Sistine Chapel ceiling

What you are looking at

This photograph takes in the whole chapel, looking toward the altar. Overhead, the long barrel vault is covered with Michelangelo's frescoes: down the center runs a painted framework of fictive architecture holding nine rectangular scenes from the Book of Genesis, from the Separation of Light and Darkness above the altar to the Drunkenness of Noah at the entrance end. Between them sit pairs of muscular nude youths, the ignudi, holding garlands and bronze-colored medallions. On the curving sides, enthroned prophets and sibyls alternate, and in the triangular spandrels and lunettes above the windows sit the ancestors of Christ.

The altar wall at the far end shows Michelangelo's later Last Judgment (1536–41), a separate commission. Along the side walls are the earlier fresco cycles of the lives of Moses and Christ by Botticelli, Perugino, Ghirlandaio, Rosselli and others, painted in 1481–82. The ceiling therefore sits at the center of a decorative scheme spanning about sixty years.

How it was made

Pope Julius II commissioned the ceiling in 1508. The first plan called for figures of the twelve apostles; Michelangelo, who regarded himself as a sculptor and had little experience of fresco, won permission to expand it into the vast scheme seen today. He worked from a scaffold of his own design, standing and painting upward rather than lying on his back, as legend has it, with assistants who ground pigments and prepared the plaster. The paint went onto fresh lime plaster in daily patches, giornate, which can still be traced.

The first half was unveiled in 1511 and the whole ceiling in 1512. The restoration of 1980–94 removed centuries of candle soot and glue, revealing the bright oranges, greens and pinks that had been invisible for generations.

What does it mean?

The Genesis scenes run in reverse order from the entrance, so worshippers walking toward the altar move back through history toward the Creation. Renaissance theologians read the program as the story of humanity's need for redemption, foretold by prophets of Israel and sibyls of the pagan world. The Creation of Adam panel is one of the most reproduced images in Western art; the ignudi show Michelangelo's lifelong conviction that the nude male body was the highest vehicle for beauty.

Where to see it

The ceiling is in the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City, reached at the end of the Vatican Museums route; photography is not permitted inside. For more by the artist, see Michelangelo and his David, and our guide to Renaissance paintings.