Lunette: Achim and Eliud

Fresco keeps a record of its own making. The plaster must still be wet when the paint goes on, so a painter spreads only as much as he can finish in a day, and the joins between those day-patches, the giornate, can still be traced. Restorers counted four in this lunette. One took the name tablet and the top of the frame, one the whole group on the right, and two the group on the left. One of those two has an odd shape, an upside-down triangle over the old man's head, and it is read as a change of mind, with Michelangelo redoing the figure a second time in a single go.

That old man sits wrapped in a heavy orange cloak that falls over the block of his seat, a little girl twisting energetically beside him. On the right a mother turns her back to us toward her child and stretches out an arm to take food from a plate on a stool in front. The tablet names Achim and Eliud, but which figure is which, no one can say. This was probably the third lunette Michelangelo painted, in the first campaign, at the entrance end of the chapel.