The Creation of Adam

The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican City was painted by Michelangelo, an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer. [Why the church hired him to paint nudes all over their ceiling: don't ask me.] The ceiling took about four years to complete and the finished project contained over three hundred figures. Two of the famous figures are God and Adam in The Creation of Adam.

In this painting Adam is shown as a young man, lying on the ground, holding an arm up to Heaven. God is shown as a Zeus-like man lying on a cloud of some sort (probably Heaven) surrounded by Cherubs. His right arm is reaching out to Adam's and his left arm is around the neck of a female and his hand rests on that of a toddler.

Who is the female and who is the child?

There are four especially popular views on the woman, nearly everyone agrees that the child is Jesus.

Some think that the woman is Mary, the earthly mother of Jesus. Michelangelo was Catholic so the idea that he would put Mary next to Jesus makes sense. The Catholics do, afterall, often pray to St. Mary instead of Jesus because they feel that sometimes Jesus is too busy to hear there prays and Mary will tell Jesus what they have to say when Jesus has time. Mary is kind of like his secretary. It makes sense, in view of Michelangelo's beliefs, that Mary would be the woman next to Jesus.

Others, mainly the people who believe that before people exist on earth they exist in Heaven, think that the woman is Eve. I can't find any evidence for this one being what Michelangelo planned (if he even planned her to be anyone special, of course--we all know he might have painted a woman just because he felt, on that particular day, like painting a woman on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel). I think that the idea of Eve merely was thought up by those people who didn't want to think it was Mary. Eve, however, is the most popular view.

Still others are under the impression that the woman is Sophia. Sophia is the feminine personification of Wisdom. In Proverbs Wisdom is often written as "she" and that "she," in Hebrew tradition, is named Sophia. Also in Hebrew tradition it says that Sophia was with God in the very beginning. [Hmm, yeah, wisdom has always been with God. God is wise!] I like this idea best because I like the idea of Wisdom being under God's left arm. Though the idea of Wisdom being Sophia is very poetic I'm not really a fan of wisdom being female. It gets too goddess-like.

Fourth and finally, others think that the woman is Lilith. Lilith is a female storm demon associated with wind and thought to be the bearer of disease, illness, and death. Lilith is often considered to be Adam's first wife. I'm not sure about the legend of Lilith but in another Michelangelo painting, "The Temptation of Adam and Eve" the serpent is shown as part snake and part woman. The woman is supposed to be Lilith. This is very like the Eve theory. First it would be Lilith under God's left arm, if the painting had depicted a later date the woman would have been Eve. [Or something. Hard to say with all this mythology.]

The theory that I have to deem the most logical is that of Mary, when looking at the painting your eyes go from Adam, to God, to the woman, to the child.
The theory that I like the best is that of Sophia. The thought that the woman has no meaning still isn't complete stupid, is it?

[So, if I lost you after the first paragraph, don't worry. I lost myself after the second word.]