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 God, he was swallowed by a "mighty fish". He spent three days in its belly and was eventually spewed up on dry land where he went about God's business. Jonah was thus seen as presaging Jesus, who having died by crucifixion, spent part of three days in a tomb and was raised on the third day. So, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Jonah, with the "great fish" beside him and his eyes turned towards God the Creator, represents a "portent" of the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. The Jonah figure placed right over the altar activated the Passion