Vatican Museums

This book, dedicated to the fifteenth-century painters, is the third volume of the series Face to Face with Masterpieces, presenting to the public some of the most important works of the Vatican Museums from a closer point of view.

The opening historical-artistic essay describes the patronage and the iconographic program of the articulate cycle of frescoes decorating the side walls of the Sistine Chapel. The greatest masters from Umbrian and Tuscan schools of the second half of the fifteenth century worked here, invited to Rome by Sixtus IV Della Rovere. The two main themes, backbone of the entire complex, focused on the parallel stories of Christ and Moses, are subsequently explained.
A wide section of plates allows the reader to place himself literally ‘face to face’ with the complex scenes of the cycle, catching also the tiniest details and the rich microcosm of characters and landscapes surrounding the main subjects.
The volume ends with an essential bibliography, offering useful hints in order to analyse the artistic story of the Sistine Chapel and of its decoration before Michelangelo’s intervention.