SISTINE CHAPEL, Walls

The chapel's decoration began in 1481, just after the end of the hostilities between Rome and Florence that were set off by the Pazzi conspiracy. Lorenzo the Magnificent, who managed to avoid the plot to kill him, sent an exceptional quartet of painting masters to Rome: Perugino, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, and Cosimo Rosselli, along with their excellent team of assistants. Each of the four was assigned a portion of the wall to the right of the altar, and had a year to finish its decoration; before the year had ended, Luca Signorelli substituted Perugino.

Before Michelangelo destroyed it to paint the Last Judgment, a different fresco by Perugino was in the center of the wall behind the altar: it depicted the Assumption, that is, the Madonna ascending to heaven. The ceiling had instead been decorated with a simple starry sky.

Above the lower band I mentioned with the fake curtains, the middle band shows the episodes of the Old Testament with Moses and his brother Aaron, and on the other side you can see the episodes of Christ's life. The similarities between the stories that face each other are explained by inscriptions in the upper bands....