Sistine Chapel ceiling motif. "When Perugino's altar painting was removed and ... "Last Judgement" fresco came to cover the altar wall", after at least twenty five years Michelangelo depicted Christ just below Jonah: not only for his role as precursor of Christ, Christianity and Christocentrism, but also because his powerful torsion of the body, bent backwards from the bust to the eyes and with his forefingers that now point the glorious Jesus to the characters of the ceiling, assumes a function of link between the Old and New Testament. In Vasari's description of the Prophets and Sibyls he is particularly high in his
Sistine Chapel ceiling was made to rich and to poor, to mighty and to humble, to Jew and to Gentile. The Three Wise Men (the "Magi" of the Bible) who sought out the infant King with precious gifts were pagan foreigners. In the Roman Catholic Church, where there was an increasing interest in the remains of the city's pagan past, where scholars turned from reading Medieval Church Latin to Classical Latin and the philosophies of the Classical world were studied along with the writings of St Augustine, the presence, in the Sistine Chapel of five pagan prophets is not surprising. It is not