Art › Rome › The Sistine Chapel
The Creation of Adam
La creazione di Adamo
God reaches out to give life to Adam, their fingers nearly touching, on the Sistine ceiling.
Pope Julius II asked Michelangelo, who thought of himself as a sculptor, to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. From 1508 to 1512 he painted more than 300 figures on it, standing on a scaffold he designed himself: the prophets and sibyls round the edges, and nine stories from Genesis down the middle.
The Creation of Adam is the fourth of them from the altar. Adam lies on the bare earth, his hand limp; God sweeps towards him in a red cloak full of angels, and the gap between their fingers is the moment life passes over. Some see the shape of a human brain in the cloak round God. Stand before it in 3D ›
