Sistine Chapel

Michelangelo did not want this job. He considered himself a sculptor, not a painter, and he was furious when Pope Julius II pulled him off the tomb project he was working on and told him to paint a ceiling instead. He suspected a rival — possibly Bramante, possibly Raphael — had suggested it specifically to set him up for failure. He wrote to his father complaining about the assignment. He wrote a poem about how miserable the work was, describing paint dripping into his eyes and his body bent into an agonising curve.

And here is the thing everyone gets wrong: he did not paint it lying on his back. That image comes from the Charlton Heston film. He painted standing upright on a specially designed scaffold, head tilted backwards, arm extended above him, for four years. Four years of looking straight up. His eyesight was reportedly damaged by the end. The scaffold itself was an engineering achievement — Michelangelo designed it himself, a stepped wooden platform that bridged the chapel walls without touching the ceiling, so services could continue underneath.

The ceiling contains over three hundred figures and took from 1508 to 1512. The famous central panel — the Creation of Adam, God reaching out to touch Adam's finger — is arguably the most reproduced image in art history. But look closer at the shape surrounding God. It is anatomically identical to a cross-section of a human brain, complete with the frontal lobe, brain stem, and vertebral artery. Neuroscientists have confirmed the match. Whether Michelangelo did this deliberately — embedding the idea that God's greatest gift to humanity was intelligence, not life — is one of art history's great debates.

Twenty-three years later, he came back to paint The Last Judgment on the altar wall. He included a self-portrait — his own flayed skin, held by Saint Bartholomew. The face on the empty skin is unmistakably Michelangelo's. He was seventy years old and apparently had opinions about how life had treated him.