Who painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel?

Michelangelo took the commission from Pope Julius II in 1508 and worked on the vault until 1512, covering some five hundred square metres with scenes from Genesis, prophets, sibyls and the ancestors of Christ. He accepted reluctantly. He thought of himself as a sculptor rather than a painter, had just been pulled off the pope's tomb, and suspected rivals of steering him towards a job he would fail at. The technique was buon fresco, in which pigment is applied to wet plaster so the colour binds chemically into the wall as it dries. That forces the painter to plan each day's patch of plaster in advance and finish it before it sets, with mistakes correctable only by chiselling out the section. He worked standing on a scaffold he designed himself, craning upwards rather than lying on his back as legend has it. The Last Judgement on the altar wall came from the same hand decades later.

The chapel is still where cardinals gather to elect a pope.