The Sistine Chapel
Edizioni Musei Vaticani – Scripta Maneant
February 2019
Photographic volume, in bilingual version – Italian and English – also available in a prestigious edition in slipcase, dedicated to the Sistine Chapel.
The remarkable colour images offered here, of whole works and full page details, are the fruit of a major photographic campaign carried out at the beginning of 2016. New technologies have enabled extremely high resolution images to be captured, whose clarity and chromatic fidelity permit an extraordinary view of the frescoes.
Antonio Paolucci, former Director of the “Pope’s Museums”, guides the reader through the Sistine Chapel, with brief but effective introductory accounts, providing an extensive art-historical framework and explaining the structure, styles, methods of interpreting the frescoes, and their meaning.
First the fifteenth-century cycles, with the frescoes by Botticelli, Perugino and Ghirlandaio on the life of Moses and of Christ, then the ceiling with the stories of Genesis frescoed by Michelangelo, and finally the Last Judgment on the altar wall, all illustrated in minute detail.