Lunette: Aminadab

When restorers cleaned this lunette in the early 1980s, they found a detail that centuries of soot had hidden, a yellow ring painted on Aminadab's upper arm. In Michelangelo's Italy that was the kind of badge Jews were made to wear by law, and here it marks him plainly as what Matthew's Gospel says he was, a Hebrew forebear of Christ. He also wears pendant earrings, each flicked on with a single stroke, another sign used at the time to mark a Jew. He sits bolt upright and square to us, feet together, hands clenched between his knees, his black hair tied with a white band.

This is probably the last of the surviving lunettes that Michelangelo painted, at the altar end in the final stretch of the second campaign, and the haste shows in the plaster. It was often still too soft, and here and there the brush scratched the surface and left bristles caught in it. On the right a woman twists on her seat, legs crossed, combing out her long blond hair, in a tight pink dress, one raised hand foreshortened with the palm in shadow and the fingers in light.