The Bible begins with words that have become famous, "In the beginning God created." God, like an artist, fashioned a universe. How can we grasp the grandeur of this?
Michelangelo, perhaps the greatest artist in history, may help us to understand. He painted the famous Sistine Chapel to retell Genesis' story of creation. His experience proves one thing: creativity is work.
An Exhausting Effort
Michelangelo had 6,000 square feet of ceiling to cover - the size of four average house roofs. Anyone who has painted a ceiling with a roller has caught a hint of the physical difficulty of such a task. But Michelangelo's plan called for 300 separate, detailed portraits of men and women. For more than three years the 5'4" artist devoted all his labors to the exhausting strain of painting the vast overhead space with his tiny brushes.
Sometimes he painted standing on a huge scaffold, a paintbrush high over his head. Sometimes he sat, his nose inches from the ceiling. Sometimes he painted while lying on his back. His back, shoulders, neck, and arms cramped painfuly.
In the long days of summer, he had light to paint 17 hours a day, taking food and a chamberpot with him on the 60-foot scaffold. For 30 days at a stretch he slept in his clothes, not even taking off his boots. Paint dribbled into his eyes so he could barely see. Freezing in the winter, sweating in the summer, he painted until at last the ceiling looked like a ceiling no more. He had transformed it into the creation |
