Sistine Chapel ceiling particular pentimenti, highlights and shadows, and other detailing painted "a secco" – was lost in the removal of various accretions. Vasari Johann Wolfgang Goethe Waldemar Januszczak The art critic and television producer Waldemar Januszczak wrote that when the Sistine Chapel ceiling was recently cleaned, he "was able to persuade the man at the Vatican who was in charge of Japanese TV access to let me climb the scaffold while the cleaning was in progress." Gabriele Bartz and Eberhard König Pope John Paul II Sistine Chapel ceiling The Sistine Chapel ceiling, painted by Michelangelo between 1508 and 1512, is a cornerstone
Sistine Chapel ceiling to a strongly projecting painted cornice that runs right around the ceiling, separating the pictorial areas of the biblical scenes from the figures of Prophets, Sibyls, and Ancestors, who literally and figuratively support the narratives. Ten broad painted crossribs of travertine cross the ceiling and divide it into alternately wide and narrow pictorial spaces, a grid that gives all the figures their defined place. A great number of small figures are integrated with the painted architecture, their purpose apparently purely decorative. These include two faux marble "putti" below the cornice on each rib, each one a male and female pair;