The Creation of Adam: Two Hands, Almost Touching

Michelangelo saw himself first as a sculptor. Julius II had summoned him to Rome to design a grand tomb, then, worried about its cost, gave him the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel instead.²

The contract, signed on 8 May 1508, planned twelve apostles and some ornament. Michelangelo found the project “a poor thing,” and the pope let him design the whole program himself.¹ He chose nine scenes from the Book of Genesis, from the creation of the world to Noah.¹

God, carried by angels and wrapped in a billowing mantle, leans toward Adam, who lies like a resting athlete. His beauty seems to confirm the words of Genesis: man was created in the image and likeness of God.¹

Fresco was an unfamiliar medium for him. He completed the ceiling almost single-handedly, because the Florentine craftsmen sent to help did not meet his standards, painting fast from scaffolding. As he went on, he worked more and more quickly, reducing and finally eliminating preparatory drawings and incisions in the plaster.²

For the figures, he drew from life. The Met's famous red-chalk studies for the Libyan Sibyl were made from a young male assistant posing in the studio. In the fresco, she is about three times life-size.³

The ceiling was hailed as a masterpiece in its own time. Michelangelo was judged a superhuman being, “the divine Michelangelo,” and contemporaries spoke of the terribilità, the awesome power, of the frescoes and their creator.²

Their influence ran deep: in Rome, a century later, the young Rubens absorbed a new style that revived Michelangelo's heroic figures.⁴ A ten-year cleaning of the ceiling, completed in 1989, removed centuries of dirt, smoke and varnish.²