Once You See It, You'll Never Unsee It!

You already know the hands. God's arm out straight, finger rigid with effort. Adam barely lifting a finger, wrist gone completely floppy like he can't quite be bothered. And that famous little gap in between, which is just 1.9 centimetres by the way. You look at this painting and your eyes go straight to those fingers. It makes sense, you've seen it ripped off for the ET poster. It inspired Nokia's classic Connecting People intro, and it's been parodied in everything from The Simpsons to Bruce Almighty. We are practically hard-wired to focus on that. But that's actually the problem. Because although the whole world spent five centuries staring at that one spot, we totally ignored the massive, bizarre shape surrounding God. People studied this ceiling their entire lives and saw nothing. It took until 1990 for an American doctor to look up at that shape and realise Michelangelo was hiding something huge, right in plain sight. None of it makes sense though, unless we start in Florence in 1492, in a room full of dead bodies. Behind the church of Santo Spirito there was a hospital, and attached to it a mortuary where they kept the bodies of the poor until somebody got round to burying them. The prior, a monk called Niccolò Bicchellini, gave a 17-year-old Michelangelo a room, a supply of candles, and permission to cut those bodies open, which was very much not the done thing. The church tolerated dissection grudgingly, mostly on executed criminals, and ordinary people found it revolting. So it happened at night, and it went on for years. Vasari, who knew him, says he flayed a great many bodies in that room. He was teaching himself what a person is made of, half a century before anyone printed a decent anatomy book. He paid Bicchellini back with a wooden crucifix, which still hangs there today. And then, near the end of his life, he burned his drawings. Piles of them, onto the fire, so nobody would ever see how much work it had taken him. Whatever he worked out in that mortuary, he made sure it stayed inside one skull. Remember the mortuary. Sixteen years later, in Rome, Pope Julius II told him to go and paint a ceiling. Michelangelo didn't want to paint a ceiling. He was a sculptor, and said so constantly, signed his letters Michelangelo, Sculptor, for four solid years. Then he made it worse for himself by talking the Pope into doing the whole of Genesis. Three hundred figures. Five hundred square metres. One man, standing on a scaffold with his head cranked back and one arm above him, paint running into his eyes. He never lay on his back, by the way. That bit's a myth. Autumn of 1511, roughly, he paints the one you know. Three metres by six. Above the room where they still lock cardinals in to elect popes. Adams on the left. Finished. Flawless. Draped over a green slope like he pays rent on it. Look at his eyes, though. Because everything hangs off this. Fully awake, propped up on one elbow, looking straight back. He's alive in every way but one. And the whole painting is an argument about which one. On the right, God. And nobody had painted God like this before. An old man in a thin shift, barefoot, packed in with a crowd of angels who haven't got any wings. And then the gap. The fingers were never the strange part, though. Everything on the right-hand side of that painting is travelling inside something. And that something is the oddest object on the whole ceiling. The guidebooks call it a cloak. Try looking at it as a cloak and it falls apart in your hands. It doesn't stream out behind him the way fabric does at speed. It seals the group into one closed shape, swollen, ridged along the top, flat underneath. A green sash spills out the bottom and coils back on itself. Twenty metres up and it's spent four centuries under candle soot. The restoration that started in 1980 took the soot off and put the colour back. Which is roughly when a man in Indiana went to check something he'd been sitting on since medical school. Frank Lynn Meshberger. Early 70s, medical student, and one evening after a full day in the neuroanatomy lab, he opened a book about Michelangelo at a fold-out of The Creation of Adam. He recognised it instantly. It was the same thing he'd been staring at all day. Then he did what most of us would do and assumed it was old news. Obviously somebody had noticed. Somebody in the art department years ago in a footnote. So he shut the book, qualified, and spent years delivering babies in Anderson, Indiana. It was 1988 before it properly dawned on him that nobody had ever said it. So he checked. He laid a transparency of the fresco over a plate from a standard anatomy atlas and matched them up point by point. On the 10th of October 1990, it ran in the Journal of the American Medical Association with the fresco on the cover. The thing carrying God across the sky is a brain. And not just a vague resemblance at that, it's a precise sagittal section of the skull and brain cut straight down the middle. The one image every first-year medical student has to have absolutely nailed. And once you've got that, the painting starts giving things up one at a time. According to Meshberger, the sulcus singuli, a major brain fold, extends exactly along the hip of the angel in front of God, across God's shoulders and right over Eve's forehead. The back of the angel extending laterally below God is the pons. The angel's hip and leg represent the spinal cord. The green sash spilling out the bottom is the vertebral artery, which really does climb towards the brain in that exact irregular coil. And the dangling leg is the pituitary gland hanging off its stalk. Even the human visual pathway is perfectly mapped out on another angel's flexed leg. So what's crossing the gap? Go back to Adam's eyes. He's already alive. Genesis has God forming him from the dust and breathing into him before any of this. Meshberger thought the painting had been given the wrong title all along, that it should be The Endowment of Adam. What crosses that gap isn't life. Adam's got life. It's the mind. The art world didn't take this lying down. One Renaissance specialist told the New York Times that God is a good deal more than a flying brain. An ophthalmologist pointed out that if you stare at anything long enough, you'll find whatever you're looking for. Both fair. A brain is exactly the sort of shape human beings hallucinate. We see faces in plug sockets and saints in burnt toast. Except it didn't go away. In 2010, a neurosurgeon and a medical illustrator at Johns Hopkins published on a different panel, the one directly above the altar. What had been nagging them was God's throat. It's lumpy. It's awkward. And the beard curls round the jaw in a way that doesn't work from a painter who plainly knew how to paint a neck. Trace those lumps and you get a precise view of the human brain stem seen from below. They showed it to other neurosurgeons without saying what they were looking for. The neurosurgeons got there on their own. It's more than just a depiction of the first breath of life. Michelangelo was capturing the moment God gave mankind its intellect.