The immense beauty of the Sistine Chapel, inside the Vatican Museums, is not a secret. The vastness of its space and the quantity of masterpieces in the same room can be overwhelming though, and missing some details is very easy.
This series aims to share individual panels or paintings so to offer some additional information to the curious, since each pictorial fragment of the chapel is a wonder in its own right.
But first, some historical information.
Why is it called SISTINE Chapel? The chapel is named after the pope who decided its construction in 1477, Sixtus IV.
Where is it? Inside the Vatican Museums, adjacent to St. Peter’s Basilica and physically connected to it through a gallery.
Who worked on its realization? The most important artists of the time were employed for the decoration of the chapel: Pietro Perugino, Domenico ‘il Ghirlandaio” Bignardi, Alessandro Filipepi known as Botticelli, Cosimo Rosselli, Piero di Cosimo, Signorelli, Bartolomeo della Gatta, fra’ Diamante, Bernardino di Leto (Pinturicchio). And only in a second moment, between 1508 and 1512, Michelangelo Buonarroti, called in to paint the altar wall and the vault of the room by pope Julius II.
Image credits: Wikipedia.
