The frescoed ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, painted by Michelangelo between 1508 and 1512 — a vault of Old Testament scenes crowded with hundreds of figures and centered on the Creation of Adam, and one of the supreme achievements of Renaissance art. A contested late-twentieth-century cleaning restored its startlingly vivid color.
For four years a man stood on a wooden platform near the top of a chapel, his head tilted back, paint falling into his eyes, working a damp plaster ceiling he had never wanted to paint. He thought of himself as a sculptor, and he resented the brush. He was wrong about himself. When the scaffolding came down in 1512, the ceiling of the pope's chapel held nine scenes from Genesis and hundreds of straining figures, and at its center God reached out a finger toward a newly made man named Adam. Their hands do not quite touch. That small gap, charged with the life about to leap across it, became one of the most reproduced images in Western art. He had given God a face, and the world has been looking up at it ever since.