Around 1509, halfway up a scaffold in the pope's private chapel, the most celebrated sculptor in Italy wrote a sonnet complaining about his job. Michelangelo described himself to his friend Giovanni da Pistoia as bent like a bow, beard pointing at heaven, brain crushed against his spine, paint dripping onto his face until it made a “rich pavement” of him — and in the margin he sketched a little stick figure reaching up to daub a ceiling. The poem ends with a plea to defend his dead pictures and his honour, “for I am not in a good place, and I am no painter.” He was, at that moment, about halfway through painting the most famous ceiling in the world.
Notice the stick figure: it is standing. The tenacious myth that Michelangelo painted the Sistine ceiling flat on his back — cemented by Irving Stone's novel The Agony and the Ecstasy and the 1965 film with Charlton Heston — traces partly to an early biographer's Latin word resupinus, bent backwards, misread as supine. The record is clear that he worked upright on a flying scaffold of his own design, a bridge on brackets socketed into the walls, head tilted back, arm raised for hours at a time. The architect Bramante had proposed hanging a platform from ropes through holes in the ceiling; Michelangelo pointed out the obvious flaw — who would fill the holes afterwards? — and built his own.
A sculptor conscripted
He had not wanted the commission at all. In 1508 Pope Julius II, the ferocious “warrior pope”, pulled Michelangelo off the marble tomb project he cared about and ordered him to fresco the ceiling of the chapel built for Sixtus IV — hence “Sistine” — which then carried a simple starry sky. Michelangelo protested that painting was not his art and suspected rivals had engineered the job to watch him fail. The original brief was modest: the twelve apostles. He talked the pope into letting him do something vastly more ambitious, and over four years covered roughly five hundred square metres with more than three hundred figures: nine scenes from Genesis running down the spine of the vault, from the Separation of Light and Darkness to the Drunkenness of Noah, flanked by colossal prophets and sibyls, the ancestors of Christ, and the athletic nude youths called ignudi.
It was buon fresco — pigment onto wet plaster, laid one day's patch (a giornata) at a time, unforgiving of error. It nearly ended immediately: the first sections grew mould because the plaster mix was wrong, and Michelangelo begged to be released before a fix was found. He dismissed most of the Florentine assistants brought in to help and did the overwhelming share of the painting himself, with a small crew grinding colours and laying plaster. The Creation of Adam, with its almost-touching fingertips — now perhaps the most reproduced religious image on earth — was painted in the later campaign, when he had loosened his style and enlarged his figures after inspecting the first half from the floor. The ceiling was unveiled on 31 October 1512. Michelangelo was thirty-seven, and complained he had ruined his eyes and neck for it, for a while only able to read letters by holding them overhead.
Return visits and breeches
He was not finished with the room. More than two decades later, in 1536, he returned to paint the Last Judgment on the altar wall, completing it in 1541: a swirling, muscular apocalypse whose nudity scandalised parts of the papal court. When the master of ceremonies Biagio da Cesena complained it belonged in a bathhouse, Michelangelo painted him into hell as Minos, judge of the damned, with donkey ears and a serpent. After the Council of Trent tightened decorum, the painter Daniele da Volterra was hired to drape the offending figures, earning the immortal nickname Il Braghettone — “the breeches-maker”. Between 1980 and 1994 a landmark restoration, funded by a Japanese broadcaster, stripped away centuries of soot, candle smoke and animal glue, revealing colours so bright — acid greens, shot oranges, violets — that some critics accused the restorers of scrubbing off Michelangelo's own finishing touches; most scholars accepted the vivid palette as genuine. The chapel remains a working room: cardinals still gather beneath the ceiling to elect popes. The man who painted it insisted to the end that he was a sculptor. The ceiling has spent five centuries overruling him.
Quiz nuggets
- Michelangelo frescoed the Sistine ceiling between 1508 and 1512 for Pope Julius II, unveiling it on 31 October 1512.
- He painted standing on a scaffold he designed himself, head bent back — not lying down, as the popular myth claims.
- His surviving sonnet to Giovanni da Pistoia complains about the work and ends “I am no painter”.
- The chapel is named after Pope Sixtus IV; Michelangelo returned in 1536–41 to paint the Last Judgment on the altar wall.
- Daniele da Volterra, hired to paint draperies over the Last Judgment's nudes, was nicknamed Il Braghettone, “the breeches-maker”.