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Vatican City, Rome
514 years ago

On November 1, 1512, the Feast of All Saints, Pope Julius II celebrated mass in the Sistine Chapel beneath a ceiling that nobody outside the scaffolding had seen. Michelangelo Buonarroti had been at work on it since 1508. The date was chosen deliberately, so that the unveiling would fall on one of the most significant festivals in the church calendar. The response was immediate and enormous. The Renaissance biographer Giorgio Vasari later wrote that the whole world ran to see it.

Michelangelo had not wanted the commission. He was thirty-three when it was given to him, already famous for the Pietà and the David, and he thought of himself as a sculptor rather than a painter. He had been working on an enormous tomb for Julius II, a project he cared about far more, when the pope redirected him to the chapel. He suspected, with some reason, that rivals at the papal court had suggested the assignment hoping he would fail at it.

The practical problems were severe. The surface is roughly five hundred square metres, curved, and about twenty metres above the floor. Michelangelo rejected the scaffolding built for him by Donato Bramante, which would have hung from ropes through holes in the vault, and designed his own platform braced from holes cut near the tops of the windows. The first section of plaster he painted grew mould because the mix was too wet, and he had to scrape it off and start again. He worked standing and leaning backwards rather than lying down, with paint running onto his face, and wrote a sour comic poem about what the posture was doing to his neck, his beard and his spine.
The original brief was modest: the twelve apostles against a decorative background. Michelangelo pushed for something far larger and got it. The finished scheme contains more than three hundred figures organized around nine central panels from the Book of Genesis, including the separation of light from darkness, the creation of Adam, and the flood, framed by prophets, sibyls, ancestors of Christ, and muscular nude youths whose purpose scholars still argue about. He also changed his method as he went. The later panels, painted when he was working faster and more confidently, use far fewer and larger figures than the crowded early scenes.

The ceiling was blackened over the centuries by candle smoke, incense, and repeated varnishing, and by the twentieth century it was widely assumed that Michelangelo had worked in sombre, muted tones. A restoration carried out between 1980 and 1994 removed the accumulated grime and revealed colours of startling brightness, pinks, acid greens, oranges and yellows. The result was controversial. Some art historians argued the cleaning had stripped away shading that Michelangelo had applied himself as a finishing layer. The debate has never been entirely settled, but the restored ceiling is the one that about five million visitors a year now file beneath, usually in silence, usually looking up.

Michelangelo took the Sistine Chapel commission reluctantly, suspected it was a trap set by rivals, built his own scaffolding after rejecting the one provided, and spent four years painting with his head tipped back. The ceiling was shown on November 1, 1512. Five million people a year still come to look at it.

How much do you know about the Sistine Chapel ceiling, why Michelangelo resisted the commission, the scheme he painted, and the restoration that changed how we see it?