Today in 1512
Sistine Chapel ceiling opens
to public.

The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, one of
Italian artist Michelangelo’s finest works, is
exhibited to the public for the first time

Michelangelo Buonarroti, the greatest of the
Italian Renaissance artists, was born in the small
village of Caprese in 1475. The son of a
government administrator, he grew up in Florence,
a center of the early Renaissance movement, and
became an artist’s apprentice at age 13.
Demonstrating obvious talent, he was taken under
the wing of Lorenzo de’ Medici, the ruler of the
Florentine republic and a great patron of the arts.
After demonstrating his mastery of sculpture in
such works as the Pieta (1498) and David
(1504), he was called to Rome in 1508 to paint
the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—the chief
consecrated space in the Vatican.

The most
famous of these is The Creation of Adam, a
painting in which the arms of God and Adam are
stretching toward each other. In 1512,
Michelangelo completed the work.

Michelangelo worked until his death in 1564 at
the age of 88. In addition to his major artistic
works, he produced numerous other sculptures,
frescoes, architectural designs, and drawings,
many of which are unfinished and some of which
are lost. In his lifetime, he was celebrated as
Europe’s greatest living artist, and today he is
held up as one of the greatest artists of all time,
as exalted in the visual arts as William
Shakespeare is in literature or Ludwig van
Beethoven is in music.