Last week marked a new low in our national conversation on education. On an episode of the “Not Your Ordinary Parts” podcast, professional race-baiter Robin DiAngelo shared how she uses a classic piece of Renaissance art as an example of “white supremacy and patriarchy.” In doing so, she revealed the truth about her ideological mission, which is not to create a better world by eliminating racial prejudice but to undermine the foundations of Western civilization itself.
The masterpiece DiAngelo degrades is none other than Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam” from the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Painted circa 1511, this now iconic fresco is the central point of Michelangelo’s epic depiction of the early chapters of Genesis.
Then as now, the image of God extending his hand to Adam commands attention. Giorgio Vasari, Michelangelo’s student and biographer, described Adam as “a figure whose beauty, pose and contours are of such a quality that he seems newly created by his Supreme and First Creator rather by the brush and design of a mere mortal.” In his 2003 book Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling, art historian Ross King explains how Michelangelo’s depiction of God was incredibly novel for its time: “The Lord God in full length, complete with bare toes and kneecaps, was a rare and unaccustomed sight.”
In my own lectures on this work, I have drawn my students’ attention to the body language of God and Adam. As God strains to touch his beloved creation, Adam’s efforts to reach toward his Creator are
