Who painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel?

Michelangelo, between 1508 and 1512, and he did not want the job. He considered himself a sculptor, had never worked at that scale in fresco, and appears to have suspected the commission was arranged by rivals hoping he would fail publicly. He took it because Julius II was not a pope you refused.

The popular image of him lying on his back is wrong. He designed a scaffold that stood clear of the floor on brackets and painted standing, craned backwards, which he described in a bitterly funny poem about his beard pointing at heaven, his brush dripping into his face, and his spine curling into a bow. Fresco also has to be painted onto wet plaster and finished before it dries, so the whole ceiling was executed in daily sections with no possibility of revision.

The 1980s cleaning was the real controversy of the modern era. Centuries of soot and animal-glue varnish came off and revealed colours so bright - acid greens, shocking pinks - that many critics insisted the restorers had stripped a layer Michelangelo applied himself. The consensus now is that the cleaning was sound and that the sombre Michelangelo everyone grew up with was mostly candle smoke.