Sistine Chapel Ceiling

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.

For most of the twentieth century, every photograph of Michelangelo's ceiling showed the same muddy brown palette, and generations of viewers assumed that was simply how Michelangelo had painted it, a deliberately sombre counterpoint to the chapel's solemn function. In 1979 the conservator Gianluigi Colalucci noticed a crack in one lunette and found bright, clear colour underneath, unmuddied fifteenth century pigment sitting beneath centuries of soot, candle smoke and earlier restorers' own darkened varnish.

The Vatican Museums committed to a full cleaning, carried out from 1980 to 1994 using solvent compresses applied panel by panel. As the grime came away, figures long assumed to be earth toned emerged in colours nobody alive had seen: the twisted, muscular Libyan Sibyl turned out to be painted in lime green and coral pink, her flesh a pink salmon tone, her book the colour of fresh cream.

The transformation was dramatic enough to provoke real scholarly alarm rather than simple celebration. Art historian James Beck called the project an artistic Chernobyl, arguing that Michelangelo had likely added shadow and modelling in dry secco paint after the fresco itself had set, and that the cleaning had stripped away the artist's own final adjustments along with the dirt. Prominent contemporary artists, including Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg, petitioned Pope John Paul II to pause the work. Colalucci and the Vatican's own restoration team held their ground, insisting the underlying pigment analysis showed true buon fresco throughout and that what critics mourned as Michelangelo's lost intention was in fact five centuries of soot finally coming off.