Sistine Chapel

The chapel is named for Sixtus IV della Rovere, pontiff from 1471 to 1484, who had the old Cappella Magna restored between 1477 and 1480. The fifteenth-century wall decoration runs false drapes, the Stories of Moses on the south and entrance walls, the Stories of Christ on the north and entrance walls, and portraits of the popes; the painters were Pietro Perugino, Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Cosimo Rosselli, with workshops and assistants among whom the Museums name Biagio di Antonio, Bartolomeo della Gatta and Luca Signorelli, and Pier Matteo d'Amelia painted a starry sky on the ceiling. Work on the frescoes began in 1481 and concluded in 1482, and the marble screen, the choir stalls and the pontifical arms over the door date from the same year. Sixtus IV consecrated the chapel on 15 August 1483, dedicating it to Our Lady of the Assumption. Julius II entrusted the ceiling to Michelangelo in 1508; the work was finished in October 1512 and Julius II inaugurated the chapel with a solemn Mass on the Feast of All Saints, 1 November 1512, with nine central panels of the Stories of Genesis, five Sibyls and seven Prophets between the spandrels, the Miraculous salvation of Israel in the four corner pendentives, and the Ancestors of Christ in the spandrels and lunettes. Clement VII de' Medici commissioned the Last Judgement towards the end of 1533; Michelangelo began it in 1536 under Paul III and completed it in the autumn of 1541, destroying Perugino's altarpiece of the Virgin among the Apostles and the first two episodes of both fresco cycles. In the second half of the sixteenth century Hendrik van den Broeck repainted Ghirlandaio's Resurrection on the entrance wall and Matteo da Lecce repainted Signorelli's Discussion over the body of Moses, which had been damaged when the door collapsed in 1522. The frescoes were restored completely between 1979 and 1999, together with the cantoria, the screen and the arms of Sixtus IV.