Sistine Chapel Ceiling

The Sistine Chapel ceiling is Michelangelo's supreme achievement in painting and the most celebrated single work of art produced during the High Renaissance. Commissioned by Pope Julius II and painted between 1508 and 1512, the ceiling covers approximately forty by thirteen metres and contains nine narrative scenes from the Book of Genesis, flanked by figures of Old Testament prophets and pagan sibyls, surrounded by the ancestors of Christ, and populated throughout by the idealised athletic figures — the ignudi — that have come to define Michelangelo's visual language.

The commission was, by Michelangelo's own account, unwelcome. He considered himself a sculptor, not a painter, and the scale of the project was without precedent in the history of ceiling decoration. What he produced in four years of nearly continuous work — lying on his back on a scaffolding platform designed to his own specifications — was not merely a great ceiling painting but a redefinition of what fresco painting could achieve in terms of monumental scale, anatomical complexity, and theological ambition.

The nine central scenes move from the separation of light from darkness through the creation of the heavenly bodies, the creation of the earth and sea, the creation of Adam, the creation of Eve, the Fall and Expulsion, Noah's sacrifice, the Flood, and the drunkenness of Noah. They are framed and animated by fifty-six figures of ancestors, twenty figures of sibyls and prophets, and twenty nude athletic figures whose function remains partially disputed.

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