Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling between 1508 and 1512, about four and a half years from the contract to the unveiling, with a long pause in the middle. He painted the altar wall, the Last Judgment, between 1536 and 1541.
Those are the dates a guide repeats. They measure the calendar, not the brush. Michelangelo was a sculptor who took the job after a persistent pope pressed him, and over those years the work stopped for months over money while the pope was away at war.
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A man who knew Michelangelo gave a much shorter number. Ascanio Condivi published his life of the artist in 1553, when Michelangelo was still alive, and wrote that he finished the whole ceiling in twenty months.
Twenty months cannot be squared with the record. The contract is dated 8 May 1508, and the vault was finished by 31 October 1512. Nobody has shown how Condivi reached his figure, and I don't believe it for a moment. But the dates do show where the missing years went.
The job ran in two bursts with a long stop between them, and the pope had a look at half the ceiling while the other half was still bare plaster.
What You'll Discover
The day the clock started.
Why the work stopped halfway.
What the pope insisted on seeing.
How fast the second half went.
Who sent him back to the wall.