Lunette: Azor and Zadok

The figures in the lunettes are about twice life size, and each lunette is a half-moon some six and a half metres across. Michelangelo did not make full-size cartoons for them. Working from small sketches, he roughed the figures straight onto the plaster and finished a lunette in about three days on average. Only the name tablet in the middle needed tools. To sit perfectly centred and upright, it was laid out with a ruler and a plumb line and scored into the plaster as a guide.

Here the tablet reads AZOR and SADOCH, Zadok in its Latin spelling, two names from the genealogy of Christ in Matthew's Gospel. On the left a woman in a pink dress with lilac shadows points at something outside the picture for a boy who seems to be writing or drawing, and he turns slowly toward her. Her face is outlined in red with the very tip of the brush. On the right a man sits alone, wrapped tight in an ochre cloak, his chin in his hand and his forehead creased under raised eyebrows. Michelangelo painted this lunette early, in the first campaign, at the entrance end of the chapel.