Was every book about confession?

The answer, of course, is no. Or at least they don’t all have “confession” in the title. But all true confession books tend to have one other thing in common, which is conversion. After all, if the sinners hadn’t converted at some point after sinning, they wouldn’t be in the business of writing books that declare their former lives to be sinful.

Jeannie Marshall’s compact and elegantly voiced book, “All Things Move: Learning to Look in the Sistine Chapel,” is a confession about a former life which begins with a childhood that was squalid in both material and spiritual circumstances, and proceeds into a young adulthood that (mostly by implication) left her emotionally deprived but then got turned around by repeated exposure to the Sistine Chapel, where she found herself reborn into the love of art, the love of the past and, indeed, into love itself.

Don’t miss that subtle choice of preposition in Marshall’s title: not “learning to look at the Sistine Chapel,” which is what we expect art books to offer, but learning to look in the Sistine Chapel. It’s not just a book about art appreciation, in other words; it’s about life appreciation, with a conversion that takes place through the author’s encounter with Michelangelo — and with a certain pivotal moment of the European past.

The conversion/confession story, here as in my undergraduate reading list, has a kind of sublime simplicity: I am not the person I once was, but the experience of change has enabled me to speak with the tongues of angels about both my former life and my new life. For Marshall, this means that studying Michelangelo’s work provides her with a new perspective on her life. Simultaneously, the narrative of her past provides her with a frame through which she can manage the otherwise overwhelming scope of the chapel and its contents. Early in the book, when narrating her pre-conversion attitude toward the chapel, which consisted of avoiding it altogether, Marshall refers to it as “something that seemed simultaneously too complex to be understood just by looking at it and too worn out from overexposure.”. It’s not always clear that she evades this set of traps.

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On the personal side, Marshall situates her experience of the Sistine Chapel within her family’s story, offering a simple and moving account of her parents, who never married because Roman Catholic religious considerations made it impossible for her father to divorce his frail and alcoholic first wife. Late in the book there is a touching scene in which her mother, now elderly and weak, finally accepts a visit from a priest, who (without saying it in so many words) absolves her from her irregular life on the grounds that she truly loves her children.

On the Michelangelo side, “All Things Move” admirably explicates the art of the Sistine Chapel and the history of its moment. The chapters are structured along the lines of the frescoes themselves, from the narrative panels on the ceiling to the Sibyls and Prophets to the painted faux architecture to the Last Judgment, such that the book really could be used as a guide by a visitor navigating the crowded space. There are moments that reveal both how much Marshall knows and how eloquently she can translate pictures into words. Her account, for instance, of the female figure in the painting of “The Deluge” who is trying to carry a jug balanced on an upside-down table is a little masterpiece of description. What could signal desperation with more pathos, Marshall tells us, than some housewife attempting to hold on to a few household goods at a time like this? The same goes for the marvelous detail that she notices in the depiction of the prophet Isaiah, who has stuck his finger in the open book of what is presumably his prophecy, “holding his place in a way that is ordinary and unremarkable, a practical action that any of us would take when we interrupt our reading to think.”

The challenge is to get past what anthropologist Clifford Geertz in another context called “thick description.” That housewife escaping the flood and Isaiah with his finger in a book: How do we go from pointing out these inspiring details to revealing the sublimity of a masterpiece? Marshall reaches out in some familiar directions, for instance to other works of art and other media. She visits the Roman church of Santa Cecilia, patron saint of music, where she discovers that she is enveloped by the sound while feeling no need to explain anything, though it’s not quite clear how that might raise questions about her project of explaining Michelangelo. She reaches out toward poetry, citing the often-quoted work of William Carlos Williams in “The Red Wheelbarrow,” though it would seem that Michelangelo’s aesthetic is as far from those spare lines as it’s possible to be. She reaches out toward the history surrounding the chapel, which is — like all history — a tissue of savagery and intolerance. She finds traces of that darkness in her old childhood rages and in the scrawled commentary left on the walls of the chapel by the Protestant imperial soldiers responsible for the 1527 sack of Rome.

Does all this explain the Sistine Chapel? Does it need to? Perhaps not. In one of the book’s most striking claims, referencing the late-Renaissance moment of violence, iconoclasm and religious strife, she declares of the “Last Judgment” that the “painting is about petty, human failure.” To place oneself imaginatively in front of that gigantic, frescoed wall in the Sistine Chapel with its vast span of cosmic horror (the damned) and ecstasy (the saved) and then to receive such a deflationary interpretation — really? “petty, human failure”? — is, at first, profoundly unsettling, counterintuitive, wrong.

Upon reflection, however, one comes to understand from the whole of Marshall’s engaging and well-researched book that the record of her experience in the chapel is not so much Art History 101 as an act of encouragement and permission, inviting readers to bring their own lives to bear as they, however briefly, inhabit this masterpiece. Reflecting on what is at stake for her, Marshall turns the lens from Michelangelo to herself, but also to the angry northern invaders who defaced the chapel in the early 16th century: “I was quite likely the very embodiment of their fears: an unaccompanied woman, an agnostic looking at art for its beauty and secular meaning.” That is her confession, and it is a worthy one. Readers can agree or disagree with some of Marshall’s historical conclusions, or seek alternative interpretations of the artist’s choices, but that declaration of a point of view, that sense of personal experience in the face of great art and especially the right to have personal experience in the face of great art, proves to be as worthy a subject as the Sistine Chapel itself.

Leonard Barkan is the Class of 1943 university professor of comparative literature at Princeton University. He is the author of “Michelangelo: A Life on Paper,” “Reading Shakespeare Reading Me” and other books.

Learning to Look in the Sistine Chape

Biblioasis. 239 pp. $25.95