This is part 1 of a two parts Series, Sistine Chapel Facts. If you would like to read part 2 of Sistine Chapel Facts, please click here.

Michelangelo Buonarroti is one of the most famous artists of all time. He was a true renaissance man; having been a well known painter, sculptor, poet, architect, and engineer. Although the Michelangelo is often first thought of as a sculptor, one of his best known works is the painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The Sistine Chapel had originally been commissioned and built in 1477 by Pope Sixtus IV. Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel between 1508 and 1512 at the request of Pope Julius II.

The painting itself was quite complex and was comprised of a number of biblical scenes from the old testament. The ceiling focuses around nine different scenes from the Book of Genesis. In the most famous of these scenes, titled The Creation of Adam, Michelangelo depicts God giving life to Adam. The entirety of the painting is very architectural.

Michelangelo also utilized the nude male figure as decoration throughout the ceiling. The painting nine main scenes of the ceiling can be separated in three different categories.
The first category shows God creating the Heavens and Earth. This section consists of; The Separation of Light and Darkness, The Creation of the Sun, Moon and Earth, and The Separation of Land and Water. The second category depicts scenes regarding the creation of humans and it includes The Creation of Adam, The Creation of Eve, and The Temptation and Expulsion. The final category shows the plight of Humanity and includes the paintings The Sacrifice of Noah, The Great Flood, and The Drunkenness of Noah.

The method of which Michelangelo used when approaching the painting of the Sistine Chapel is still not definitively known. The movie The Agony and the Ecstasy by filmmaker Carol Reed, based off of the book by Irving Stone and Malcomb Bull’s “The Iconography of the Sistine Ceiling,” from Burlington Magazine (August 1988) can be both examined to answer this unknown. Each source depicted Michelangelo’s approach to the chapel ceiling as a dramatically different approach.

This is part 1 of a two parts Series, Sistine Chapel Facts. If you would like to read part 2 of Sistine Chapel Facts, please click here.

Shaun