Sistine Chapel Vatican City

Legendary

Located in the Vatican Palace, it is here that popes are chosen and crowned.

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Michelangelo didn't want the job. He thought of himself as a sculptor, not a painter, and when the pope told him to paint a ceiling the size of a basketball court, he tried to get out of it.

The pope won. Michelangelo spent four years on scaffolding, from 1508 to 1512, and produced one of the most famous artworks ever made.

The chapel itself is older. Pope Sixtus IV had it built between 1473 and 1481 inside the Vatican, and it takes its name from him.

It's a plain brick box on the outside, 40 meters long and 21 meters high. Sixtus wanted it for the most important ceremonies of the Catholic Church, including the meetings where cardinals lock themselves in to elect a new pope.

Those meetings still happen here. When the world sees white smoke rising from the Vatican, it's coming from a chimney on this roof.

The first artists to decorate the walls, in 1481 and 1482, included Sandro Botticelli and Pietro Perugino. They painted the lives of Moses and Jesus in matching rows down each side.

The ceiling was left as a plain blue sky with gold stars. It stayed that way until Julius II, the nephew of Sixtus IV, became pope and decided that wasn't good enough.

Michelangelo painted nine scenes from the Book of Genesis down the center. The most famous shows God reaching out to touch the finger of Adam, the first man, and is called The Creation of Adam.

He finished in October 1512. Julius II held the first Mass beneath the new ceiling on November 1.

Michelangelo came back more than twenty years later to paint the altar wall. The Last Judgment, finished in 1541, covers the whole end of the chapel with hundreds of figures rising to heaven or falling toward hell.

For centuries, candle smoke turned the frescoes dark and dull. A cleaning between 1979 and 1999 stripped it all away, and the colors turned out to be far brighter than anyone had expected.

Look up first, then find The Creation of Adam near the center of the ceiling, the two hands almost touching. Turn to the altar wall for The Last Judgment, and look for the figure of Saint Bartholomew holding a drooping skin with Michelangelo's own face painted on it. Keep your voice down and your camera away, since photos are banned inside.