Identity and otherness are the poles around which ethnological and anthropological research essentially revolves. Their figurative representation is identified here in the iconography and style of two works by Michelangelo, read through the theological-eschatological lens of the writings of Saint Paul: a public, grandiloquent fresco in the Sistine Chapel, and a private, intimate drawing of Christ on the Cross given by the artist to the poet Vittoria Colonna, now housed in the British Museum. Following reflections made independently by the art historian Giovanni Careri, the anthropologists Francis Affergan and Francesco Remotti, and the philosopher and sociologist Slavoj Žižek, the article seeks to identify a specific iconography of otherness in these and other works by Michelangelo, characterized and structured by the tensions that flow through such polarities.