Michelangelo And The Pope's Ceiling

<p>In 1508 Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The thirty-three-year-old Michelangelo had very little experience of the physically and technically taxing art of fresco; and at twelve thousand square feet the ceiling represented one of the largest such projects ever attempted. <br><br>Nevertheless for the next four years he and a hand-picked team of assistants laboured over the vast ceiling making thousands of drawings and spending back-breaking hours on a scaffold fifty feet above the floor. The result was one of the greatest masterpieces of all time. This fascinating book tells the story of those four extraordinary years and paints a magnificent picture of day-to-day life on the Sistine scaffolding - and outside in the upheaval of early sixteenth-century Rome.</p>