman at Noah's side to the figure of Althea on a Meleager sarcophagus now in the Villa Albani. The elderly woman in profile on the right, with stiffer outlines, may be the work of assistants. Around the panel sit two pairs of Ignudi, nude youths holding ribbons, and two bronze-coloured medallions showing the punishment of Heliodorus and the destruction of an idolatrous altar by the priest Mattathias.