Half a millennium of ceiling splendour

Five hundred years ago, Michelangelo Buonarroti was in the initial stages of his work decorating the ceiling of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel.

Having first mounted the scaffolding on 10 May 1508, he was to spend hours at a time on his back in arduous single-handed labour for nearly four years.

Pope Julius II had prevailed upon him to complete the chapel’s decoration with ceiling paintings. The chapel had great symbolic meaning for the papacy as the chief consecrated space in the Vatican, used for important ceremonies such as electing and inaugurating new popes.

Michelangelo was pre-eminent in the High Renaissance as an architect, sculptor, painter and poet. The archetypal tormented genius, he was rarely satisfied with his enormous talent.

The friendship of the artist and the pope was enduring, despite recurrent strains imposed by two overly similar strong-willed personalities. There seems to have been a contretemps in 1510–11 when no payments were forthcoming and Michelangelo downed brushes for a period. The finished work would nonetheless prove to be a product of the artistic symbiosis of the two men.  

At first Michelangelo was unhappy with the commission because he considered himself to be primarily a sculptor. He had done little painting since he was an apprentice in Domenico Ghirlandajo’s studio in his teens.

He suspected that the pope had chosen him on the cunning recommendation of the architect Donato Bramante who, jealous of Michelangelo’s talents, had proposed him only because his lack of experience painting frescos would doom him to failure.

But Michelangelo knew that if he declined the commission he might not get another one from Julius, and he undoubtedly thought his own genius would carry him through.

It required a brilliant imagination to devise a scheme in which the whole vast ceiling was united. As Michelangelo proceeded he quickly grew in confidence, reducing and finally eliminating such preparatory helps as complete drawings and incisions in the plaster surface.

The ceiling as a whole includes nearly 350 figures in a rich variety of poses that have been drawn on by artists ever since. Michelangelo’s women are as sturdy and muscled as his men, possibly because his models for all the figures were men.

The chapel was officially opened on 31 October 1512. The ceiling was hailed as a supreme work of art, and it earned its artist the name of “il divino Michelangelo”.