Lunette: Eleazar and Matthan

On the 20th of June 1980, restorers made a small cleaning test on this lunette, on the entrance wall of the Sistine Chapel. Under the soot and old layers of glue the colours came up so bright that the Vatican Museums decided to clean all the lunettes, and in the end the whole ceiling. It was a fitting place to begin, because this is probably the first lunette Michelangelo painted, at the start of the first campaign, when he worked from the door toward the altar. On this wall the window below the lunette is not real. It is painted.

Eleazar and Matthan are the next-to-last pair in the genealogy of Christ that opens Matthew's Gospel, and their names stand on the tablet in the middle. On the left a woman with a strikingly masculine build stretches out her arms to hold a small boy, while a man behind her looks on in surprise or worry. A key and a little purse of coins hang from a cord along the stone seat. Right beside them is a darker patch, a repair made a few decades after Michelangelo finished, when a piece of plaster had fallen, and its tone shows the frescoes were already darkening by then.