Sistine Chapel

Pope Sixtus IV ordered the chapel built on the site of an older papal chapel recorded as standing by 1368; a communication to Sixtus IV from Andreas of Trebizond described the earlier building, by the time of its demolition, as ruinous, with its walls leaning. Baccio Pontelli's design is thought to date from 1473; the derelict old chapel was pulled down in 1477, and construction under Giovannino de' Dolci was largely complete by the summer of 1481.

Sixtus IV celebrated the first mass in the new chapel on 15 August 1483, the Feast of the Assumption, at which it was consecrated and dedicated to the Virgin Mary.

In 1480 Sixtus IV commissioned a cycle of wall frescoes on the Life of Moses and the Life of Christ. Pietro Perugino began work in the chapel before a group of Florentine painters arrived in Rome in spring 1481; Lorenzo de' Medici, Florence's de facto ruler, sent Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Cosimo Rosselli south as part of a reconciliation with Sixtus IV following the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478. The painters and their workshops, aided by assistants including Pinturicchio, Piero di Cosimo and Bartolomeo della Gatta, completed the twelve-scene cycle in 1482.

Below the narrative scenes the lower walls were painted with frescoed hangings in silver and gold, and a marble screen by Mino da Fiesole, Andrea Bregno and Giovanni Dalmata divided the chapel between the space reserved for the Papal Chapel and the area open to the laity.

Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo in 1508 to repaint the vault, originally asking only for the twelve apostles on the spandrels supporting it. Michelangelo, who considered himself a sculptor rather than a painter and tried to decline the commission, was granted a free hand over the subject matter instead. Donato Bramante's proposed scaffold, suspended by ropes through holes cut in the vault, proved unworkable, and the pope ordered Michelangelo to build his own: a wooden platform on brackets set into the walls near the tops of the windows, from which he worked standing rather than lying down.

Over the following years Michelangelo painted nine scenes from Genesis along the centre of the vault, male and female prophets beside them, and the ancestors of Christ around the windows, filling more than three hundred figures across roughly 40 by 13 metres of plaster before the work was finished in late 1512.

Michelangelo returned to the chapel after the Sack of Rome in 1527. Sebastiano del Piombo wrote to him in July 1533 on behalf of Clement VII, urging him back to Rome, and the altar-wall fresco that followed, the Last Judgment, was carried out largely under Paul III, reaching completion in 1541. Painting it required destroying two of the 1480s narrative scenes, several papal portraits, and two sets of the ancestors of Christ that had occupied the wall.

The fresco's nudity drew a formal protest: Cardinal Carafa and the Mantuan ambassador Sernini organised what became known as the Fig-Leaf Campaign to have the figures removed or covered. When the papal master of ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena, compared the work to decoration fit for a bathhouse or tavern, Michelangelo painted his likeness as Minos, judge of the underworld; Paul III is said to have observed that his authority did not extend to hell, and the portrait stayed. After Michelangelo's death a law was passed ordering the genitalia covered, and his former assistant Daniele da Volterra painted the drapery that earned him the nickname 'Il Braghettone.'

The chapel has hosted the papal conclave since 1492, when cardinals meeting there elected Alexander VI. A chimney is fitted into the roof for each conclave, with smoke signalling the outcome to the crowd outside: white for a successful vote, black for none. Since 1996, cardinals attending a conclave have been lodged at the Domus Sanctae Marthae under Pope John Paul II's constitution Universi Dominici gregis, though they continue to cast their votes inside the chapel.

The most recent restoration of the ceiling and frescoes ran through the 1980s and into the 1990s; the chapel reopened to the public on 8 April 1994, and the brighter colours the cleaning revealed raised concern among some scholars that the process had stripped away more than later grime. The chapel remains the pope's chapel within the Apostolic Palace and forms part of the Vatican Museums, open to visitors.