Book Review: All Things Move

All Things Move: Learning to Look in the Sistine Chapel by Jeannie Marshall (Biblioasis, 2023).

Imagine being surrounded by art all the time. I think it would be amazing. I don’t always have the best eye for art, but I love it (at least a lot of it) and am always trying to learn more about it.

Jeannie Marshall doesn’t have to imagine this kind of life—she lives it. Marshall and her family have lived for more than 20 years in Rome, a city that is arguably one gigantic artwork in itself. Though she loves it, Marshall can also sometimes feel overwhelmed by it all. Which is part of the reason she waited 18 years to go and see the famous ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

“I never quite felt up to the intellectual challenge,” she explains in her book, All Things Move. More than that, she adds, “I had a sense that religious art could have nothing to say to me, that its concerns were not mine. … There was apprehension mixed into it, too, and the slight concern that these frescoes might be genuinely meaningless in the twenty-first century to a person like me, though I preferred to think that I wouldn’t understand them than to think there was no longer anything there to grasp.”

But as you can tell from the fact that she wrote a whole book about it, Marshall’s relationship with Michelangelo’s masterpiece has changed significantly. She takes us slowly and meditatively through that process of change, and while that might not sound like material for a riveting story, it really is.

Part of the appeal is her genuine respect and admiration for the work, and the feeling it gives her of being “a part of something much bigger than what I can see.” By exploring this immense and complex piece of art thoroughly, with an ever-increasing awe and appreciation—by finding ways to truly see and comprehend it despite her initial reluctance—she demonstrates its universality. “The world seems different to me now that I’ve made this artwork a part of my life,” she reflects. “The images I’ve studied have become my own, just as they can belong to anyone, they’re not exclusive.”

Another compelling factor is the way Marshall weaves together the history of the ceiling’s creation, her analysis of the art, and her own long and complicated relationship with faith and family. This is not a long book—233 pages, smaller and shorter pages than you’ll find in most books, many of them full of wonderful photos of the Sistine Chapel ceiling and other artworks—yet somehow these interwoven stories seem to unfold at a leisurely pace, giving us plenty of time to ponder them. And while dealing with some very weighty themes, and filtering them through her own experiences and views, Marshall doesn’t trivialize or fully individualize them. Her clear-eyed examination of the entwined history of art and religion is shocking and moving by turns, and all the more effective because she so often keeps her own ideas and judgements in the background.

Living in a completely different world from the one in which Michelangelo lived and painted, with beliefs very unlike his, Marshall nevertheless finds his art transporting her through time and space to find points of connection and, in the process, a new sense of her own place in the world. She sounds positively like the preacher in Ecclesiastes at times: “I saw that life was brief, that even a long life was not long enough, and that the days of my own were passing whether I did anything interesting with them or not. I wondered if I could learn something fundamental and unchanging, a universal truth perhaps, about what it means to be alive from a work of art that is meant to speak to the living about the past and the unknown future ahead.” I would say that yes, indeed, she did. And that thanks to her beautifully written and illustrated book, all of us can, too.

(Cover image copyright Biblioasis)

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