Sistine Chapel ceiling love and creative power." For the central section of the ceiling, Michelangelo has taken four episodes from the story of Adam and Eve as told in the first, second and third chapters of Genesis. In this sequence of three, two of the panels are large and one small. In the first of the pictures, and one of the most widely recognised images in the history of painting, Michelangelo shows God reaching out to touch Adam, who, in the words of Vasari, is "a figure whose beauty, pose and contours are such that it seems to have been fashioned that very
Sistine Chapel ceiling completed by four large corner "pendentives", each illustrating a dramatic Biblical story. The narrative elements of the ceiling illustrate that God made the World as a perfect creation and put humanity into it, that humanity fell into disgrace and was punished by death and by separation from God. Humanity then sank further into sin and disgrace, and was punished by the Great Flood. Through a lineage of Ancestors – from Abraham to Joseph – God sent the saviour of humanity, Christ Jesus. The coming of the Saviour was prophesied by Prophets of Israel and Sibyls of the Classical world. The