The Sistine Chapel Ceiling

Michelangelo painted the whole thing standing on a scaffold of his own design, his head tilted back, paint dripping into his eyes. He began at the entrance end and worked towards the altar, and you can watch him grow bolder: the early Noah scenes are crowded with small figures, while the later creation scenes use a few huge bodies that fill the frame. The painted architecture that divides the ceiling is an illusion; the real vault is a simple curve. The cleaning completed in nineteen ninety four removed centuries of soot and revealed colours of surprising brightness, lilac, green and orange.

Pope Julius the Second pressed the commission on Michelangelo in fifteen oh eight, though the artist insisted he was a sculptor and not a painter. Four years of labour followed, and when the scaffold came down in October fifteen twelve, all Rome came to see it. The chapel itself, built for Sixtus the Fourth in the fourteen seventies, is still where cardinals gather to elect a new pope. Speak quietly, find a place along the side wall, and give your eyes time to travel the length of the vault; the design was meant to be read slowly, one story leading to the next.

Did You Know? Michelangelo wrote a comic poem about the job, complaining that his beard pointed to heaven and his brush dripped onto his face until he looked like a mosaic floor.