Bored with the Sistine Chapel?

Boredom is banned these days, you can't be bored. Parents don't like their kids to be bored, whatever that means. Bored is bad and you're a neglectful and lazy parent if you tolerate it. So kids get phones, screens, trashy toys, shallow experiences and the rest because that's all better than the dreaded boredom. School, car journeys and relatives are also boring, so I'm told. Just wait till you get a job at Amazon or driving a bus or as a brain surgeon.

I see boredom as more of a gateway or springboard. No matter how you look at it boredom is a temporary state, it's another liminal space on life's err ... journey. When you get out of boredom you step into something worthwhile, maybe not right away but it'll come. You have to have boredom to understand and gain an appreciation for satisfaction and fulfillment. It's all part of the tonal system that gives life a meaning of some kind ... I think.

So what does anything in this have to do with the decorations, paintings and frescoes in the Sistine Chapel? Not much really, I just had a idle thought that perhaps the apprentices and assistants who worked on the project with Michelangelo and the other "name" artists just might have been bored from time to time. The routine and tedium in their daily working life, fetching, carrying, cleaning, filling in spaces with washes of paint, mixing the fresh plaster etc. as the years of decorative work passed by, and yet to their credit they were involved in something that is regarded as one of the greatest artistic accomplishments in human civilization.