In 1508, Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The thirty-three-year-old Michelangelo had very little experience of the physically and technically taxing art of fresco; and, at twelve thousand square feet, the ceiling represented one of the largest such projects ever attempted. Nevertheless, for the next four years he and a handpicked team of assistants laboured over the vast ceiling, making thousands of drawings and spending backbreaking hours on a scaffolding fifty feet about the floor. The result was one of the greatest masterpieces of all time.

This fascinating book tells the story of those four extraordinary years and paints a magnificent picture of day-to-day life on the Sistine scaffolding — and outside, in the upheaval of early sixteenth-century Rome.