Lunette: Jesse, David and Solomon

The tablet names three generations, IESSE, DAVID and SALOMON, the father of King David, David himself and his son. The usual reading puts David on the left. He sits sideways but turns his head and chest full toward us, in an eastern-looking costume, a green hood falling over his shoulders, a pink robe and a yellow mantle across his legs, and his powerful left hand grips a long white cloth. Behind him a small boy with a veiled head, taken for Solomon, holds out something like a little ritual tray, tiny next to his father.

The older woman on the right, read as Bathsheba, Solomon's mother, is dressed in dark violet with a green belt and a white veil, and she pays attention to no one. She is winding yarn, a ball in one hand while the other turns the winder, which Michelangelo dashed in so quickly that it seems to spin. If that reading is right, Jesse is not in this lunette at all. He belongs to the family in the triangular field of the vault just above. The lunette was painted in the second campaign.