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Saul struck blind on the road to Damascus. Peter in the act of being crucified. These scenes—the last frescoes Michelangelo ever painted—face one another on the walls of the pope's private chapel in the Vatican. Michelangelo was still working on them in late 1549 when the chapel became the site of one of the most important papal elections in the history of Christianity.

At stake was the soul of the Western church: Would it remain in one piece, or would the divisions that had been tearing at its unity for a generation lead to a permanent rupture? Michelangelo's friend Reginald Pole—nemesis of Henry VIII and later Mary Tudor's archbishop of Canterbury—led in the voting throughout most of the election. He stood for a more personal, inward version of Christianity than many of his peers in Rome and sympathized with the almost unprecedented religious openness of this period. Above all, he was thought likely to seek an immediate understanding with the increasingly Protestant parts of Europe, especially Luther's Germany.

The cardinals debated the future of the papacy for over two months within the embrace of a profound artistic message. Michelangelo had designed The Crucifixion of Peter and The Conversion of Paul so that when the pope turned toward the assembly in the chapel while celebrating the Eucharist, the gaze of the soon-to-be-martyred Peter struck him full in the face. A quick glance away brought the pope into confrontation with the stricken Paul, whose temporarily blind eyes directed attention upward to Christ, the source of Paul's, Peter's, and the church's authority. Both frescoes graphically illustrated the pope's absolute dependence on God. The papacy's outward majesty and power were nowhere in evidence. This was exactly the view that Pole developed during the election, concluding that the pope should model himself after the crucified Christ. Since Pole also refused to campaign, arguing that anyone who did automatically made himself unworthy of the office, he had a radically different understanding of the papacy than any of his immediate predecessors.

These two frescoes have often been criticized as the efforts of a failing artist no longer capable of the magnificent work he had done in the adjoining Sistine Chapel. Seen in their proper context, however, they were in fact part of Michelangelo's last testament, along with the Rondanini Pietà. The views that Pole theorized in writing and Michelangelo painted were shared with their bosom companion, Vittoria Colonna. Before she died in 1547, the three had known each other for almost 15 years. Their common, highly personal faith represented a broad and deep challenge to the current state of the institutional church in favor of a return to a simpler, purer version of New Testament Christianity.

It was one of the most tumultuous periods in Christian history. A principal cause was the state of the papacy. Once the arbiter of Christendom, it had suffered a serious decline in prestige. Since the 13th century, the papacy had gained an enviable position of authority (and sometimes power) by promising Europeans that they could bring any and all problems to Rome and the pope would solve them. This promise proved wildly popular but difficult to keep—and, by the late 15th and early 16th centuries, impossible.

After the French invasion of Italy in 1494, the popes struggled under increasing political and religious pressures. Not least among these was the movement of renewal launched in Florence by Girolamo Savonarola. Savonarola believed that the Apocalypse was rapidly approaching, and that the Antichrist was the pope. He preached the importance of inner faith, as well as the necessity of restoring the republic in Florence.

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