Pope Julius II's first contract with Michelangelo, signed 8 May 1508, asked for something fairly modest: the twelve apostles painted in the pendentives around the ceiling's edge, with decorative filler covering the rest. Michelangelo, who had spent years training as a sculptor and had accepted the fresco commission reluctantly, looked at the plan and told the pope it was a poor thing. Julius, unusually, let him redesign the whole program himself.
What Michelangelo built instead runs down the centre of the vault as nine scenes from the Book of Genesis, beginning with God separating light from darkness and ending, near the chapel's entrance, with Noah's drunkenness after the flood. He populated the space between and around these scenes with twelve seated prophets and sibyls, each larger than life, and with pairs of idealised nude youths, the ignudi, whose exact meaning is still debated but whose sculptural, twisting poses show Michelangelo painting a ceiling the way he thought about carving marble.
By the time he finished, on 31 October 1512, more than three hundred figures covered roughly five hundred square metres of curved surface, most of it painted by Michelangelo working largely alone after dismissing an early team of assistants whose work did not satisfy him. The Creation of Adam, where God's hand reaches toward Adam's without quite touching it, has become one of the most reproduced single images in the history of art, but it is only one panel among nine in a program whose real ambition is easy to lose sight of at that scale.