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The Sistine unveiled. Iconography of a masterpiece

FOR ALMOST FIFTY YEARS, FATHER HEINRICH PFEIFFER HAS INVESTIGATED ON A ICONOGRAPHIC, THEOLOGICAL AND ICONOLOGICAL SIDE THE WHOLE CORPUS OF SISTINE FRESCOES THAT NARRATE THE THEMES OF BIBLICAL HISTORY

AN INVESTIGATION THAT REVEALS THE TRUE BRILLIANCE OF MICHELANGELO AND HIS CHALLENGE TO SEDUCE MEN BY LEADING THEM WHERE HUMANITY AND DIVINITY ARE IDENTIFIED

 

This volume shows a new Sistine through a completely innovative look at the iconography of the side walls painted among others by Botticelli, Perugino, Signorelli and at Michelangelo\’s work in the vault, in the lunettes and in the wall of the Last Judgment. The revolutionary aspect of the work does not consist in subverting historical-artistic judgments or attributions now completely established by critics, but in showing image by image, color by color, the underlying symbolic structure that coherently orders the entire work. This symbolic structure, a real philosophical-theological program, anticipates and determines the entire history of the Sistine frescoes, from the fifteenth-century artists to the work of Michelangelo. It is a unitary iconographic program formulated by the theologians of Sixtus IV, in the middle of the fifteenth century, and then followed by Michelangelo himself many years later. The publication is also an opportunity to show the Sistine Chapel with an exceptional abundance of details so that this masterpiece is easy to understand for the reader but also decoded in the meanings and even in the use of the colors of each scene.


HEINRICH W. PFEIFFER is graduated in History of Art, Classical Archeology and Prehistory at the Faculty of Letters in Tübingen. Ordained priest in 1969 in Berlin, he acquired a license in Theology in 1970 at the PUG in Rome. Appointed Adjunct Professor, then Extraordinary and Full Professor at PUG, for nine years he was director of the Higher Course for the Cultural Heritage of the Church and for five years a member of the Pontifical Commission for the Cultural Heritage of the Church.

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