Sistine Chapel ceiling

• 1. Introduction

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  The Sistine Chapel ceiling exists because a sculptor who considered himself no painter agreed to climb a scaffold in Rome. It was 1508, and Michelangelo would not really come down again for four years. Michelangelo had never painted a fresco at any real scale. Pope Julius II wanted the ceiling of his uncle's chapel repainted anyway, and he wanted this particular artist to do it. The Sistine Chapel was built in the Vatican between 1477 and 1480 by Pope Sixtus IV, who gave it his name. Its walls already carried paintings by some of the finest artists of the age. Its ceiling, though, was still the plain night sky first painted there by Pier Matteo d'Amelia: stars scattered across blue. By the time Michelangelo climbed down for good in 1512, that sky had become one of the most studied surfaces in art history. It carried over 300 figures across nine scenes from the Book of Genesis. Twelve towering prophets and sibyls line its sides, alongside dozens of nude youths whose purpose is still debated. How did a reluctant artist end up spending years alone on that scaffold? What did the physical toll do to him? And was he secretly encoding messages into the very shape of the vault?

• 2. The Warrior Pope

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  For six months in 1504, a diagonal crack in the chapel's vault had made it unusable. Pope Julius II had the old starry ceiling stripped away by Piero Roselli, a friend of Michelangelo's.

  Julius, born Giuliano della Rovere, ran his papacy like a military campaign, aiming to unify Italy under Church authority. Vasari records him riding a chariot through a triumphal arch after one of his many military victories, staging himself as a Roman conqueror. He was also tearing down the old St. Peter's Basilica, planning a grander replacement to house his own tomb.

  In early 1505, Julius summoned Michelangelo to Rome and commissioned him to design that tomb. The move pulled Michelangelo away from an unfinished painting in Florence, the Battle of Cascina. Both men had hot tempers, and Michelangelo, already an established artist, soon clashed with the pope. On the 17th of April 1506, Michelangelo fled Rome for Florence in secret, staying away until Florence's government pressed him to make peace with Julius.

  That same year, as the foundation stone was laid for the new St. Peter's, Julius conceived a plan to repaint the Sistine ceiling. His original scheme called for twelve large figures of the Apostles across the spandrels, set within an interlocking pattern of squares and circles. Michelangelo pushed for something far bigger, and by his own later account, was told 'to do as I liked.' Many historians think he overstated how much freedom he actually got.

  On the 10th of May 1506, Piero Roselli wrote to Michelangelo on the pope's behalf. Roselli reported that the papal architect Donato Bramante doubted Michelangelo could handle a fresco this large, given his thin experience in the medium. By Bramante's account, Michelangelo refused outright.

  In November 1506, Michelangelo went to Bologna, commissioned to cast a colossal bronze statue of the pope conquering the city. After finishing it in early 1508, he returned to Rome expecting to resume the tomb, only to find that project quietly shelved. Instead, he was commissioned for a cycle of frescoes across the chapel's vault and upper walls. Michelangelo, who considered himself a sculptor rather than a painter, tried to hand the job to his younger rival Raphael instead. According to Vasari, Bramante had provoked the pope into insisting, leaving Michelangelo little room to refuse.

  The contract was signed on the 8th of May 1508, promising a fee of 3,000 ducats. In gold, by 2021 reckoning, that fee was worth roughly 600,000 US dollars. Bramante built the first scaffold by hanging it from ropes threaded through holes in the ceiling. Michelangelo hated this method, since it would force him to paint around the gaps. He had it replaced with a freestanding structure, built by the same Piero Roselli, who then roughcast the surface, leaving it ready to paint.

• 3. The Ordeal Of Painting

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  Michelangelo first tried to recruit assistants better versed in fresco painting than himself. Vasari names six Florentines he brought to Rome for help: Francesco Granacci, Giuliano Bugiardini, Jacopo di Sandro, l'Indaco the Elder, Agnolo di Domenico, and Aristotile. None proved suitable, and Michelangelo decided to paint the entire ceiling alone.

  He began at the west end, farthest from the altar, with the Drunkenness of Noah and the Prophet Zechariah. From there he worked backward through the story, toward the Creation of Eve. That fifth bay was finished in September 1510. Each day's work required a fresh patch of wet plaster, called a giornata, with the old edges scraped away before a new section went up.

  Early on, the plaster, called intonaco, started growing mildew because it had been laid too wet. Michelangelo nearly gave up, until the pope sent the architect Giuliano da Sangallo to show him how to strip the fungus away.

  Contrary to popular belief, and to what a later biographer named Paolo Giovio imagined, Michelangelo painted standing up, not lying on his back. Vasari wrote that the work was done, in his words, 'with the greatest discomfort, for he had to stand there working with his head tilted backwards.' Michelangelo may have captured that suffering himself, in a poem accompanied by a sketch, likely sent to his friend Giovanni di Benedetto da Pistoia.

  A dispute over payment stopped work entirely from September 1510 until roughly June 1511, while Julius was away besieging Bologna. The first half of the ceiling had its preliminary showing on the 14th of August 1511, with an official viewing the next day. New scaffolding then had to be built for the second half, which Michelangelo finished swiftly once work resumed. The whole ceiling was revealed on the 31st of October 1512, All Hallows' Eve, with the public allowed in the following day, All Saints' Day.

  Both Michelangelo and Julius wanted the finished ceiling reworked afterward with gold and secco detail, the way the chapel's older wall frescoes had been. That never happened, partly because Michelangelo refused to rebuild the scaffolding. He also argued that 'in those days men did not wear gold, and those who are painted... were holy men who despised wealth.' Julius himself died just months after the ceiling's completion, in February 1513, and never saw it gilded the way he had wanted.

• 4. Genesis Overhead

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  Thirty five metres long and fourteen metres wide, the vault rises about twenty metres above the chapel floor. Five pairs of painted ribs cut across the ceiling, dividing its central field into four large rectangles and five smaller ones. A painted cornice frames each one, making them look open to the sky.

  Michelangelo filled these nine fields with scenes from the Old Testament, running from the altar toward the entrance. Near the altar come the Separation of Light from Darkness, the Creation of the Sun, Moon and Plants, and the Separation of Land and Water. The middle three show the Creation of Adam, the Creation of Eve, and the Fall and Expulsion from Eden. Closest to the door are the Sacrifice of Noah, the Great Flood, and, last of all, the Drunkenness of Noah.

  At the corners of the five smaller fields sit 20 nude male youths, known as ignudi, whose exact meaning nobody has settled. Kenneth Clark wrote that 'their physical beauty is an image of divine perfection; their alert and vigorous movements an expression of divine energy.' Between them hang ten medallions, adapted, according to scholar Ulrich Pfisterer, from woodcuts in the 1490 Malermi Bible, the first Bible printed in Italian. Their bloody subjects include Abraham about to sacrifice his son Isaac and the prophet Elijah being carried up to heaven.

  Along the sides, in the spandrels, Michelangelo painted the largest figures on the ceiling: twelve people believed to have prophesied the coming of a Messiah. Seven are prophets of Israel, among them the four so-called major prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel. The other five are Sibyls, prophetic women of Greek and Roman legend, including the Delphic, Erythraean, Cumaean, Persian, and Libyan Sibyls. Vasari singled out Isaiah for praise, writing that anyone who studied the figure closely could learn from it 'all the precepts of good painting.'

• 5. Heroes In The Corners

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  Moses, Esther, David, and Judith each headline one of the four large doubled spandrels painted into the chapel's corners. In the Punishment of Haman, drawn from the Book of Esther, Michelangelo shows the plotting courtier crucified rather than hanged. Esther watches from a doorway, while Mordechai sits on the steps, linking the two halves of the scene.

  The Brazen Serpent shows the biblical plague of venomous snakes, and Moses raising a bronze serpent on a pole to heal the afflicted. It is the most crowded and Mannerist composition Michelangelo made for the chapel. The English critic John Ruskin, writing in the 19th century, judged this scene against the ancient statue Laocoön and His Sons. He praised Michelangelo's 'gigantic intellect' over what he called the sculpture's 'meagre lines and contemptible tortures.'

  In the remaining two corners, Judith carries the severed head of Holofernes in a basket, while David finishes off the fallen giant Goliath.

  Above the windows, fourteen surviving lunettes list the ancestors of Christ, names drawn from the Gospel of Matthew's genealogy running from Abraham to Joseph. Two more lunettes, over the altar, were destroyed in 1537, when Michelangelo returned to paint The Last Judgment on the wall beneath them. They survive only in old engravings.

  The figures in each lunette stand roughly two metres tall. Rather than showing harmony, most show families split by a painted tablet, and by very human emotions: jealousy, suspicion, boredom. The critic Andrew Graham-Dixon described them as capturing 'the daily round of merely domestic life as if it were a curse.' During the chapel's restoration, the figure of Amminadab was found wearing a Jewish badge of a kind then strictly enforced. It appears to mark him as excluded from salvation.

  One lunette shows a woman trimming the neck of a garment with shears while a child looks on. She is likely Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel, whose son she would soon send to live in the temple.

• 6. The Ceiling's Theology

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  The chapel's walls already told the story of the Old Covenant through Moses and the New Covenant through Christ before Michelangelo ever touched the ceiling. His addition carries one overarching message: that humanity needs salvation, and that salvation comes through Jesus. In the ceiling's narrative, God creates a perfect world, and humanity falls and is made mortal. Humanity then sins further and is punished by the Great Flood, ending in Noah's drunkenness at the end farthest from the altar. The theologian John W. O'Malley reads that final, degrading scene as marking a separation between Gentiles and Jews as God's chosen people.

  Above the altar itself sits the prophet Jonah, recognizable by the great fish beside him. Jesus, in the Gospels, links Jonah to his own coming death and resurrection. At the opposite end, above the door through which the pope processes each Palm Sunday, sits the prophet Zechariah. Zechariah had foretold that the Messiah would arrive on a donkey, just as Jesus rode one into Jerusalem.

  Michelangelo's biographer Ascanio Condivi wrote that the artist read and reread the Old Testament while painting, drawing on scripture rather than existing religious art. Even so, historians think he likely worked with theological advisers, possibly the Augustinian friar Giles of Viterbo or the papal diplomat Cardinal Francesco Alidosi.

  Some researchers, including Benjamin Blech and the Vatican art historian Enrico Bruschini, argue the ceiling hides further 'concealed' and 'forbidden' subject matter beyond this reading. As a young man, Michelangelo had spent time at the Medici family's Platonic Academy in Florence, absorbing the era's fascination with Plato and Aristotle. He had already carved his own giant marble David, set up in Florence's Piazza della Signoria, following the humanist tradition of Donatello's earlier bronze version. That humanist current held that spirituality was rooted in human nature, not only channelled through the Church. It found a synthesis in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man, a text quoted in sermons at the papal court.

  Art historian Anthony Bertram argued the ceiling reveals Michelangelo's inner conflict, torn between 'his passionate admiration for classical beauty and his profound, almost mystical Catholicism.' Scholar Edgar Wind went further, proposing that the ten medallions secretly represent violations of the Ten Commandments. A badly obscured one, above the Persian Sibyl, is said to stand for adultery. O'Malley has pointed out one problem with Wind's theory: if it is correct, the commandments appear on the ceiling out of order.

• 7. A Celestial Puzzle

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  Despite decades of scholarship, historians Charles de Tolnay and Ramsden have both noted that the ceiling's single unifying theme has never been pinned down. One researcher, Jelbert, argues that Michelangelo built the ceiling as a deliberate intellectual puzzle. Leonardo da Vinci, in the same era, engaged in exactly this kind of visual riddle.

  Some scholars suggest individual scenes were mapped onto human anatomy. The Creation of Adam and the Separation of Light from Darkness, in this reading, echo the structures of the brain and eyes. Others have pointed to what they read as references to urological and gynaecological organs elsewhere along the vault.

  A related trick appears in The Last Judgment, which Michelangelo painted on the altar wall roughly 25 years after the ceiling. First noticed in 1925, the flayed skin held by Saint Bartholomew carries a face entirely different from the saint's own bald head and grey beard. That mismatched face carries Michelangelo's own dark hair and features.

  The ceiling's original decoration, a starry sky by Piermatteo d'Amelia, survives today only in a small painting held in the Uffizi in Florence. The scholar Métral argues that d'Amelia's stars were not random, but traced a path of constellations meaningful to Pope Sixtus IV. Sixtus IV had commissioned the chapel itself. Jelbert suggests Michelangelo, working for Sixtus's nephew Julius II, hid a similar star path of his own within the new design. That reading connects the ceiling to the Laocoön Group, a sculpture of a man and his sons crushed by sea serpents. Julius II bought it for the Vatican's new Belvedere Courtyard. The Laocoön myth was traditionally linked to the constellations Ophiuchus and Serpens, giving Michelangelo, in this theory, a hidden foothold in the heavens.

  Michelangelo had seen that very sculpture pulled from the ground himself, in January 1506, two years before he signed the contract to paint the ceiling.

• 8. An Instant Masterpiece

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  Vasari wrote that when the chapel was uncovered, 'people from everywhere rushed to see it.' The sight alone, he said, 'was sufficient to leave them amazed and speechless.' Michelangelo was 37 years old. From that point on he was called il divino, and treated as the greatest artist of his age for the rest of his long life. The ceiling was judged one of the greatest masterpieces ever made almost immediately, a judgment that has not really been challenged since.

  Raphael later designed a set of large tapestries, made in 1515-1516, to cover the lowest tier of the chapel's walls. Some of those tapestries are still hung there on special occasions today.

  Other Renaissance artists copied the poses of Michelangelo's ignudi directly, including the sculptor Bartolommeo Bandinelli and Raphael's own workshop, in their Baptism of Constantine. Not everyone approved: the nudity throughout the ceiling drew criticism from at least one later pope, Adrian VI.

  The ceiling has since been restored several times, most recently in a project running from 1980 to 1994. Even the ceiling's smallest painted details carry a signature. Michelangelo repeated two motifs throughout its illusionistic stonework: the acorn and the scallop shell. The acorn is the family symbol of both Sixtus IV, who built the chapel, and Julius II, who commissioned the ceiling. The scallop shell honors the Madonna, to whom the chapel was dedicated in 1483.