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For centuries, the Sistine Chapel frescoes were characterized by muted colors and dark shadows. Some people even assumed that Michelangelo, who saw himself as a sculptor rather than a painter, was more interested inform than color. But a major restoration project in the 1980s showed what a thorough cleaning can do. Over the course of a decade and in the center of a swirling international controversy, conservators used computer technology and chemical solvents to repair damaged sections and wipe away the accumulated grime. Their efforts uncovered a brilliantly colorful ceiling that revealed Michelangelo's genius anew. When the project was completed in 1990, the New York Times called the result "overwhelmingly beautiful." Restoration of Michelangelo's Last Judgment on the altar wall soon followed.

Michelangelo's reputation was so immense that contemporaries lauded him as "the divine Michelangelo." But before his death the aging artist wrote to a friend that he was only "a poor man and of little value, a man who goes along laboring in that art which God has given me for as long as I possibly can."

During the Renaissance, the humanists' efforts to study ancient texts and to purify Christianity [see p. 14] led to a number of groundbreaking discoveries. The classical scholar Lorenzo Valla (1406-1457) proved that the "Donation of Constantine"—a document granting the pope temporal power over the Western Roman Empire—could not have been written by the emperor Constantine but was a later forgery. Valla also shocked the church by arguing that the twelve apostles did not compose the Apostles' Creed and that the Latin Vulgate version of the Bible was full of errors when compared to early Greek manuscripts. His work deeply influenced Erasmus of Rotterdam, who published an edition of the Greek New Testament in 1516, as well as the Protestant Reformers.

During the Renaissance, artists' guilds adopted as their patron saint the author of the third gospel, and a 16th-century painting academy in Rome was even named after him. Why? According to an early tradition, Luke was not only a physician but also a painter. One legend held the wife of Emperor Theodosius II brought back from the Holy Land a portrait of the Virgin Mary painted from life by Luke himself.

Much of what we know about the life of Michelangelo, as well as many other Renaissance artists, comes from the painter, architect, and biographer Georgio Vasari (1511-74). Vasari's immensely popular Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, first published in 1550 and expanded and revised in 1568, laid the foundation for centuries of art historians. It chronicles the development of Italian art from the 14th to the 16th centuries, climaxing in Michelangelo, whom Vasari idolized.

Michelangelo, on the other hand, didn't have the same high opinion of Vasari's first edition. He had his pupil Ascanio Condivi write another account of his life to set the record straight.

Michelangelo's ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican may be a feast for the eyes [see p. 22], but painting it was no picnic. The cramped position atop high scaffolding for four years caused him enormous discomfort. He spent so much time looking up while working on the ceiling that it was some time before his eyes could adjust to looking down again—for a while, he had to read things by holding them over his head. He described his misery in a poem: "My beard toward heaven, I feel the back of my brain / Upon my neck … / My brush, above my face continually, / Makes it a splendid floor by dripping down."

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