Sistine Chapel

Few rooms on earth are as familiar before they are entered. The chapel that Pope Sixtus IV rebuilt between 1473 and 1481 on the site of the older Cappella Maggiore is, on the outside, almost nothing: a tall brick box braced by buttresses, with no façade and no street door, reached only through the rooms of the Apostolic Palace. Its proportions were set with Renaissance arithmetic — the length divided by three gives the width, by two the height — and the result is a hall roughly forty metres long and twenty high, a plain container for one of the densest concentrations of painting anywhere.

The walls came first. In 1481–82 a team led by Perugino, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and Cosimo Rosselli painted two facing cycles, the life of Moses on one side and the life of Christ on the other, meant to be read as answer and echo. Below run painted curtains of silver and gold; above, a gallery of early popes. The chapel was consecrated on 15 August 1483, the feast of the Assumption, and dedicated to the Virgin.

Then came Michelangelo, reluctantly — he considered himself a sculptor. Between 1508 and 1512, for Julius II, he replaced a blue ceiling scattered with gold stars with nine scenes from Genesis, framed by prophets, sibyls and the ancestors of Christ; he worked standing on a platform of his own design, not lying on his back as legend prefers. More than twenty years later, for Clement VII and Paul III, he covered the altar wall with the Last Judgment (1535–41), sacrificing two earlier frescoes to do it. Look down as well as up: the floor is opus alexandrinum, an inlay of marble and coloured stone that marks the processional way from the main door, and a marble screen by Mino da Fiesole, Andrea Bregno and Giovanni Dalmata still divides the clergy's end from the laity's.

The room has never stopped working. It is the chapel of the papal household, the home of the Sistine Chapel Choir, and, since the conclave of 1492 that elected Alexander VI, the place where cardinals vote for a new pope — a chimney is fitted to the roof for the occasion, and the smoke tells the square outside how the ballot went.

Getting there

The chapel lies in Vatican City, inside the city of Rome, and is visited as part of the Vatican Museums, whose entrance is on Viale Vaticano. Metro line A stops at Ottaviano and Cipro, each within about ten minutes' walk of the entrance; bus 49 stops in front of the museums. The nearest airport is Ciampino (CIA), about 16 km away; Rome's main airport, Fiumicino, also serves the city.