The Sistine Chapel (c. 1473-1481)

The project: replacing the old Cappella Magna

Elected on 9 August 1471, the Franciscan Francesco della Rovere took the name Sixtus IV and undertook a vast programme of urban and liturgical renovation in a Rome he wanted to make worthy of its rank as the Christian capital after the papacy's return from Avignon (1377) and the end of the Western Schism (1417). A theologian and former general of the Franciscan order (1464-1469), Sixtus IV was also a cultivated patron: in 1475 he founded the Vatican Library in its modern form, enlarged the Hospital of the Holy Spirit, and entrusted to the Florentine architect Baccio Pontelli several Roman buildings — including the Ponte Sisto over the Tiber, according to a traditional attribution now abandoned.

Within the Apostolic Palace, the pope decided to replace the old medieval Cappella Magna — a palatine chapel perhaps founded under Urban V (1362-1370), by then obsolete and threatening ruin^[5]. The new building was intended to house the great pontifical ceremonies: papal masses, processions, ordinations. The works, commonly dated to around 1473-1481, saw — according to the Vatican Museums' official guide — the actual reconstruction commissioned in 1477 and completed in 1480, before the painted decoration of 1481. On 15 August 1483, the feast of the Assumption, the chapel was solemnly inaugurated and placed under the patronage of the Virgin Mary assumed into heaven^[6].

Baccio Pontelli, Giovannino de' Dolci: the architects

The architectural attribution is still debated among specialists. Tradition retains two names: Baccio Pontelli (Florence, c. 1450 – Urbino, 1492) for the overall plan, and Giovannino de' Dolci (Florence, died 1485) for the effective direction of the works in Rome. Dolci's connection with the building is not a reconstruction of the 20th century alone: as early as 1879, the historian Eugène Müntz argued for it from archive documents, including a payment of 1486 still owed to his heirs^[7]. These records attest his documented participation in the construction, without settling on their own three distinct questions: who designed the plan, who directed the works, and who actually took part in them. The monumental study by Ernst Steinmann, Die Sixtinische Kapelle (Munich, 1901-1905), subsequently fixed the framework of all modern historiography on the subject^[8].

The chapel's exterior, at once sober and massive, is deliberately defensive: its bare brick walls, articulated by simple cornices, its terrace roof pierced by an embattled wall-walk, its small round-arched openings recall a fortress tower more than a sanctuary. At the time, Rome was still prey to urban factions — Orsini against Colonna — and the pontifical palace had to be able to hold out in case of riot. The military sobriety of the shell contrasts violently with the splendour within: the only real exterior luxury is the elegance of the proportions and the regularity of the brick courses.

The Solomonic proportions (1 Kgs 6:2)

The most singular feature of the project is its symbolic mensuration — the choice of its measurements. The building's interior dimensions — 40.23 m long, 13.41 m wide, 20.70 m high (measurements from the Vatican Museums' official guide) — are compared with the ratio 60 × 20 × 30 of the measurements given by the Bible for Solomon's sanctuary: "The house that King Solomon built for the LORD was sixty cubits long, twenty cubits wide, and thirty cubits high" (1 Kgs 6:2, ESV). The comparison is real but not an exact ratio: 40.23 ÷ 60 = 13.41 ÷ 20 = 0.67050, against 20.70 ÷ 30 = 0.69000 — an implicit cubit of about 0.67 metres for the plan, 0.69 for the height. This Solomonic reading, defended notably by John Shearman, places the papal sanctuary within the long Christian typology of the Temple, in which the Roman Church presents itself as the heir and fulfilment of the Temple of Jerusalem^[9]; this verifiable proportional comparison must however be distinguished from a formally demonstrated historical intention.

The rectangular plan, simple and frontal — oriented east-west, altar to the west beneath the Last Judgment wall — is itself a Solomonic heritage: one large single vessel with no side aisles, divided into two parts (the cardinals' sanctuary and the lay nave) by a marble balustrade sculpted by Mino da Fiesole and Andrea Bregno. Above, twelve large windows opened high in the long walls provide natural light.

The call of the great Tuscan and Umbrian masters

Once the structural work was finished, Sixtus IV launched a pictorial undertaking of unheard-of ambition: bringing to Rome the finest painters of central Italy, to adorn in a single impetus the middle register of the two long walls and the four ends. In the spring of 1481, the team gathered around Perugino (Pietro Vannucci, c. 1448-1523): it included Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510), Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449-1494) and Cosimo Rosselli (1439-1507) — each heading a workshop — surrounded by their assistants, among them the young Pinturicchio (Bernardino di Betto), Piero di Cosimo and Luca Signorelli^[10].

The contract was signed on 27 October 1481: it stipulated the delivery of ten frescoes before 15 March 1482, less than five months for colossal work^[11]. To meet this vertiginous deadline, the ten scenes were divided among the masters and their workshops, but visual unity was guaranteed by imposed formats and a common programme.

The double typological parallel: Moses and Christ

Sixtus IV's iconographic programme is of remarkable theological rigour. On the south wall (to the left for the pope looking towards the altar) unfolds the life of Moses; on the north wall, in frontal parallel, the life of Christ. Each Mosaic fresco corresponds, scene for scene, to a Christological fresco placed directly opposite: The Baptism of Christ (Perugino) answers The Circumcision of Moses' Son (Perugino), The Temptations of Christ (Botticelli) answers The Trials of Moses (Botticelli), The Vocation of the Apostles (Ghirlandaio) answers The Crossing of the Red Sea (Cosimo Rosselli), and so on. The double cycle illustrates the Pauline and patristic doctrine of biblical typology: “These things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction” (1 Cor 10:11)^[12].

Above the narrative register, some thirty portraits of popes — whose programme visually reinforces the chapel's central theme: the unbroken continuity between Moses, Christ, Peter and the Roman successors of Peter. Beneath the vault, in the lunettes, Michelangelo would later paint Christ's Forefathers (Mt 1:1-17), typologically linking the original programme to the redeeming incarnation.

Originally, the cycle included two additional frescoes on the altar wall — The Finding of Moses and The Nativity of Christ, opening each cycle respectively — as well as a reredos framing Perugino's Assumption. All were destroyed in 1536 to make room for Michelangelo's Last Judgment^[13].

The commission of Julius II (10 May 1508)

Twenty-six years after the completion of the first pictorial cycle, the chapel's vault still bore a simple starry sky on a blue ground painted around 1481 by a certain Piermatteo d'Amelia. In 1504, a dangerous crack opened in the vault and threatened the building; consolidation work erased part of the starry decoration.

The conclave opened on 31 October 1503 and within a few hours raised Giuliano della Rovere to the throne of Peter (pontificate counted from 1 November 1503)^[14]: Pope Julius II (nephew of Sixtus IV) decided to seize the opportunity to have the entire vault redecorated. In early May 1508, the agreement was sealed with Michelangelo Buonarroti (Caprese, 6 March 1475 – Rome, 18 February 1564) for the decoration of more than 500 square metres of vaulted surface: on 10 May 1508, the sculptor recorded in an autograph memorandum that he had received from Julius II 500 ducats on account for painting the vault and had begun work that very day^[15]. The Florentine sculptor was then 33 years old; he had just reluctantly abandoned the great tomb project for the pope, of which he would ultimately realise only fragments. The agreed price was 3,000 gold ducats — a considerable sum but derisory beside the scale of the work^[16].

Michelangelo was then known as a painter for only one finished picture, the Doni Tondo (c. 1506). It is a sculptor who stands before the vault: in his letter to his father Lodovico of 27 January 1509, he confides that this work is not his profession (paraphrase)^[17]. Julius II's initial project — twelve large figures of the apostles in the spandrels, a sober geometric ground — was quickly abandoned by Michelangelo, who judged it, according to his biographer Ascanio Condivi, too poor for such a vault (paraphrase). He obtained full powers and conceived the definitive programme posterity would know.

The nine scenes from Genesis

The vault's central register unfolds nine scenes drawn from the first eleven chapters of Genesis, organised in three triads (Creation of the universe — Creation and fall of Adam and Eve — Noah):

1. The Separation of Light from Darkness (Gen 1:3-5)
2. The Creation of the Sun, Moon and Plants (Gen 1:11-19)
3. The Separation of the Waters and the Earth (Gen 1:6-10)
4. The Creation of Adam (Gen 2:7)
5. The Creation of Eve (Gen 2:21-22)
6. Original Sin and the Expulsion from Paradise (Gen 3)
7. The Sacrifice of Noah (Gen 8:20)
8. The Flood (Gen 7-8)
9. The Drunkenness of Noah (Gen 9:21-23)

The nine compartments alternate between narrow panels and wide panels: the five small ones are framed by the famous Ignudi (“the Nudes”) — twenty athletic naked young men seated at the corners, with no explicit biblical correspondence, who remain one of the most debated iconographic enigmas in art history. The critic Charles de Tolnay proposed a Neoplatonic reading of them^[18].

The Prophets, the Sibyls, the corner spandrels

Framing the central scenes, twelve large seated figures alternate in the lateral spandrels seven prophets of the Old Testament — Jonah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Joel, Zechariah, Isaiah, Daniel — and five pagan Sibyls — the Persian, the Erythraean, the Delphic, the Cumaean, the Libyan. The presence of the Sibyls beside the Hebrew prophets belongs to a humanist tradition which, since Saint Augustine (The City of God, XVIII, 23), sees in the pagan oracles a possible announcement of the coming of Christ — though this general filiation alone does not explain the precise choice of the five Sibyls on the vault.

At the vault's four corners, in the pendentivi (the corner pendentives), Michelangelo painted four episodes of the miraculous deliverance of Israel, read typologically as figures of Redemption: David and Goliath, Judith and Holofernes, The Brazen Serpent (Num 21:4-9 — a figure of the Crucifixion) and The Punishment of Haman (Esther 7). Finally, in the lunettes above the windows, Michelangelo painted Christ's Forefathers according to the genealogy of Mt 1:1-17 (three times fourteen generations).

A work wrested from exhaustion (1508-1512)

The undertaking was extremely gruelling. Contrary to the legend popularised by Hollywood, Michelangelo did not paint lying on his back but standing, head thrown back towards the vault, perched on a flying scaffold of his own design — a technical innovation that proved crucial. In a sonnet addressed to his friend Giovanni da Pistoia in 1509, he describes in striking terms his body twisted by effort: “I already have my beard towards heaven and my neck in my back, the brush all day long above my face which makes it a rich pavement as it drips.” (translation original to this article^[19])

The work stretched over four and a half years, with a long interruption while the scaffold was dismantled and re-erected towards the vault's second half^[20]. The vault's first half — from the Flood to the Creation of Eve — was unveiled on 14 August 1511; the second, up to the Separation of Light, on 31 October 1512, the eve of All Saints' Day. At the Mass celebrated on 1 November 1512 by Julius II in person (died 21 February 1513), the Roman crowd pressed into the chapel.

From Clement VII to Paul III

Twenty-four years after the ceiling, Michelangelo was recalled to the Sistine Chapel for a new monumental undertaking. In 1533, Pope Clement VII (Giulio de' Medici) commissioned from him the Last Judgment for the altar wall. Clement VII died on 25 September 1534, but his successor Paul III (Alessandro Farnese, 1534-1549) maintained the commission. The altar wall was prepared: Perugino's frescoes (Assumption, Nativity, Finding of Moses), two papal portraits and two lunettes by Michelangelo himself were destroyed in 1536 to prepare the wall^[21].

An event-fresco

For five years — from 1536 to autumn 1541 — Michelangelo, 61 years old when the undertaking began and 66 when it was completed, deployed a dizzying composition. On a surface 13.7 metres high by 12.2 metres wide, nearly three hundred figures are organised around the central Christ the Judge, beardless and athletic, who with a fulminating gesture separates the elect (on his right, rising towards glory) from the damned (on his left, cast down towards hell). Below, Charon — borrowed directly from Dante (Inferno, III, 109-111) — ferries the damned from his boat with blows of his oar; the dead rise from their opened tombs (Rev 20:12-13); the martyrs present their instruments of torture — Saint Bartholomew holds his flayed skin, on which Michelangelo painted a despairing self-portrait.

The fresco was unveiled on 31 October 1541, exactly twenty-nine years to the day after the ceiling.

The nudity controversy and the “Braghettone”

From the inauguration, the figures' radical nudity caused scandal. The pontifical master of ceremonies Biagio da Cesena judged, before the pope, these naked bodies more worthy of a tavern or bathhouse than of the Sovereign Pontiff's chapel (paraphrase of Vasari's account)^[22]. Michelangelo avenged himself by painting his caricature as Minos, judge of the underworld, with ass's ears and a serpent biting his genitals^[23].

The controversy worsened during the Council of Trent (1545-1563). The 25th session, on 3 December 1563, voted a “Decree on the invocation, veneration and relics of saints, and on sacred images” requiring bishops to remove from all sacred painting “all lasciviousness”. On 21 January 1564 — less than a month before Michelangelo's death — Pius IV ordered, through the cardinal deputation he had created to apply the decrees in Rome, the covering of the nudities: the repainting was entrusted to the painter Daniele da Volterra, friend and disciple of the old master, who covered the most exposed nudities with painted draperies applied dry, a secco — that is, on already dry plaster, not in the wet plaster of the fresco. Posterity saddled Daniele with the nickname “Il Braghettone” — “the breeches-maker”. The repainting continued through further interventions in the second half of the 16th century^[24].

The 1980-1999 restoration removed the later repaints wherever technically possible, but kept the veils painted in tempera, a secco, by Daniele himself, now regarded as an integral part of the work's history — according to the reports published by the restoration team.

The first conclave: Alexander VI Borgia (August 1492)

Less than nine years after its consecration, the Sistine Chapel hosted its first conclave: from 6 to 11 August 1492, twenty-three cardinals elected at the fourth ballot Rodrigo Borgia, Cardinal of Valencia — who took the name Alexander VI^[25]. The Borgia conclave would remain in history as one of the most marked by simony and political rivalries between France, Spain and the Empire; it foreshadowed the urgency of the Catholic reform that would truly prevail only in the following century.

Between 1492 and 1878, the Sistine Chapel hosted only some of the conclaves — the others being held in various chapels of the Apostolic Palace or elsewhere (notably in the Pauline Chapel of the Quirinal for the four 19th-century conclaves: 1823, 1829, 1830-1831 and 1846)^[26].

Permanent seat since 1878

After the capture of Rome by the troops of the Kingdom of Italy on 20 September 1870 and the loss of the Papal States, the Quirinal palace was confiscated by King Victor Emmanuel II. Pope Pius IX, who henceforth considered himself a prisoner of the Vatican, no longer left the apostolic palace. At his death in 1878, the conclave electing Leo XIII (Vincenzo Pecci) on 20 February 1878 was necessarily convened within the Vatican perimeter: it took place in the Sistine Chapel.

Since that date, every Catholic conclave has been held in the chapel — twelve successive elections up to those of Francis (March 2013) and Leo XIV (May 2025). The current organisation dates mainly from the apostolic constitution Universi Dominici Gregis signed by John Paul II on 22 February 1996, amended by Benedict XVI (De aliquibus mutationibus, 2007; Normas nonnullas, 2013)^[27].

The ritual: Extra omnes, the oath, the smoke

The conclave ritual gradually stabilised. After the Mass pro eligendo Romano Pontifice celebrated in the morning in Saint Peter's Basilica, the cardinal electors — those who have not reached 80 years of age on the day the See falls vacant (UDG 33) — enter the chapel in procession. Before the Last Judgment, each swears an oath on the Gospel to respect the procedure and absolute secrecy: “Spondeo, voveo ac iuro”. The pontifical master of ceremonies then pronounces the formula “Extra omnes!” — “Let all leave!” — and has every person not admitted to the ballot evacuated.

A special stove, installed in the chapel, burns the ballots: after verification, those of two successive ballots without election are burned together (UDG 70). Since the 2005 conclave, a second device chemically produces the smoke's colour — black in case of failure (fumata nera), white in case of election (fumata bianca) — so as to remove any ambiguity from the signal^[28].

When a cardinal has obtained two thirds of the votes, the dean — or, failing him, the first of the cardinals in order and seniority (UDG 87) — asks him in Latin: “Acceptasne electionem de te canonice factam in Summum Pontificem?” — “Do you accept your canonical election as Supreme Pontiff?” Upon a positive answer, the elected man chooses his reign name and passes into the “Room of Tears” (Stanza delle Lacrime), a small room adjoining the chapel, where three white cassocks of different sizes prepared by the house of Gammarelli await him before the conclave^[29].

The teams: Colalucci (1980–1994), then De Luca (1995–1999)

At the end of the 1970s, the frescoes' state of conservation was alarming: nearly five centuries of candle smoke, heat from the crowds, and above all of linseed oils and glues applied by earlier restorers (notably by Carnevali in the 19th century), had blackened the vault and dulled the colours. On 16 June 1980, at the instigation of the Vatican Museums director Carlo Pietrangeli, a small team began with the 15th-century series of popes, with a first cleaning test on a lunette.

At its head, Gianluigi Colalucci (1929-2021), the Vatican's chief restorer, former collaborator of Pico Cellini and a recognised expert on Renaissance fresco. He was assisted by Maurizio Rossi, Piergiorgio Bonetti, then Giovanni Grossi and Bruno Baratti, under works direction by Fabrizio Mancinelli. According to the team's publications, the chosen method — brush application of an alkaline solution called AB-57, rinsed with distilled water — aimed to dissolve the layers of oils and glues without touching the authentic pigment or the intonaco (the thin layer of plaster on which the fresco is painted)^[30]. For the final phase (1995–1999), technical responsibility passed to Maurizio De Luca, under works direction by Arnold Nesselrath, Colalucci remaining only as consultant.

The support of Nippon Television (1981–1994, $4.2 million)

The Japanese channel Nippon Television Network (Nippon TV) joined the undertaking in 1981 and supported it until 1994: financial backing and a filmed documentary of the whole campaign, in exchange for commercial use of the images for three years. The reported amount is about $4.2 million. The photographer Takashi Okamura documented each stage with unprecedented precision — every square centimetre of the vault photographed before, during and after cleaning^[31].

The successive phases were:

The international controversy

From the late 1980s, the restoration drew vehement opposition from part of the art world. The American historian James Beck, professor at Columbia, founded ArtWatch International in 1992 to denounce what he considered the destruction of the a secco (on dry plaster) velature (veils) — final touches applied by Michelangelo himself on dry fresco, which the AB-57 solution would dissolve. According to Beck, the “dark and sculptural” Michelangelo known to previous centuries was not the result of later soiling, but an original pictorial intention now irretrievably lost^[34].

The restoration team replies, in its publications, that analyses would place the dark layers after Michelangelo — at the time of the Baroque restorations —, that microscopic examination would reveal no Michelangelesque pigment in the cleaned areas, and that uncleaned margins, kept as witnesses, should allow any later verification. These conclusions commit their authors and each calls for the report, the method and its exact scope. The debate remains open in the academic world — it has at least had the merit of henceforth imposing exhaustive photographic documentation before any intervention on a major work.

In the early 2020s, the Vatican Museums — of which the Sistine Chapel is the most visited stage — received on the order of six to seven million visitors a year (nearly 6.8 million in 2023 according to The Art Newspaper's annual survey, down only 2% from the 2019 record)^[35]. To regulate this flow, the Vatican Museums installed in 2014 a custom-built air-conditioning and filtration system, designed by Carrier Corporation^[36], which keeps humidity, temperature and dust levels compatible with the frescoes' long-term conservation.

• The construction of the present Saint Peter's Basilica (1506-1626) — the great neighbouring undertaking, contemporary with Michelangelo's ceiling
• The ancient Constantinian Saint Peter's Basilica
• The Basilica of Saint John Lateran
• The Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls
• The Basilica of Saint Mary Major
• The Council of Trent (1545-1563) — which would inspire the campaigns repainting the Last Judgment's nudities