Sistine Chapel Ceiling and Last Judgment Explained

1. What the Sistine Chapel Is

The Sistine Chapel is a working chapel in the Apostolic Palace, built for Pope Sixtus IV between 1473 and 1481 and dedicated to the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. Sixtus gave the room its name and its shape. Michelangelo, arriving a generation later, painted the ceiling of a chapel that already had a full decorative programme on its walls and a liturgical purpose in daily use. Most visitors meet the room as a museum stop at the end of a long corridor, and the single most useful correction to make before looking up is that the vault was painted for a room where Mass is celebrated and popes are chosen.

The chapel is a plain rectangular box, roughly forty metres long and thirteen wide, with a shallow barrel vault and a screen of marble that divides the area near the altar from the area near the door. The proportions have often been compared to the measurements given for the Temple of Solomon in 1 Kings 6:2, sixty cubits by twenty by thirty. The comparison is a matter of published interpretation rather than a surviving instruction from Sixtus IV, and it is worth knowing as a reading of the room rather than as a documented intention.

The construction dates, the dedication to the Assumption, and the comparison with the dimensions of the Temple are as published by the Vatican Museums, which administer the chapel. No contract or letter survives in which Sixtus IV states the Temple analogy in his own words, and this page reports it as an interpretation.

Understanding what the room is for explains why the decoration goes the way it goes. A visitor walks in at the far end from the altar and walks toward it. The ceiling narrative runs the other way, beginning at the altar with God alone in the dark and ending above the door with a drunken man asleep in a vineyard. Walk from the door toward the altar and you walk backward through the story of the world, from human failure toward the first act of God. That is the direction of a procession, and the room was designed for processions.

2. The Walls Before Michelangelo

The side walls of the Sistine Chapel were painted in 1481 and 1482, a full generation before the ceiling, by a team of the best fresco painters in Italy. Sixtus IV brought in Pietro Perugino, Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Cosimo Rosselli, Luca Signorelli and their workshops, and the result is a cycle that most visitors walk past while craning their necks. Skipping it costs you the key to the whole room.

Moses on One Side, Christ on the Other

The two walls run in parallel. On one side, scenes from the life of Moses. On the other, facing them directly, scenes from the life of Christ. Each pair was chosen so that the Moses scene and the Christ scene opposite it answer one another: the crossing of the Red Sea faces the baptism of Christ, the giving of the Law on Sinai faces the Sermon on the Mount, the punishment of the rebels under Korah faces the handing of the keys to Peter.

The technique of reading the Old Testament as a preparation for the New is called typology, and the Church treats it as a genuine mode of interpretation. The Catechism sets it out in the section on the unity of the two Testaments, at paragraphs 128 to 130: the Old Testament retains its own value, and the Church reads its events as figures of what God accomplished in Christ. The Sistine walls are that principle in paint.

Perugino's Delivery of the Keys

The single most consequential panel on the walls is Perugino's Delivery of the Keys to St Peter, which shows Christ handing a gold key and a silver key to a kneeling Peter in a wide piazza. The scene illustrates Matthew 16:19, and its placement in the chapel where popes are elected is not accidental. The panel argues, in the room where the argument matters most, that the office being filled was instituted by Christ.

Readers who want the doctrine behind that panel rather than the painting of it will find it in the guide to the papacy and the office of Peter, and the apostle's own story in the profile of Simon Peter. The tomb over which the neighbouring basilica was raised is treated in the guide to St Peter's Basilica and what to see in it.

The Popes Above the Windows

Above the two cycles runs a register of painted popes, standing in niches, each an early bishop of Rome. Higher still, the windows. Higher again, Michelangelo. The room therefore stacks its argument in horizontal bands: Moses and Christ at eye level, the popes above them, the world before both above that. A visitor who reads the bands as one vertical sentence understands the design.

3. Why Julius II Wanted a Ceiling

Pope Julius II commissioned the ceiling in 1508, and Michelangelo did not want the job. The original vault was painted as a blue sky scattered with gold stars, a conventional and perfectly acceptable finish, and it had cracked when structural work was done on the palace. Julius, the nephew of Sixtus IV and a man with an appetite for building, decided to replace it.

A Sculptor Given a Brush

Michelangelo Buonarroti was thirty-three, and he considered himself a sculptor. He had been working on Julius's tomb, a project that consumed decades of his life and was never finished as designed, and he regarded the ceiling commission as an interruption engineered by rivals who wanted him to fail at a medium he had barely practised. He said so repeatedly, in letters and in later accounts, and the resentment is part of the record rather than a legend.

The Commission Grew in His Hands

The first plan was modest: twelve apostles in the triangular spandrels, with ornament filling the rest of the vault. In a letter written years afterwards to Giovanni Francesco Fattucci, Michelangelo recalled telling the pope that such a scheme would come out a poor thing, and being told to paint what he liked. The commission that resulted covers something over a thousand square metres and contains hundreds of figures.

The account of the original twelve-apostle scheme and the exchange with Julius II comes from Michelangelo's own letter to Giovanni Francesco Fattucci, written in 1523 and preserved in his correspondence. Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists and Ascanio Condivi's biography give overlapping and sometimes conflicting versions of the same events, and both authors had reasons to shape the story.

He Painted Standing Up

The persistent picture of Michelangelo lying on his back on a plank is wrong. He designed a bridge-like scaffold that stood on brackets set into the wall above the windows, leaving the floor of the chapel clear, and he worked standing with his head tipped back and his arm above him. He wrote a comic and miserable sonnet to his friend Giovanni da Pistoia about what the posture did to him, complaining that his beard pointed at heaven, his brush dripped on his face, and his spine had bent itself into a bow. Four years of that produced the vault.

4. How the Ceiling Is Built

The Sistine ceiling is organised by a painted architecture that does not exist. Michelangelo frescoed a system of ribs, cornices, thrones and plinths onto a smooth curved surface, and then populated it. Recognising the fake architecture is the first step to reading the vault, because everything else hangs on that framework and every figure has an assigned place in it.

The Five Layers

Work from the centre outward and downward, and the vault falls into five bands.

He Painted It Backwards

Michelangelo began at the end of the chapel nearest the door, with the Noah scenes, and worked toward the altar. The order matters for two reasons. First, the narrative therefore runs against the direction of his work: he painted the last events of the story first. Second, his manner changed as he went. The early panels near the door are crowded with small figures in complicated groupings. The later panels near the altar are enormous, simplified, and reduced to a handful of bodies against empty space. The scaffold was moved once, halfway through, and Michelangelo saw the first half from the floor before starting the second. What he saw made him paint bigger.

The sequence of work, the single repositioning of the scaffold, and the shift in scale between the two halves are established from the surviving payment records, the giornate (the daily plaster patches visible in raking light), and the technical findings published by the Vatican Museums during the restoration campaign of 1980 to 1989.

5. The Nine Genesis Panels

Nine framed scenes run down the middle of the vault, and they divide into three groups of three: three panels on the creation of the world, three on the creation and fall of humanity, three on Noah. Listed here from the altar end toward the door, which is the order of the biblical narrative.

The First Three: God and the Cosmos

The Separation of Light from Darkness. Directly over the altar, God alone, twisting in a void, arms raised, dividing light from dark. Genesis 1:3 to 1:4. There is no landscape and no witness. Michelangelo painted this panel last, at the height of his confidence, and it is the most abstract thing on the ceiling.

The Creation of the Sun, the Moon and the Plants. God appears twice in one frame, hurtling forward with arms flung out to set the sun and moon in place, and seen again from behind, retreating, as he creates the vegetation of the earth. Genesis 1:11 to 1:19. The double appearance in a single panel is a medieval storytelling device used at full Renaissance scale.

The Separation of Land from Water. God hovers over the water with his arms spread wide, gathering the seas. Genesis 1:9 to 1:10. The panel is the quietest of the three and the least often reproduced.

The Middle Three: Adam, Eve and the Fall

The Creation of Adam. The panel almost every visitor arrives already knowing, treated on its own in the next section.

The Creation of Eve. Eve rises from the sleeping Adam's side at the command of a God who stands on the ground, robed and heavy, in a rocky landscape. Genesis 2:21 to 2:22. Christian tradition has read the woman drawn from the side of the sleeping man as a figure of the Church drawn from the pierced side of Christ asleep in death, a reading found in the Fathers and echoed in later commentary. Note that this panel sits at the exact centre of the ceiling.

The Temptation and the Expulsion. One frame, two moments, divided by the tree. On the left, Adam and Eve reach for the fruit from a serpent with a woman's torso coiled around the trunk. On the right, the same two figures, aged and cowering, are driven out by an angel with a sword. Genesis 3. The bodies on the left are beautiful and the bodies on the right are ruined, and the tree between them is the hinge. For what the Church actually teaches about the event this panel depicts, see the guide to original sin.

The Last Three: Noah

The Sacrifice of Noah. A crowded scene of animals being killed and burned on an altar. In Genesis the sacrifice follows the flood (Genesis 8:20), yet the panel is placed before the Flood panel on the ceiling. Some scholars read the placement as a deliberate rearrangement for compositional reasons, and a minority have argued the scene is the sacrifice of Cain and Abel from Genesis 4 rather than Noah's. The identification is genuinely contested.

The Flood. The largest and most crowded panel on the ceiling, and one of the first Michelangelo painted. Families struggle up a shrinking island, a man carries his drowned son, a boat capsizes, and the ark floats in the distance with a small door. Genesis 7. A section of this panel was lost to an explosion in a nearby powder magazine in 1797 and the damage was never repainted.

The Drunkenness of Noah. Directly over the entrance. Noah lies naked and asleep after the wine, his sons around him, one covering him and one mocking. Genesis 9:20 to 9:27. The story of the world ends, at the door of the chapel, with the man God saved from the flood lying senseless on the ground.

6. The Creation of Adam

The Creation of Adam shows God the Father reaching toward a reclining Adam whose fingers do not quite touch his. God is carried through the air by a mass of figures wrapped inside a swirling red cloak. Adam lies on a bare slope of earth, formed and beautiful and completely inert, propped on one elbow, his arm extended without effort. The gap between the two index fingers is a few centimetres wide and it is the subject of the painting.

What the Gap Is Doing

Michelangelo is painting a verse rather than a moment: "the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being" (Genesis 2:7). The man of dust is already there. What has not yet happened is the breath. So Michelangelo paints the instant before contact and makes the viewer close the distance in their own mind. Look at the two arms and the difference is stark: God's is rigid, straight, driven forward by will, and Adam's droops from the wrist as though the hand does not yet know it is a hand.

Who Is the Woman Under God's Arm?

A young woman looks out from beneath God's left arm, held close, with a child under his hand beside her. The most common identification is Eve, present in the mind of God before she exists, watching the making of the man she will be given to. Others identify her as divine Wisdom, the figure who in Proverbs 8:22 to 8:31 is beside God at the founding of the world, delighting in the human race. Both readings have been argued for a long time and neither is settled by any document from Michelangelo.

The Brain-Shaped Cloak

The red mantle enclosing God and his companions has an outline that resembles a cross-section of the human brain, a resemblance first argued in print by the physician Frank Lynn Meshberger in a 1990 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association. On his reading, Michelangelo, who dissected human bodies as a young man, was depicting the gift of intellect. The proposal has been repeated widely and disputed just as widely, and no document from Michelangelo supports or refutes it.

The brain hypothesis is attributed to Frank Lynn Meshberger, "An Interpretation of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam Based on Neuroanatomy", JAMA, 1990. It is one scholar's reading of a shape, it has been contested by art historians since publication, and this page reports it as a proposal rather than as an established fact about Michelangelo's intention.

What a Catholic Sees in It

The doctrinal content of the panel is the claim of Genesis 1:27, that the human being is made in the image of God. Michelangelo paints God and Adam with the same body, the same musculature, the same physical vocabulary, and the resemblance is the argument. Human dignity in Catholic teaching rests on that likeness and not on capacity, usefulness or achievement. Pope John Paul II, preaching in the chapel in 1994 at the Mass marking the end of the restoration, called it the sanctuary of the theology of the human body. The description fits the whole vault, and it fits this panel exactly.

7. The Prophets and the Sibyls

Twelve enormous seated figures line the sides of the vault, alternating between Hebrew prophets and pagan sibyls, each on a marble throne with their name lettered on a plaque beneath and two attendant figures behind. They are the largest figures on the ceiling and they carry its argument about revelation.

The Seven Prophets

Jonah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Joel and Zechariah. Their placement is deliberate. Zechariah sits above the entrance door, so every person coming into the chapel enters beneath the prophet who wrote of a king coming to Jerusalem humble and riding on a donkey (Zechariah 9:9). Jonah sits above the altar, at the summit of the whole scheme, thrown backward with the great fish beside him.

Why Jonah Is Over the Altar

Jonah holds the highest and most conspicuous position on the ceiling because of one verse in the Gospels. Challenged for a sign, Jesus answered that no sign would be given except the sign of the prophet Jonah, "for as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (Matthew 12:40). Jonah is the Old Testament figure of the resurrection. Placing him directly over the altar, where the death and resurrection of Christ are made present in the Mass, and directly above the wall that would later carry the Last Judgment, ties the whole room together.

The Five Sibyls

The Delphic, Erythraean, Cumaean, Persian and Libyan sibyls are prophetesses of Greek and Roman legend, and their presence in a papal chapel surprises people. Medieval and Renaissance Christians read collections of verse oracles attributed to the sibyls, and found in them what they took to be announcements of a coming saviour spoken outside the covenant with Israel. The Dies Irae, the great medieval hymn of the last judgment, names David and the Sibyl in the same line as witnesses to the day of wrath.

The theological point being made is about the reach of God's providence. Catholic teaching holds that public revelation runs through Israel and is completed and closed in Christ, so the sibyls are not being ranked with Isaiah as sources of doctrine. They stand for the longing of the nations, the pagan world reaching for something it could not name. The pairing on the vault says that God prepared his own people through the prophets and left the rest of humanity restless for the same thing.

The Cumaean Sibyl and the Erythraean

Michelangelo differentiates them sharply. The Cumaean is old, massive, thick-armed and hunched over her book, the most physically formidable figure on the ceiling. The Erythraean is young and turns a page by lamplight. The Delphic looks up and away from her scroll with her mouth open, caught in the moment of hearing something. The variety is the point: revelation arrives differently to different people, and Michelangelo gives each of the twelve a distinct posture of attention, from Jeremiah's collapsed grief to Isaiah's sudden turn of the head.

8. The Four Corners: Israel Rescued

The four corner pendentives of the vault, awkward triangular fields where the ceiling meets the walls, each carry a scene in which Israel was saved from destruction through a single person. Michelangelo filled the difficult shapes with violent, twisted compositions that fit the corners the way a hand fits a glove.

David and Goliath

The young David stands over the fallen giant with the sword raised, the moment before the head comes off (1 Samuel 17:51). Michelangelo shows it from behind and above, so the figures fold into the corner. David defeating a champion who had terrorised an army is read in Christian tradition as a figure of Christ overcoming the devil.

Judith and Holofernes

Judith and her maidservant carry the severed head of the Assyrian general Holofernes away on a platter under a white cloth, while the headless body writhes on the bed behind them (Judith 13). The Book of Judith is one of the deuterocanonical books, received as Scripture by Catholics and Orthodox and placed among the apocrypha by most Protestant bodies, a difference explained in the guide to the deuterocanonical books. Judith has been read since the Fathers as a figure of the Virgin Mary crushing the head of the serpent.

The Brazen Serpent

A mass of bodies tangled with snakes on one side, and on the other, those who have turned to look at the bronze serpent Moses raised on a pole (Numbers 21:4 to 21:9). Jesus applies the image to himself directly: "Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him" (John 3:14 to 3:15). The panel is the crucifixion in Old Testament form.

The Punishment of Haman

Haman, who plotted the destruction of the Jews in the Book of Esther, is shown fixed to a tree in a violently foreshortened pose, seen from below with his limbs splayed (Esther 7). Michelangelo departs from the hanging described in the text and gives him a crucified posture. Dante had described the same scene in the Purgatorio, and Michelangelo knew Dante well enough to quote him on the altar wall thirty years later.

All four scenes share a shape: a people facing annihilation, one person acting, deliverance. Set beneath the creation and above the ancestors of Christ, they hold the middle of the argument. God made the world, the world fell, and God went on rescuing.

9. The Ancestors of Christ

The lowest band of Michelangelo's work, in the lunettes above the windows and the spandrels between them, contains the least famous and quietest figures in the chapel: family groups seated under painted tablets that carry the names from the genealogy opening the Gospel of Matthew. Michelangelo filled sixteen lunettes and the eight spandrels between them. Most visitors never look at them.

Ordinary People Waiting

The contrast with the vault is total. Above are prophets in ecstasy and God in flight. Down here are men slumped asleep, women combing hair or feeding infants, couples sitting apart in silence, a father staring at nothing, families in shadow and cramped spaces. Nobody is having a vision. They are the generations in Matthew 1:1 to 1:17, most of whom are only names in a list, and Michelangelo painted them as what the list implies: an enormous number of unremarkable people, living and dying in obscurity, through whom the promise travelled to its fulfilment.

Why the Band Is Worth Your Neck Ache

The ancestors sit directly above the heads of the congregation, closest to the human world of the room. Their placement makes a claim about how salvation history reaches a particular person: through families, through waiting, through generations who see nothing and are given no sign. A pilgrim who identifies with Isaiah on the vault is flattering themselves. A pilgrim who identifies with the exhausted woman in a lunette holding a child is reading the chapel correctly.

Two of these lunettes were destroyed when Michelangelo returned in the 1530s and cleared the altar wall for the Last Judgment. He painted over his own work to make room for it.

10. How the Last Judgment Came to Be Painted

The Last Judgment covers the entire altar wall of the chapel and was painted between 1536 and 1541, roughly a quarter of a century after the ceiling. Pope Clement VII commissioned it shortly before his death in 1534, and his successor Paul III held Michelangelo to the work. Michelangelo was in his sixties when he began and sixty-six when it was unveiled on 31 October 1541.

A Different Rome

The world between the ceiling and the altar wall had changed. Rome had been sacked in 1527 by mutinous imperial troops, an event that shook the city and the papacy badly. Martin Luther's break with Rome had hardened into a permanent division of Western Christianity, treated in the guide to the Reformation and what it changed. The confident humanism of the vault, with its beautiful bodies and its architecture of order, gives way on the altar wall to a swirling mass of figures without ground under their feet and without a frame around them.

What Was Destroyed to Make Room

Clearing the wall was expensive in more than money. Michelangelo removed Perugino's altarpiece of the Assumption, painted for Sixtus IV, together with two scenes from the fifteenth-century cycles, the Finding of Moses and the Nativity of Christ, and two of his own lunettes of the ancestors of Christ. He also had the wall rebuilt so that it leans slightly forward from the vertical, a detail usually explained as a measure to stop dust settling on the surface.

The commission dates, the unveiling on 31 October 1541, and the list of works removed to clear the wall are as published by the Vatican Museums and recorded in Vasari's Lives of the Artists. The reason for the wall's forward inclination is an interpretation offered in the technical literature rather than a documented instruction from Michelangelo.

11. Reading the Last Judgment

The Last Judgment shows the general judgment at the end of history, with several hundred figures arranged in a slow wheel around the risen Christ. The composition has no architectural frame and no horizon. Reading it means finding the centre first and then working outward, because the movement of the whole wall turns on that one figure.

Christ at the Centre

Christ stands at the middle of the upper half, beardless and young, built like an athlete, with his right arm raised and his left lowered. Interpreters have argued for centuries about the gesture. The raised arm has been read as condemnation, as the display of the wound in his side, and as the sweep that sets the entire wheel of figures in motion. His body is turned in a torsion that pulls the whole composition around him. The wound marks are visible in his hands, his feet and his side.

Mary Beside Him

The Virgin Mary sits at Christ's right, drawn in close against him, her arms folded and her head turned away from the judgment toward the side of the saved. In the medieval tradition Mary intercedes at the judgment. Michelangelo paints her at the moment when intercession is over and the verdict is being given, and she looks away. Catholic teaching holds that the time for intercession is this life, and the fresco takes that seriously.

The Martyrs and Their Instruments

Around Christ crowd the saints, and many hold the objects with which they were killed. St Bartholomew holds a knife and a flayed human skin. St Catherine holds a spiked wheel. St Lawrence holds his gridiron. St Sebastian holds a fistful of arrows. St Peter, massive and forward, holds out two large keys toward Christ, an image commonly read as the office being handed back to the one who gave it once the Church's work in history is done.

The Face in the Flayed Skin

The empty face on the skin held by St Bartholomew is generally identified as a self-portrait of Michelangelo. The identification was proposed by Francesco La Cava in 1925 and has been broadly accepted since, though Michelangelo left no statement about it. Read that way, the artist put himself into his own fresco as a discarded husk hanging from a martyr's hand, at the judgment, with no body left.

The self-portrait in the flayed skin was first argued by Francesco La Cava in a study published in 1925. It is an interpretation that the great majority of art historians accept, and no document in Michelangelo's hand confirms it.

The Trumpets and the Two Books

In the lower centre a group of angels sound trumpets toward the earth, and two of them hold open books. The small book is for the saved and the large book, which requires two angels to hold it, is for the damned. The image comes from Revelation 20:12, where the dead are judged from what is written in the books, and the difference in size is Michelangelo's own commentary.

The Rising and the Falling

On the viewer's lower left, bodies climb out of the earth. Some are skeletons reassembling, some are half-clothed in flesh, some are being hauled upward by angels and by other souls, and one is being lifted by a rosary that two figures grip at either end. On the viewer's lower right, bodies fall. Demons pull them down by the ankles, one man covers a single eye with his hand and stares out of the wall in terror while a serpent coils around him, and the whole right side sinks toward the boat at the bottom.

Charon and Minos

The lower right corner is taken straight from Dante. Charon, the ferryman of the dead, drives the damned out of his boat with an oar, and Michelangelo follows Dante's line in Inferno III almost literally, where Charon beats with his oar whoever lingers. Beside the boat stands Minos, the judge of the underworld, with a serpent wound around him and the ears of an ass. Vasari reports that the face of Minos is the portrait of Biagio da Cesena, the papal master of ceremonies who complained to Paul III about the nudity in the fresco while it was in progress.

The identification of Minos with Biagio da Cesena comes from Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists, together with the story that the pope declined to intervene. Vasari is a near-contemporary and the sole source for the anecdote in this form, and it should be read as his account rather than as documented fact.

The Two Lunettes at the Top

At the very top of the wall, in the two curved fields left by the vault, angels without wings carry the instruments of the Passion: the cross on one side, the column of the scourging and the crown of thorns on the other. They are hauled forward with visible physical effort. The judgment is being given by a man who was executed, and the tools of that execution are held above the whole scene as the credentials of the judge.

12. What the Fresco Teaches and What It Does Not

The Last Judgment is a painting, and Catholic doctrine is not established by paintings. Distinguishing the two is the most useful thing a reader can take from this section, because a great deal of confusion about Catholic teaching on judgment comes from people reading a fresco as a diagram.

What the Church Actually Teaches About Judgment

Catholic teaching distinguishes two judgments. Each person is judged immediately at death, which is called the particular judgment, and the whole human race is judged together at the end of history when Christ returns and the dead rise bodily, which is the general or last judgment. Michelangelo's wall shows the second. The doctrine behind the scene, drawn from Matthew 25:31-46, the Creed and the Catechism, is set out in full in the guide to the final judgment, which names no painting and treats the teaching on its own terms. The bodily rising shown along the bottom of the fresco is the subject of the guide to the resurrection of the body.

Four Things the Fresco Does Not Say

It does not name a date. Nothing on the wall claims to know when the judgment comes, and the Church holds that no one knows the day or the hour except the Father (Mark 13:32). Any use of the fresco to suggest a timetable is a misuse of it.

It does not identify any named living person among the damned. The one portrait among the damned is a papal official who was alive in the 1530s and is a piece of artistic score-settling, reported by Vasari, that no one at the time took as a spiritual verdict.

It does not depict purgatory. The wall shows the end of history, when purgatory is over. The Catholic teaching on the purification of souls after death is a separate subject, covered in the guide to purgatory, and readers looking for the ascent and the descent as final states will find them in the guides to heaven and hell.

It does not settle the number of the saved. The Church has never declared any individual to be in hell, and the fresco makes no head count. What it insists on is that the choice is real and the outcome matters, which is the plain sense of Matthew 25.

13. The Loincloth Controversy

Almost every figure in the Last Judgment was originally naked, including Christ, the Virgin and the saints, and the nudity was attacked from the day the fresco was unveiled in 1541. The dispute ran for centuries and left permanent marks on the wall, and both sides of it deserve to be stated fairly.

The Case Against the Nudity

Critics argued that a chapel is a place of prayer and that a wall of nude bodies behind the altar distracts from it, that the fresco treated a sacred subject with the vocabulary of pagan sculpture, and that the naked bodies of Christ and his mother were indecorous in a room where Mass is offered. The writer Pietro Aretino made the case at length in a public letter to Michelangelo. Biagio da Cesena made it to the pope. The objection was not squeamishness alone. It rested on a real question about what belongs behind an altar.

The Case for It

Michelangelo's defenders held that the resurrection of the body is a doctrine about bodies, that clothing at the last judgment would be an absurdity since the dead rise from the ground with nothing, and that the human figure is the highest subject available to a Christian artist because it is what God made in his own image and what God assumed in the Incarnation. On this reading the nudity is theological argument.

What Happened

The Council of Trent issued its decree on sacred images in December 1563, requiring that images in churches contain nothing disorderly or unbecoming. In January 1564 the relevant congregation decided that the objectionable parts of the Last Judgment should be covered. Michelangelo died the following month, in February 1564, at eighty-eight. His pupil and friend Daniele da Volterra was given the work of adding draperies to some of the figures, which he did with restraint, and the nickname that followed him for the rest of history was Il Braghettone, the breeches maker. Later hands added more coverings over the following two centuries, some of them clumsy.

The restoration finished in 1994 removed most of the later additions and kept Daniele's, on the reasoning that his work is contemporary with the controversy and now belongs to the wall's own history. The figures of St Blaise and St Catherine, which Daniele repainted entirely, remain as he left them.

The date of the Tridentine decree on sacred images (Session 25, December 1563), the decision of January 1564, and the attribution of the first draperies to Daniele da Volterra are drawn from the conciliar acts and from the published record of the Vatican Museums restoration, which documented which coverings were removed and which were kept.

14. The Restoration and the Colour Debate

The Sistine frescoes were cleaned in two long campaigns, the ceiling from 1980 to 1989 and the Last Judgment from 1990 to 1994, and the result was one of the fiercest arguments in the history of conservation. The colours that emerged were far brighter than anything anyone alive had seen, and not everyone believed they were Michelangelo's.

What the Restorers Said

The Vatican Museums team, led by the chief restorer Gianluigi Colalucci under the direction of Fabrizio Mancinelli, held that what they removed was four centuries of candle soot, animal glue applied in earlier cleanings, and darkened varnish. On their account, Michelangelo painted in true fresco with a brilliant palette of shot colours, orange against green, pink against blue, and the sombre Michelangelo the world knew was a Michelangelo under dirt. They published the intervention in detail as they went and left small unrestored patches for comparison.

What the Critics Said

A group of scholars and artists, among them the art historian James Beck and the painter Frank Mason, argued that Michelangelo finished his frescoes with a final layer of shadow and modelling applied a secco, onto dry plaster, and that the cleaning stripped that layer away along with the grime. On their account, the restoration removed the artist's last touches and left the underpainting, which is why the results look flat and garish. The debate ran in the press and in the scholarly journals for years.

Where It Stands

The restorers' position is the majority view among conservation professionals, and the technical documentation supports it in most particulars. The critics' objection has not been shown to be baseless either, since some a secco work certainly existed and some of it certainly went. A visitor standing in the chapel today is looking at frescoes that are cleaner than any generation since the sixteenth century has seen, with a residual question about how much of the final surface survived the cleaning.

The restoration campaigns of 1980 to 1989 and 1990 to 1994 were carried out by the Vatican Museums and funded by Nippon Television Network Corporation, which received image rights in exchange, an arrangement both parties published at the time. The technical accounts are those of Gianluigi Colalucci and Fabrizio Mancinelli; the principal published objections are those of James Beck, Alessandro Conti and Frank Mason. This page describes the disagreement and takes no side on the extent of the lost a secco layer.

15. The Chapel as the Conclave Room

The Sistine Chapel is where cardinals elect a pope, and the practice goes back to the conclave of 1492. The apostolic constitution Universi Dominici Gregis, issued by Pope John Paul II in 1996, fixed the chapel as the place where the balloting must be held. The room a tourist queues for is a functioning voting chamber, and understanding that changes how the frescoes read.

Extra Omnes

When the cardinals have assembled and the preliminaries are done, the Master of Papal Liturgical Celebrations says extra omnes, everyone out, and every person not entitled to remain leaves. The doors are closed. Each cardinal has already sworn an oath, individually, with his hand on the book of the Gospels, promising secrecy and promising to act as he believes right before God. He swears it standing in front of Michelangelo's Last Judgment.

The Stove and the Chimney

Ballots are counted and then burned in a stove installed for the purpose, whose flue runs up to the temporary chimney fitted to the chapel roof. Black smoke means no election. White smoke means a pope has been chosen and has accepted. A second stove with chemical cartridges was introduced to make the colour unambiguous, after generations in which the smoke came out grey and the crowd argued about it, and the bells of St Peter's are now rung as well.

Why the Room Was Chosen

The pairing of the two functions is the point of the whole chapel. Perugino's Delivery of the Keys hangs on the side wall, showing the office being given. The Last Judgment covers the wall the electors face, showing the account every one of them will render. Between them sit the men choosing a successor to Peter. A cardinal who lifts his eyes from the ballot sees exactly what he is answerable to. For the wider question of the office itself, see the guide to the papacy.

16. How to Look at It in the Room

Most people get about the same amount of time in the Sistine Chapel and spend it badly, standing in the middle of a crowd, looking straight up at whatever is directly overhead, and leaving with a blur. A short plan fixes that. What follows is about how to use your attention, and it holds whenever you go.

Look at the Walls First

Give the fifteenth-century cycles two or three minutes before you look up. Find Perugino's Delivery of the Keys on one side and the parallel Moses scene facing it. Once you have seen that the two walls answer each other, the ceiling stops being decoration and becomes the third part of an argument.

Stand at the Door End and Read Toward the Altar

Position yourself under the entrance end and follow the spine of the vault with your eyes, panel by panel, toward the altar: Noah drunk, the flood, the sacrifice, the expulsion, the creation of Eve, the creation of Adam, the waters, the sun and moon, and God alone in the dark over the altar. Reading the nine in that sequence takes a minute and is the single most valuable minute you will spend in the room.

Then Pick Three Figures and Actually Look at Them

Trying to see everything guarantees seeing nothing. Choose the Cumaean Sibyl, Jonah over the altar, and one lunette family of the ancestors, and give each a full thirty seconds. Three figures examined beat four hundred glanced at.

On the Altar Wall, Find the Centre and Work Out

Locate Christ, then Mary at his side, then Bartholomew with the skin below and to the right of Christ, then the two books in the trumpeting group, then Charon's boat in the bottom corner. Five anchors give you the structure of three hundred figures.

Say a Prayer Before You Leave

The chapel is a chapel. Whatever else you came for, the room was built so that people would pray in it, and the whole programme on its surfaces exists to move somebody to do exactly that. Thirty seconds of silence facing the altar is the response the building was designed to produce. If you want to prepare for that beforehand, the guide to what a pilgrimage is covers how to approach a holy place, and the guide to pilgrimage sites in Rome places the chapel among the other churches of the city.

Readers who cannot travel can still work through the chapel section by section from home, and the guide to making a virtual pilgrimage sets out how to do that as a spiritual exercise rather than as sightseeing.

17. Frequently Asked Questions