Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling in buon fresco, which means he painted on fresh, wet plaster so that the color dried into the wall itself. He worked from 1508 to 1512, on a scaffold he designed himself, finishing one patch of plaster at a time.
Fresco is the Italian word for fresh. A plasterer spreads a thin coat of wet lime over a small area, and the painter has until it dries to cover it with color. Once the plaster sets, the paint is locked in and cannot be changed. A mistake means chipping that patch off the wall and starting again.
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Fresco sounds like a craft for a master of paint, and Michelangelo did not think he was one. About a year into the job, in 1509, he wrote a poem to his friend Giovanni da Pistoia.
In one modern English translation it opens, "I've already grown a goiter from this torture." It describes a body folded under the vault and a face dripping with paint. It ends with a request: defend my honor, because this is no place for me, and I am no painter.
He was already famous as a sculptor, the man who had carved the David. Now he was covering the ceiling of the pope's chapel in the Vatican with more than 300 figures, in a medium that forgave nothing.
What You'll Discover
Why he refused the pope's scaffold.
What he could paint in a day.
How a drawing reached the wet wall.
What the work did to his body.
What lay under centuries of soot.