Sistine Chapel, Vatican

A goldsmith hired to paint a chapel

Michelangelo Buonarroti — the 33-year-old Florentine who had carved the Pietà and the David — did not want the Sistine Chapel commission.

He considered himself a sculptor, not a painter. He suspected (correctly) that the assignment was a trap set by his architectural rival Donato Bramante to discredit him.

Pope Julius II, who had originally commissioned Michelangelo to carve a massive marble tomb, abruptly reassigned him to the chapel ceiling in May 1508. Michelangelo accepted under protest. The work took four years, from May 1508 to October 1512, and Michelangelo emerged half-blind, half-deaf, and so accustomed to looking upward that he reported needing to hold letters above his head to read them.

Standing, not lying

The most stubborn modern myth about Michelangelo's Sistine work is that he painted lying on his back.

He did not.

He stood, on a custom flat-plank scaffold he designed himself, with his head tilted sharply backward and his arm raised over his head. He wrote a satirical sonnet in 1509 to his friend Giovanni da Pistoia complaining about the cramps and pain from this posture. The sonnet survives, in his own hand, illustrated with a self- caricature in standing pose, brush raised.

Hollywood films from The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965, with Charlton Heston) onward have shown the lying posture. The painter himself documented otherwise.

A new fresco every Tuesday

Fresco — painting on wet lime plaster — must be completed before the plaster dries, in roughly one day.

Michelangelo divided the 460-square-metre ceiling into giornate (day-portions), each one a section of fresh plaster applied in the morning and completed by evening. The boundaries between giornate are still visible to ultraviolet light. About 300 individual day-sections were used over the four years.

When the first half of the ceiling was unveiled in 1511 — Bramante having pressed for an early inspection in hopes the work would be a failure — Michelangelo decided the figures were too small for the height and enlarged them significantly in the second half. The result is the Creation of Adam, on the second-half side, which is roughly twice the scale of the first scenes.

A ceiling and a coming Reformation

Pope Julius II commissioned the work as a political statement.

Julius — the "warrior pope" who personally led armies into battle — was reclaiming Catholic theological authority against Reformation tendencies brewing in northern Europe. Luther would post his 95 Theses six years later.

Michelangelo's programme, drawn from Genesis, asserted the continuity of Christian salvation history from the Creation through to the prophets — emphasising that the Catholic Church was the legitimate inheritor of the Hebrew prophetic tradition.

The political subtext was lost on no one. When Luther visited Rome in 1510 and saw the chapel mid-construction, he was repelled by what he considered worldly papal display — a reaction that contributed to his subsequent break with Rome.