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October 19, 2001
Valerie Shrimplin Sun Symbolism and Cosmology in Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment” Truman State University Press, 1999. 375 pp.; 127 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (0943549655)
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This book systematically examines the ways in which the sun was understood metaphorically, symbolically, and scientifically in a range of texts and images available to Michelangelo during the period in which he designed and painted the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel (1534-41). Observing that Michelangelo’s Last Judgment differs from previous renditions in that it offers a circular composition with figures rising and falling in a clockwise pattern around a figure of Christ before a...