The Sixtine Chapel

The Sixtine Chapel was built by the architect Giovanni del Dolci among 1475 and 1583 under commission of Pope Sixtus IV who wanted this construction. Essential in the forms, enclosed and inaccessible from the outside, almost strengthened.

The pictorial decoration, started in 1481, transformed this severe and almost naked chapel in a precious picture-gallery of the paintings of the Italian Renaissance among the XV and the XVI century. It was the same Pope Sistus IV that entrusted some among the greatest painters of the epoch as Perugino, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio (teacher of Michelangelo) and Cosimo Rosselli of the realization of the parallel histories of Ancient and New Testament that is found of forehead in the central band of the two walls.

We can see represented "the life of Moises" on one side (Ancient Will) and "the life of Christ" from the other (New Testament).
In this way, to the "trip of Moses in Egypt" by Pinturicchio corresponds on the opposite wall "the Baptism of Christ", always by Pinturicchio, where besides the Christian symbology Roman monuments are also represented.

Following on the left are "the Temptation of Christ", "the Leper's Recovery" by Botticelli and "the crossing of the Red Sea" by Rosselli.
On the opposite side "the Call of the first Apostles" by Ghirlandaio and the "Mosè that receives the Tables of the Laws" and "the Sermon of the Mountain" by Rosselli. Following "the Delivery of the Keys to S.Peter" by Perugino and the "Testament" and "the Death of Moses" by Luca Signorelli, opposite to the "Last Supper" by Cosimo Rosselli.

But the true gigantic masterpiece, initiated in May of 1508 and finished in November of 1512, commissioned by Pope Giulio II, was the ceiling of the Sixtine Chapel, immense challenge due to the vastness of the surface (800 square meters around).

Michelangelo succeeded in fact to get a tri-dimensional effect drawing an architectural structure on the real structure, where subsequently it put his characters magistrally mixing architecture, painting and sculpture. To the center of the complex nine panels are followed with episodes of the Genesis.

Between the decoration of the ceiling and the realization of the Last Judgment, always from Michelangelo, on the wall of the Most Greater Altar, 23 years passed. The Last Judgment started in 1535 and it was finished in 1541, including more than 300 characters, painted with a clarity and a coherence that don't have anything of commune.

Restoration of the Sixtine Chapel

Among 1980 and 1994 a giant work of restoration of the frescoes of the vault and the Last Judgment was realized (and re-inaugurated for the Vatican Jubilee of 2000), returning the neatness and the vivacity of the colors that only a big teacher as Michelangelo had known how to interpret.