Is That a Secret Michelangelo Selfie at the Sistine Chapel?

Michelangelo may have secretly painted himself onto the ceiling of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, portraying himself as God with arm outstretched to spark life in a lounging Adam.

The theory, if true, underscores Michelangelo’s outsize ego, or at least his cheeky sense of humour. The hunch, which is gaining traction among Italian Renaissance scholars, also places the artist’s self-portrait squarely at the center of one of the most famous images in Western art.

“Michelangelo saw himself as the Messiah of art, so it makes sense,” said Adriano Marinazzo, a curator of special projects at Virginia’s Muscarelle Museum of Art at The College of William & Mary who published the theory last December in the peer-reviewed Italian art journal Critica d’Arte.

Although the artist painted more than 300 biblical characters across 5,000 square feet of ceiling, the central action in Michelangelo’s masterpiece is “The Creation of Adam.” The section shows an elderly, bearded God twisting beneath a floating cloak so that the fingertips on his right hand nearly reach a lackadaisical Adam, who represents mankind.

Mr. Marinazzo, who has a record of Michelangelo-related discoveries, said he made the connection after studying a sheet of paper containing a sonnet Michelangelo wrote to his friend Giovanni da Pistoia between 1509 and 1511. In the sonnet, Michelangelo complains about the physical toll the job has taken on his health.

“My brush, above me all the time, dribbles the paint so my face makes a fine floor for droppings,” the artist wrote.

In the sonnet’s margins, the artist also drew a man, presumably himself, standing with legs slightly crossed while painting a ghoulish face on the ceiling with his right arm outstretched.

Scholars have long focused on how the poem now held in Florence’s Buonarroti Archive proves Michelangelo’s ornery attitude about the papal commission. Mr. Marinazzo said he instead fixated on the sketch, wondering why the artist would portray himself standing with one leg slightly crossing the other—a shaky stance for anyone standing on scaffolding.

Mr. Marinazzo rotated a digital image of the letter last year and had an epiphany: The posture and pose of the sketched man looked eerily similar to that of God on the ceiling, a move the historian is now convinced was intentional.

“He’s hidden himself in the ceiling,” he said. “The face is idealised because Michelangelo was self-conscious about his smashed nose, but this is the closest he’s ever come to presenting himself as divine.”

Not everyone is convinced. Paul Barolsky, a Renaissance art historian at the University of Virginia, said he needs corroborating proof that the sketch inspired the final product. Michelangelo left behind hundreds of letters, including several where he wrote self-deprecatingly about his looks after a rival painter punched and broke his nose. He also created preparatory drawings of the figures’ hands in that pivotal scene on the ceiling. Never once did the artist claim to have modelled the figure of God after himself. “Everybody’s got theories, but you’ve got to do better than that,” Mr. Barolsky said.

Yet other scholars who have read Mr. Marinazzo’s hypothesis see merit in the claim.

William Wallace, a historian at Washington University in St. Louis who has written eight books on Michelangelo, said Mr. Marinazzo has made a “clever connection” about an artist whose crackling sense of humor is often overlooked. Mr. Wallace said he could “totally entertain” a theory wherein the artist painted himself as God. “He liked to laugh at himself, so this could be a hint.”

Gary Radke, an Italian Renaissance expert at New York’s Syracuse University, said he is now equally curious about the artist’s stance in the sketch. “Who stands like that on scaffolding?” Mr. Radke said. “It raises questions about interpretation, and Adriano has seen something new.”

Mr. Radke thinks the artist, who prized his own skills, may have subconsciously related to the God figure he was painting at the time.

Certainly the task before him was gargantuan. At the time Michelangelo took the commission, he was in his 30s—far younger than the God he painted—and already deemed one of Florence’s greatest sculptors, having carved “David” in Florence and the “Pietà” of St. Peter’s a few years before. He famously preferred sculpting over painting and accused his peers of recommending him for the ceiling job so they could watch him fail, scholars say.

Pope Julius II only asked him to paint the 12 apostles in the triangular shapes lining the outer edges of the barrel-vaulted ceiling, leaving the centre painted like a night sky with gilt stars. Instead, Michelangelo took over the entire span, ultimately re-creating a vast, biblical story about man’s search for God and redemption.

The result was widely hailed the moment it was unveiled in 1512, with Michelangelo’s biographer Giorgio Vasari describing the artist as “something divine rather than mortal.”

Mr. Radke said it often takes time for scholars to accept new ideas involving Michelangelo’s masterpiece. Another theory gaining traction alleges that the artist modelled the billowing cloak surrounding God after the shape of a human brain, he said. Ditto the notion that the woman and toddler tucked under God’s left arm represent Christ and his mother, Mary.

When it comes to Michelangelo selfies, there’s also precedent: Two decades after the artist finished the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Michelangelo returned to the same room to paint a wall-spanning view of Christ’s Second Coming. In 1925, a scholar first suggested that Michelangelo likely painted himself in the flayed skin held by St. Bartholomew in that work, “The Last Judgment,” and the idea has since caught on.

“Michelangelo had an ego beyond belief,” Mr. Radke said, “so all his art was autobiography to him. He was a modern artist in that way.”

There is ample and alarming evidence that artificial intelligence can help humans do bad things, such as committing cyberattacks, building weapons and even killing themselves or others. The Hugging Face hacking episode—and a growing list of others by poorly constrained swarms of agents—indicate just how powerful and potentially dangerous AI has quickly become.

Yet many inside the U.S. AI industry insist far worse is coming, on account of the imminent arrival of AI with superhuman and self-improving abilities.

Plenty of experts, including many who study AI harms for a living, are skeptical. The so-called doomers’ assertion that AI might decide to wipe out all of humanity—or even “just” topple human civilization—is contingent on it achieving a pace of development not yet seen.

And if the assumptions behind this global-doomsday scenario are wrong, it could lead us to curb or regulate AI in ways that don’t address its real harms.

At the center of this debate is the claim that current AI systems might take over the job of training their next versions, a process called “recursive self-improvement.” Think of it like evolution on steroids—billions of years happening at light speed within vast AI supercomputers. Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei recently proposed a global agreement to slow down the pace of releasing new AI models, with the goal of delaying the arrival of recursive self-improvement.

“I don’t think we’re anywhere near ‘artificial general intelligence,’” says Melanie Mitchell, a professor at the nonprofit research group Santa Fe Institute who studies AI. She said AI is making impressive strides but thinks claims by engineers that they’ve achieved recursive self-improvement don’t stand up to scrutiny.

She is hardly alone. A recent paper by two dozen academics at Princeton, Stanford and other institutions found that even the most cutting-edge AIs are incapable of doing the original research required to advance the AI frontier.

Two of the authors involved in that paper also threw cold water on the idea that the Hugging Face swarm hack by OpenAI agents occurred because of a breakthrough in intelligence. The attack succeeded primarily because of a lack of basic technical guardrails, not an unmanageable explosion in AI capability, they wrote.

Yann LeCun, former chief AI scientist at Meta, posted that this analysis was “a welcome dose of sanity in an otherwise insane debate.”

OpenAI and Anthropic didn’t respond to several requests for comment.

The people who disagree with the doomers still consider AI to be dangerous, and point out that such systems don’t have to be particularly capable to be powerful. Some argue that AI should undergo regular evaluation by outsiders and that the companies that make it should be held responsible when their systems do harm. AI should also be treated the same as airplanes and elevators, and should be designed to do the least harm possible, they say.

“If you believe that technology is powerful enough to create novel, dangerous viruses, or to essentially take over the whole planet for some reason, then it must also be strong enough to create cures for cancer, to cure aging, to fix socio-economic or political problems,” says Christopher Canal, CEO of EquiStamp, a company that helps companies and governments evaluate AIs.

AI has shown an ability to rapidly advance because it is matching the abilities of humans who are constantly feeding it their knowledge. Sometimes it can recombine that knowledge and exceed what people have been capable of, through a kind of post-training known as reinforcement learning, as we’ve seen in mathematics.

Today’s LLMs are “models of knowledge” rather than actually intelligent, wrote Yi Ma, professor of AI at Hong Kong University.

Researchers at universities and commercial AI research labs in China wrote in a recent paper that autonomous, self-improving AI is likely to be a long way off, due to the sheer number of breakthroughs required. They also argue that humans will probably remain in the loop, supervising that process—and gating how fast it can occur.

Vals AI, a company that evaluates today’s AI models, maintains an RSI Index that benchmarks whether models can “do the research that builds the next model.” So far, no publicly released model is even close.

Yet Rayan Krishnan, CEO of Vals AI, says his team projects models will exceed humans’ ability to improve the next generation of AIs by August 2027, or sooner, and at that point could start building their successors all on their own.

“Once we get to recursive self-improvement, the fear is that all bets are off,” he says. “You could end up with a ‘fast takeoff’ situation, where the models quickly acquire skills and eclipse humans across every possible domain.”

In a reply to the resignation tweet heard round the world from Jacob Coxon, another Anthropic engineer declared his belief that those odds were at least 10% over the next decade. Many others in the industry chimed in to say they thought the percentage was even higher.

Some who argue the end is nigh say they calculate their personal p(doom) based on a chain of conditional probabilities—a bit like the Drake equation for calculating the likelihood of intelligent alien life. Since all those probabilities are based on speculation, estimates range from 0% to nearly 100%. Many land around 10%.

“The weird thing is that if you go back and look at the predictions on this over the last 10 years or more, it’s always been 10%—it’s just a nice round number,” says Mitchell. “I think it’s all vibes, and there’s no actual evidence or calculation.”

One argument against worrying about superintelligent AI is that the world is full of unlikely humanity-ending disasters, and trying to avert them all can make it impossible to prioritize, says Canal.

This has led AI experts and the policymakers who listen to them to propose remedies that don’t get at its real and present dangers.

AI companies’ proposals to “pace the frontier” aren’t addressing the problem in the right way, argues Stuart Russell, a computer-science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the president of the International Association for Safe and Ethical Artificial Intelligence.

“It’s like saying we’re driving toward the cliff at 60 miles per hour and we’re going to drive toward it at 40 miles per hour instead, and everything will be OK,” he says.

Russell and his peers have proposed that AI companies should have to meet the same standards that govern other areas of everyday life, from air travel and buildings to food and drugs. They highlight the “behavioral red lines” AI should not be allowed to cross. Breaking into other computer systems, stealing information or advising terrorists on how to build biological weapons are all illegal for a human to do, and should be illegal for companies’ AIs as well, he argues.

The challenge for AI companies in such a proposal, he adds, is that it would be a de facto ban on today’s advanced AI systems, since the companies behind them don’t know how to make them respect such boundaries all of the time.

Others have proposed something like the Food and Drug Administration, but for AI, but setting up a new agency has so far been a nonstarter in Congress. And some prominent voices in tech have said such a structure would give up America’s AI edge to China.

Given the bipartisan groundswell of support for curbing AI companies and their creations, however, that may soon change.

“The tech industry has had this mantra for decades that regulation is bad,” says Russell. “They don’t accept the liability for any harm, and they hide behind free speech. That, I think, has to change.”

Is That a Secret Michelangelo Selfie at the Sistine Chapel?

A new theory suggests that the Renaissance master modelled his iconic image of God after himself

Could fears of an AI apocalypse be distracting us from the dangers already here? Experts debate whether regulation should focus on speculative existential threats or present-day harms, including cyberattacks, weapons and unsafe autonomous agents. Read more via the link in bio.