Category: Academic Reportage

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Nir Eisikovits, Professor of Philosophy and Director, Applied Ethics Center, UMass Boston

Public debate about artificial intelligence in higher education has largely orbited a familiar worry: cheating. Will students use chatbots to write essays? Can instructors tell? Should universities ban the tech? Embrace it?

These concerns are understandable. But focusing so much on cheating misses the larger transformation already underway, one that extends far beyond student misconduct and even the classroom.

Universities are adopting AI across many areas of institutional life. Some uses are largely invisible, like systems that help allocate resources, flag “at-risk” students, optimize course scheduling or automate routine administrative decisions. Other uses are more noticeable. Students use AI tools to summarize and study, instructors use them to build assignments and syllabuses and researchers use them to write code, scan literature and compress hours of tedious work into minutes.

People may use AI to cheat or skip out on work assignments. But the many uses of AI in higher education, and the changes they portend, beg a much deeper question: As machines become more capable of doing the labor of research and learning, what happens to higher education? What purpose does the university serve?

Over the past eight years, we’ve been studying the moral implications of pervasive engagement with AI as part of a joint research project between the Applied Ethics Center at UMass Boston and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. In a recent white paper, we argue that as AI systems become more autonomous, the ethical stakes of AI use in higher ed rise, as do its potential consequences.

As these technologies become better at producing knowledge work – designing classes, writing papers, suggesting experiments and summarizing difficult texts – they don’t just make universities more productive. They risk hollowing out the ecosystem of learning and mentorship upon which these institutions are built, and on which they depend.

Nonautonomous AI

Consider three kinds of AI systems and their respective impacts on university life:

AI-powered software is already being used throughout higher education in admissions review, purchasing, academic advising and institutional risk assessment. These are considered “nonautonomous” systems because they automate tasks, but a person is “in the loop” and using these systems as tools.

These technologies can pose a risk to students’ privacy and data security. They also can be biased. And they often lack sufficient transparency to determine the sources of these problems. Who has access to student data? How are “risk scores” generated? How do we prevent systems from reproducing inequities or treating certain students as problems to be managed?

These questions are serious, but they are not conceptually new, at least within the field of computer science. Universities typically have compliance offices, institutional review boards and governance mechanisms that are designed to help address or mitigate these risks, even if they sometimes fall short of these objectives.

Hybrid AI

Hybrid systems encompass a range of tools, including AI-assisted tutoring chatbots, personalized feedback tools and automated writing support. They often rely on generative AI technologies, especially large language models. While human users set the overall goals, the intermediate steps the system takes to meet them are often not specified.

Hybrid systems are increasingly shaping day-to-day academic work. Students use them as writing companions, tutors, brainstorming partners and on-demand explainers. Faculty use them to generate rubrics, draft lectures and design syllabuses. Researchers use them to summarize papers, comment on drafts, design experiments and generate code.

This is where the “cheating” conversation belongs. With students and faculty alike increasingly leaning on technology for help, it is reasonable to wonder what kinds of learning might get lost along the way. But hybrid systems also raise more complex ethical questions.

One has to do with transparency. AI chatbots offer natural-language interfaces that make it hard to tell when you’re interacting with a human and when you’re interacting with an automated agent. That can be alienating and distracting for those who interact with them. A student reviewing material for a test should be able to tell if they are talking with their teaching assistant or with a robot. A student reading feedback on a term paper needs to know whether it was written by their instructor. Anything less than complete transparency in such cases will be alienating to everyone involved and will shift the focus of academic interactions from learning to the means or the technology of learning. University of Pittsburgh researchers have shown that these dynamics bring forth feelings of uncertainty, anxiety and distrust for students. These are problematic outcomes.

A second ethical question relates to accountability and intellectual credit. If an instructor uses AI to draft an assignment and a student uses AI to draft a response, who is doing the evaluating, and what exactly is being evaluated? If feedback is partly machine-generated, who is responsible when it misleads, discourages or embeds hidden assumptions? And when AI contributes substantially to research synthesis or writing, universities will need clearer norms around authorship and responsibility – not only for students, but also for faculty.

Finally, there is the critical question of cognitive offloading. AI can reduce drudgery, and that’s not inherently bad. But it can also shift users away from the parts of learning that build competence, such as generating ideas, struggling through confusion, revising a clumsy draft and learning to spot one’s own mistakes.

Autonomous agents

The most consequential changes may come with systems that look less like assistants and more like agents. While truly autonomous technologies remain aspirational, the dream of a researcher “in a box” – an agentic AI system that can perform studies on its own – is becoming increasingly realistic.

Agentic tools are anticipated to “free up time” for work that focuses on more human capacities like empathy and problem-solving. In teaching, this may mean that faculty may still teach in the headline sense, but more of the day-to-day labor of instruction can be handed off to systems optimized for efficiency and scale. Similarly, in research, the trajectory points toward systems that can increasingly automate the research cycle. In some domains, that already looks like robotic laboratories that run continuously, automate large portions of experimentation and even select new tests based on prior results.

At first glance, this may sound like a welcome boost to productivity. But universities are not information factories; they are systems of practice. They rely on a pipeline of graduate students and early-career academics who learn to teach and research by participating in that same work. If autonomous agents absorb more of the “routine” responsibilities that historically served as on-ramps into academic life, the university may keep producing courses and publications while quietly thinning the opportunity structures that sustain expertise over time.

The same dynamic applies to undergraduates, albeit in a different register. When AI systems can supply explanations, drafts, solutions and study plans on demand, the temptation is to offload the most challenging parts of learning. To the industry that is pushing AI into universities, it may seem as if this type of work is “inefficient” and that students will be better off letting a machine handle it. But it is the very nature of that struggle that builds durable understanding. Cognitive psychology has shown that students grow intellectually through doing the work of drafting, revising, failing, trying again, grappling with confusion and revising weak arguments. This is the work of learning how to learn.

Taken together, these developments suggest that the greatest risk posed by automation in higher education is not simply the replacement of particular tasks by machines, but the erosion of the broader ecosystem of practice that has long sustained teaching, research and learning.

An uncomfortable inflection point

So what purpose do universities serve in a world in which knowledge work is increasingly automated?

One possible answer treats the university primarily as an engine for producing credentials and knowledge. There, the core question is output: Are students graduating with degrees? Are papers and discoveries being generated? If autonomous systems can deliver those outputs more efficiently, then the institution has every reason to adopt them.

But another answer treats the university as something more than an output machine, acknowledging that the value of higher education lies partly in the ecosystem itself. This model assigns intrinsic value to the pipeline of opportunities through which novices become experts, the mentorship structures through which judgment and responsibility are cultivated, and the educational design that encourages productive struggle rather than optimizing it away. Here, what matters is not only whether knowledge and degrees are produced, but how they are produced and what kinds of people, capacities and communities are formed in the process. In this version, the university is meant to serve as no less than an ecosystem that reliably forms human expertise and judgment.

In a world where knowledge work itself is increasingly automated, we think universities must ask what higher education owes its students, its early-career scholars and the society it serves. The answers will determine not only how AI is adopted, but also what the modern university becomes.

The Applied Ethics Center at UMass Boston receives funding from the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Nir Eisikovits serves as the data ethics advisor to MindGuard, a startup focused on AI integration into companies’ workflow.

Jacob Burley receives funding from The Applied Ethics Center at UMass Boston.

– ref. The greatest risk of AI in higher education isn’t cheating – it’s the erosion of learning itself – https://theconversation.com/the-greatest-risk-of-ai-in-higher-education-isnt-cheating-its-the-erosion-of-learning-itself-270243

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Cynthia Chris, Professor of Media Studies, City University of New York

There is a long and storied history of nonhuman actors, from Luke, the dog of silent star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, to the collies cast in the role of Lassie in film and on television. Bart the Bear racked up over 20 film and TV credits in the 1980s and 1990s, while countless horses have supported period dramas that now saturate streaming services.

But business has not been as good as it used to be for the animal trainers who specialize in renting creatures of all kinds to film and TV productions.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, it’s a trend that’s been building for at least 25 years, and it’s largely due to a mix of activism and technological advances, which I’ve observed in my studies of animals on screen.

Fewer roles to go around

Hollywood’s adoption of visual effects – also referred to as computer generated imagery, or CGI – has had an outsized role in putting many animal actors out of work. Ever since “Jurassic Park” (1993) dared to comingle CGI dinosaurs with human actors, more and more digital animals have appeared alongside humans on screen.

Other factors have accelerated the trend.

The COVID-19 pandemic, the 2023 Hollywood actors and writers strikes and a recent dip in the number of new TV series being greenlit have meant fewer productions and fewer roles to go around, whether they’re written for humans or animals.

But even before these recent events, there were calls for Hollywood to radically reduce its dependence on animal actors.

In 2012, The Hollywood Reporter – the same trade magazine that recently lamented a downturn in animal rentals – published an exposé cataloging incidents in which animals died, were injured or were put at grievous risk on sets. These productions nonetheless went on to carry the famous “No Animals Were Harmed” credit awarded by the American Humane Association, despite the fact that, well, animals were harmed. American Humane maintained that the incidents were tragic but not the result of negligence.

In 2016, PETA released the results of undercover investigations documenting substandard living conditions and untreated medical conditions at Birds & Animals Unlimited, which operates animal training facilities for film and television. In 2024, the organization detailed neglect of animals in the care of Atlanta Film Animals. Both companies denied the allegations.

There are, of course, any number of ways to minimize or avoid using actual animals in film and TV altogether.

“The Rise of the Planet of the Apes” and its sequels have used motion-capture, with humans performing the movements of characters later rendered as chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos and orangutans.

For Ang Lee’s 2012 production “Life of Pi,” visual effects artists created thousands of virtual animals, while director Darren Aronofsky opted for completely digital animals, supplemented by some practical props, in 2014’s “Noah.”

Bucking high-tech trends, the 2025 horror film “Primate” went old school without reverting to real animals, deploying a movement artist in a costume and prosthetics to play a murderously rabid chimp.

Can CGI numb viewers to animal violence?

What do digital animals, these bestial avatars, make possible?

Undoubtedly, there are trainers who care deeply for their charges and uphold best practices in animal husbandry. But it stands to reason that the fewer captive animals, the better, and recent advances in AI have made visual effects and CGI even more realistic and easier to model.

However, substituting flesh-and-blood animals with those made of pixels seems to have created a canvas for unfettered abuse. Consider the brutal violence of the “Planet of the Apes” reboots, which include hand-to-hand combat, branding and a torturous crucifixion scene.

In the past, the fact that the animals on set were real sometimes curbed filmmakers’ most savage impulses; violence was implied or took place off-screen in family fare like “The Yearling” (1946) and “Old Yeller” (1957). At the same time, camera tricks and props have been used to create scenes of animal cruelty in many films, from “American Psycho” (2000) to “John Wick” (2014).

While the effects of violent media on viewers are notoriously hard to study, some evidence suggests that some audiences can become desensitized to the real-world consequences of unhealthy and violent content. It’s easy to see how this desensitization could extend to watching cruelty toward animals on screen.

Viewers can still sniff out the virtual

A hybrid approach to portraying animals on screen seems to have taken hold, using what one scholar has called – in a reference to on-screen dogs – “composite canine performances.”

The team behind the 2025 version of “Superman,” for example, sought to create a realistic dog, right down to each scruffy patch of fur. But they needed it to defy gravity and other laws of physics. So they incorporated just enough live animal in preproduction to animate a mostly CGI creature, with director James Gunn’s own dog serving as the “model,” or “reference,” for the superdog, Krypto.

This technique recalls the methods of Disney animators who were stumped by the challenge of creating the characters for “Bambi” (1942). So they studied animal anatomy, photographed deer in the wild and sketched animals brought into the studio in order to better capture their movements on paper.

But when it comes to live-action films grounded in everyday life, there’s still work on set for real animals. For one, it’s still usually cheaper to deploy the real thing. Moreover, most of the virtual animals on screen simply don’t look realistic enough to allow for the full suspension of disbelief that makes cinema magic.

That’s why in the 2025 adaptation of Helen MacDonald’s memoir, “H Is for Hawk,” filmmakers reportedly employed five goshawks to portray Mabel, the bird adopted by Helen (Claire Foy). And it’s why Academy Award-nominee “Marty Supreme” featured an entire menagerie of live animals, including a horse, a camel, an armadillo, a dog, a rabbit and even a ping-pong playing sea lion. Yes, the sea lion in the scene was real, but the ball wasn’t.

Future opportunities for trainers and their charges appear to rest on just how good visual effects can get. For some animal activists – not to mention the animals that have no say in their work – that day can’t come soon enough.

Moviegoers and animal advocates, meanwhile, might hope for a middle ground: a future in which only ethically treated animals continue to get to appear on the screen.

Cynthia Chris does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Do animals have a future on Hollywood sets? – https://theconversation.com/do-animals-have-a-future-on-hollywood-sets-273877

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Barret Michalec, Research Associate Professor of Nursing and Health Innovation, Arizona State University

“Humble” is not a word my colleagues would use to describe me, especially early in my career.

In fact, when word got around that I was researching humility, I suspect more than a few choked on their coffee.

And even though I have spent over a decade exploring the concept as an attribute and as a practice, it wasn’t until I recently reflected on my own professional challenges that I truly understood how to embrace humility.

I want to share my journey, but first it is important to understand what humility is – and isn’t. It’s been extolled as a virtue for centuries, but it’s often mischaracterized.

In today’s culture, it can be mistaken as a humblebrag, which disguises a boast as modesty – for example, “I really hate talking about myself, but people keep asking how I managed to run a marathon while working full time.” Or it can resemble impostor phenomenon, the persistent experience of feeling intellectually or professionally fraudulent despite clear evidence of competence or success.

But research shows that humble people hold accurate views of their own abilities and achievements. They openly acknowledge their mistakes and limitations and are receptive to new ideas. Overall, they recognize their places within a larger whole and genuinely appreciate the value of others.

Humility doesn’t always earn praise. Sometimes the humble may be seen as meek, subservient or self-abasing.

For instance, many people praised former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s empathetic, self-effacing leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic, with an openness and deference to experts. But some critics dismissed it as weak or soft. These negative views show the various ways people “see” humility.

Generally, though, when humility is understood as grounded self-awareness rather than self-erasure, it’s viewed as something worth cultivating and practicing. We see openness, curiosity, acknowledgment of others and a lack of ego in fictional characters like Ted Lasso, hero of the same-titled Apple TV series; Samwise Gamgee in the “Lord of the Rings” books; and Jean-Luc Picard, commander of the USS Enterprise in “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

Humility is also evident in public figures, such as former President Jimmy Carter, children’s television host Fred Rogers, and Nelson Mandela, the Black nationalist who served as the first Black president of South Africa.

I’m a sociologist with a focus on medical education and health care providers. At Arizona State University’s Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation, I explore issues including causes of burnout, elements of team-based care and opportunities for emphasizing the human side of health care. In recent years, my work has focused on humility.

From my research and my own experience, I’ve learned that true humility isn’t self-erasure. It’s a sense of security and confidence that your value doesn’t depend on recognition and that you are just one member of a larger system with a multitude of contributors. By removing the need to dominate, humility fosters openness to collaboration, innovation and an awareness of how the systems around us work.

Still, in a world of Instagram likes and LinkedIn accolades, humility can be the virtue everyone seems to admire but few practice It’s the one we say we want – until it requires us to confront the parts of ourselves that crave affirmation.

Climbing the professional ladder

I tend to stand out in a crowd. I’m 6-foot-4, with close-cropped hair, a heavy beard and tattoos. I also push myself to stand out professionally.

Starting in graduate school, I was determined to make my voice heard and sought after. I pursued nearly every opportunity, committee and position that came my way. No role was too small for me to accept.

I strived to present my work in top-tier journals and at conferences, and I cold-called prominent scholars to propose working together. And I constantly shared my findings and thoughts on social media.

Like many workplaces, the academic world has a set of defined success metrics, such as publications, citations of your work, grant funding and teaching evaluations from students. School culture and leadership influence what each college or university considers more or less valuable among those measures. To advance and get promoted, particularly to get tenure, it’s important to learn at an early stage what one’s department, college or university truly prioritizes.

I wanted to get tenure but also to be seen as an active citizen of academia – energetic, outspoken and unafraid to push boundaries. When my department chair described me as having my hair on fire, I took it as a compliment. I called it “making positive noise.”

Initially, the system rewarded that noise. I earned tenure at the University of Delaware and received departmental, college and national awards. I also was appointed to serve as associate dean and to direct a new research center. I felt validated, visible and valuable.

The sociology department at the University of Delaware had a typical academic culture that’s often summarized as “publish or perish.” The most important measures of scholars’ work were writing, publishing their work in respected journals and having other researchers cite those studies. Securing external funding from government, private companies or foundations was valued but was not as high a priority as publishing.

A new beginning that felt like an end

In 2020 I received a new opportunity at Arizona State University, a much larger school that branded itself as a hub of innovation and entrepreneurship. I was offered the chance to direct the Center for Advancing Interprofessional Practice, Education and Research and to step into the shoes of a leader I deeply admired. I arrived expecting to be a big fish in a bigger pond.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I showed up imagining there’d be a bit of buzz around my arrival given my time at the University of Delaware. But reality didn’t match the script: no greeting, office or nameplate marked my place when I arrived.

Early conversations with administrators weren’t about my research or teaching visions – the things that I thought set me apart. Instead, I felt they tended to focus on how much external funding I could raise from foundations and government agencies. My new colleagues often spoke in a shorthand of grant-based acronyms when referring to what projects they were working on, a “language” I was woefully unfamiliar with.

To make matters worse, I arrived during COVID-19, with classes either canceled or taught online and faculty members working mainly from home. The hallway chatter, open doors and spontaneous collaboration that I was accustomed to were absent. I began to feel alienated and disoriented as a scholar.

Even after ASU resumed in-person classes in the fall of 2021, I felt like the silence and distance lingered. No students waited for office hours. I struggled to make connections with my colleagues. I eagerly proposed collaborations when really everyone was just trying to find their footing in this new era of education.

My proposals for new classes and curricular programs hit up against institutional barriers I was unaware of. At one point, a college administrator asked, “How do we get you on other people’s grants?” – a question that I took to imply that they felt my research wasn’t strong enough.

It appeared that my colleagues in Edson College were accustomed to these values and spoke the language. I was a stranger in a strange land. Although I was producing some of my best work, measured in terms of publications and citations, I felt no one seemed interested. I had come from an environment where I felt known and valued to one where I seemed to be a nobody.

I felt as though I needed to staple my resume to my forehead and parade around the hallways asserting, like Ron Burgundy in the movie “Anchorman,” “I’m not quite sure how to put this, but … I’m kind of a big deal. People know me.”

The impact of feeling unseen

For people who have built careers by being highly engaged and visible, suddenly feeling unseen can be devastating. In any profession, a fear that you don’t belong at your workplace can be debilitating and make you question your own value.

I sought advice from peers and college leaders, and even hired a professional coach. Things only worsened. Curricular proposals were stalled or turned down. My center was shuttered in a restructuring, although it was meeting its goals and earning international recognition.

At first, I blamed ASU and Edson College for my feelings of disconnection. I thought the leadership structure and style was dysfunctional; that many colleagues were cold, unfriendly and conformist; and that the college’s stated values were inauthentic.

This series of what I came to call “unacknowledgments” sent me into a personal and professional tailspin. Negativity and self-doubt consumed me, and I truly worried that my career was over. Had I been blackballed? Why did it feel as though no one cared?

When the noise turns inward

I had spent years studying empathy – the ability to understand and feel what someone else is feeling – and how to cultivate it among health care professionals and students in order to support more patient-centered care. To that end, at the University of Delaware I had developed a program designed to foster empathy across health professions. It aimed to help students see one another as collaborators, build shared respect and recognize their collective role on the same health care delivery team.

But when I further analyzed the program’s outcomes from my office at ASU, I realized that empathy wasn’t enough. It could help students feel with others, but it didn’t necessarily help them see themselves, or others, differently.

I realized that what I really wanted the students to develop was humility. This step would require them to recognize their limits, accept that they were fallible, see themselves as part of a larger team and value others’ contributions.

That realization changed my research trajectory – and eventually, my professional life.

Research becomes a mirror

Initially, I approached humility solely as a scholar. I examined the history of the concept and gaps in existing research on it, and I analyzed how humility was connected to uncertainty and the impostor phenomenon. I explored how humility could enhance team-based care and developed a new way to define humility among health care professionals in order to promote more collaboration and patient-centeredness.

As my own professional world began to unravel, and as I dived deeper into the concept of humility through my research, something unexpected happened. I realized that humility wasn’t just an idea to study – it was becoming a mirror that made me rethink my own perspective.

Slowly, I began to see how pride and insecurity were entwined in my reactions to my new setting at ASU. I realized that my need to be noticed, and my insistence that others validate my worth, represented my own kind of arrogance.

Perhaps my ambition had been less about contributing and more about gaining external validation. I had lost the selfless wonder and awe that drive scholarly inquiry and curiosity. And now I had to confront what remained when the spotlight dimmed.

Humility, I began to understand, wasn’t just an abstract concept to explore “out there” among others. I needed to hone it internally by thinking beyond myself. By decentering my ego, I realized that I could nurture and sustain curiosity in its own right.

In short, I needed to practice what I was preaching. It wasn’t an easy lesson. I assume that cultivating humility never is.

To that end, I felt that it was essential to develop a program to help build humility “muscles.” In 2024 I developed HIIT for Humility, an online training package for individuals or groups, modeled after the fitness concept of high-intensity interval training. This program provides evidence-based strategies to help users start building “habits of humility,” such as acknowledgment of others and self-awareness.

Just as physical exercise requires consistency to produce results, so does the cultivation of humility. Leaning into HIIT for Humility workouts gradually eased my sense of alienation and defensiveness. I became more appreciative of others, less quick to judge and better able to listen to others’ perspectives. In doing so, I started to feel more confident and secure.

While I still took pride in my work, I began to see that my contributions were not the only ones that mattered. I also found that I could stretch into unfamiliar but necessary tasks, such as working harder to win federal and foundation grants and seeing the value of my colleagues’ contributions to science.

Why am I here?

Only a few years into this process, I can see that ASU and Edson College have unintentionally taught me humility by signaling, often quietly, which contributions are deemed essential and which forms of success carry the most weight. Navigating stalled proposals, shifting priorities and structural reorganizations have required me to recalibrate my ego, expectations and identity.

Not being seen as a “big fish” and being expected to persist without consistent recognition have required me to understand my work as part of a larger system with differing values and, at times, challenging constraints. Shifting to ASU forced me to rethink my identity as a professor and to reevaluate my sense of purpose from the inside out.

A colleague of mine often asks students who he feels are coasting along, “Why are you here?” Lately, I’ve taken that question personally. What is the point of being a professor – writing papers, submitting grant proposals, teaching courses? Why did I choose this path in the first place?

When I feel unseen, unheard or unappreciated, pondering why I’m here helps ground me. For anyone who is struggling to feel visible or valued at work, I strongly recommend considering this simple question.

Over time, I’ve stopped needing to be the big fish in the pond and measuring my worth in titles and awards. I now see that my responsibility as a scholar, teacher and human being is to stay curious, listen more deeply and make space for others’ voices.

Embracing humility, and consistently using my humility muscles, have helped me realize that I’m here to be part of the creative energy of academia, do the work and cultivate curiosity in my students, my peers and myself.

Barret Michalec does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. ‘Learning to be humble meant taming my need to stand out from the group’ – a humility scholar explains how he became more grounded – https://theconversation.com/learning-to-be-humble-meant-taming-my-need-to-stand-out-from-the-group-a-humility-scholar-explains-how-he-became-more-grounded-273402

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Virginia Raguin, Distinguished Professor of Humanities Emerita, College of the Holy Cross

Michelangelo’s fresco of “The Last Judgment,” covering the wall behind the altar of the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City, is being restored. The work, which started on Feb. 1, 2026, is expected to continue for three months.

The Sistine Chapel is one of the great masterpieces of Renaissance art. As the setting where the College of Cardinals of the Catholic Church meets to elect a new pope, it was decorated by the most prestigious painters of the day. In 1480, Pope Sixtus IV commissioned Domenico Ghirlandaio, Sandro Botticelli, Pietro Perugino and Cosimo Rosselli to paint the walls. On the south are six scenes of the “Life of Moses,” and across on the north are six scenes of the “Life of Christ.”

In 1508, Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling. The theme is the Book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible. The images show God creating the world through the story of Noah, who was directed by God to shelter humans and animals on an ark during the great flood. The ceiling’s most famous scene may be “God Creating Adam,” where Adam reaches out his arm to the outstretched arm of God the Father, but their fingers fail to meet.

At the sides, the artist juxtaposed the male Hebrew prophets and the female Greek and Roman sybils who were inspired by the gods to foretell the future. It was completed in 1512; then in 1536, Michelangelo was asked to create a painting for the wall behind the altar. For this immense work of 590 square feet (about square meters), filled with 391 figures, he labored until 1541. He was then nearly 67 years old.

As an art historian, I have been aware how, from the beginning, Michelangelo’s “The Last Judgment” sparked controversy for its bold and heroic portrayal of the male nude.

Many layers of meaning

Michelangelo liked to consider himself primarily a sculptor, expressing himself in variations of the nude male body. Most famous may be the Old Testament figure of David about to slay Goliath, originally made for the Cathedral of Florence.

The artist’s ceiling for the Sistine Chapel had included 20 nude males as supporting figures above the prophets and sibyls. Originally, Michelangelo’s Christ of “The Last Judgment” was entirely nude. A later painter was hired to provide drapery over the loins of Christ and other figures.

“The Last Judgment” scene also contains multiple references to pagan gods and mythology. The image of Christ is inspired by early Christian images showing Christ beardless and youthful, similar to the pagan god of light, Apollo.

At the bottom of the composition is the figure of Charon, a personage from Greek mythology who rowed souls over the river Styx to enter the pagan underworld. Minos, the judge of the underworld, is on the extreme right.

Giorgio Vasari, a fellow artist and historian who knew Michelangelo personally, later recounted the criticism by a senior Vatican official, Biagio da Cesena. The official stated that it was disgraceful that nude figures were exposed so shamefully and that the painting seemed more fit for public baths and taverns.

Michelangelo’s response was to place the face of Biagio on Minos, the judge of the underworld, and give him donkey’s ears, symbolizing stupidity.

Michelangelo included a reference to his own life in a detail connected to the Apostle Bartholomew, who is located to the lower right of Christ. The apostle was believed to have met his martyrdom by being flayed alive. In his right hand, he holds a knife and, in his left, his flayed skin whose face is a distorted portrait of the artist.

Michelangelo thus placed himself among the blessed in heaven, but also made it into a joke.

Thought-provoking imagery

The Last Judgment is a common theme in Christian art. Michelangelo, however, pushes beyond simple illustration to include pagan myths as well as to challenge traditional depiction of a calm, bearded judge. He uses dramatic imagery to provoke deeper thought: After all, how does anyone on Earth know what the saints do in heaven?

In these decisions, Michelangelo displayed his sense of self-confidence to introduce new ideas and his goal to engage the viewer in new ways.

A digital reproduction of the painting will be displayed on a screen for visitors to the Sistine Chapel during this period of restoration. Behind the screen, technicians from the Vatican Museums’ Restoration Laboratory will work to restore the masterpiece.

Virginia Raguin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Why Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgment’ endures – https://theconversation.com/why-michelangelos-last-judgment-endures-275323