Sistine Chapel

Few buildings anywhere rival the Sistine Chapel in grandeur, and the frescoes covering its ceiling and walls show how far Renaissance painters could push their art. Across several decades of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, two generations of artists worked at the very center of Christian worship to create this landmark of Western civilization.

Antonio Forcellino, an art historian who is also a practicing restorer, draws on both sides of his expertise to trace how the chapel came into being. He explains that Pope Sixtus IV launched the project to affirm papal legitimacy after Mehmed II challenged the pope's spiritual leadership. The lower walls were decorated by a team of leading masters whose frescoes are so uniform in style that they could seem the work of a single hand, representing the peak of the Tuscan workshop tradition of the Quattrocento.

In 1505, Julius II, Sixtus IV's nephew, redirected the project. Struck by the exceptional gifts of a young sculptor from Florence, he brought Michelangelo Buonarroti to Rome and asked him to paint the chapel's ceiling. Two decades later, Michelangelo returned to paint The Last Judgement on the wall behind the altar. His approach broke sharply with convention and became a decisive turning point in the history of Western art.

Rather than focusing only on the finished images, Forcellino reconstructs the everyday practices and goals of the patrons who conceived the chapel and the artists who carried it out, uncovering the material history that lies behind this work.