Sistine Chapel ceiling Church as the agent of God. To be outside the Church was to be beyond "Salvation". In the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo presented both Catholic and Humanist elements in a way that does not appear visually conflicting. The inclusion of "non-biblical" figures such as the Sibyls or "Ignudi" is consistent with the rationalising of Humanist and Christian thought of the Renaissance. This rationalisation was to become a target of the Counter Reformation. The iconography of the ceiling has had various interpretations in the past, some elements of which have been contradicted by modern scholarship. Others, such as the
Illusionistic ceiling painting sotto in sù". This was the prototype of illusionistic ceiling painting that was to become an important element of Italian baroque. Correggio at Parma took the illusionistic ceiling a step farther in his frescoes of Christ and the Apostles for the cupola at the San Giovanni Evangelista and in the "Assumption of the Virgin" in the dome of the Cathedral of Parma, which is Correggio's most famous work (1520–24); in these frescos Correggio treats the entire surface as the vast and frameless vault of heaven in which the figures float. In a visual continuity between the architectural interior and its