This fresco in the Sistine Chapel depicts Adam receiving the spark of life from God.

But what we don’t see is the story we heard, where God breathes life into a clay effigy of a man. Why are we not seeing the golem spell described in the Book of Genesis?

When you’re so talented that nothing is beyond your ability to paint, Michelangelo seems to pull his punch here – choosing to be deliberately ambiguous.

Did he doubt the story?

In 1990 Frank Meshberger, a doctor from Indiana, thought that the red cloth, along with the characters behind God, appeared to have been based on a brain’s anatomy. And he wrote about this observation in more detail in the ‘Journal of the American Medical Association. A bit of an overclaim, I think, but that blanket behind God is remarkably similar to a brain cavity of a dissected human cranium.

We know that Michelangelo did dissections and would have known the shape of a human brain, but he must have used the brain cavity in this painting for a reason.

Adam seems bored, that’s his maker there, and he doesn’t seem to be overjoyed by God’s presence.

He’s daydreaming. Some of your best ideas will happen when you’re daydreaming; you can think up the strangest things.

Maybe the creator here is Adam, and what he created was the idea of God.

And that would mean that what you see here is Western culture’s first thought bubble.

Maybe?