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Every year more than 3,000,000 pilgrims and tourists from around the world flock to the Vatican in Rome and crane their necks to peer upwards at one of the most famous artistic masterpieces in Western culture: the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

From God's creation of the world to Adam and Eve's expulsion from Eden to Noah's Ark, Michelangelo's frescoes (art made by painting in wet plaster) are some of the most dramatic and inspiring representations of Genesis ever imagined. Surrounding the nine central scenes that run the length of the chapel are frescoes of Hebrew prophets and ancient seers. In niches and corners between painted columns and arches are even more biblical scenes. In this vast visual drama, Michelangelo presents a storyline of grace foretold through the prophets, incarnate in Christ, and present in the sacraments of the church. His frescoes are a magnificent example of how a Christian artist can interpret Scripture through art.

"The Sistine Chapel is one of the best known, the most studied and the least understood of great works of art," writes John W. Dixon in his book The Christ of Michelangelo. In order to understand fully why Michelangelo painted what he did, we need to keep in mind that what has become a temple to art in the minds of tourists and art historians was designed to be a place of worship to God.

For Michelangelo, faith and creativity—liturgy and art—are inseparably linked by a shared power to transform the viewer/worshiper. As Dixon notes, "Michelangelo's work in the Sistine Chapel is participant in the liturgy, an instrument of the liturgy. … in ways we are only timidly beginning to understand, great paintings shape the imagination of those who participate in them." During the four years he was painting the ceiling, Michelangelo would have been able to observe how the liturgy was practiced in that specific space. He looked for imaginative ways to connect the ceiling frescoes to the worship in the chapel.

The focal point of the Roman Catholic Mass celebrates and reenacts Christ's redeeming sacrifice. Michelangelo was not concerned to show all of the significant scenes from Genesis, but to tell a specific story of divine and human action through creation, fall, and redemption. The fresco cycle depicts the Genesis narrative through the lens of the gospel.

Michelangelo's designs for the Sistine Chapel ceiling were the conclusion of a chapel decoration campaign that had spanned 35 years. When Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to decorate the ceiling, the pope suggested frescoes of the twelve apostles. But Michelangelo conceived a much grander program and later wrote in a letter that the pope "gave me a new commission to do whatever I wished." Fully grounded in Renaissance concepts of art, theology, and philosophy, and with access to the pope's own theological advisors, Michelangelo designed a series of frescoes depicting the Genesis narrative as an epic history of divine action.

His ceiling frescoes complemented (and surpassed) two older fresco cycles on the chapel's north and south walls painted by other artists—one on the life of Christ and the other on the life of Moses. This parallelism between the Old and New Testament set a precedent for Michelangelo to represent the Genesis creation narrative as a foretelling of the New Testament and the worship of the church.

Michelangelo framed his nine central scenes, which portray key moments in the book of Genesis, with a company of witnesses composed of Old Testament prophets and classical sibyls (prophetesses). These are the Jewish and Gentile seers who anticipated Christ. The Hebrew prophets foretold the coming of the Messiah to Israel. The pagan sibyls, according to the early church father Augustine, also received glimpses of truth that prepared the way for Christ within the Gentile world. The idea that God would work through both Jewish and non-Jewish, biblical and non-biblical, people was in harmony with Renaissance humanist theology, which attempted to unite Christian doctrine with the philosophy of classical antiquity.

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