Nahshon

Everyone looks up at the Sistine ceiling. This figure is easy to miss. Nahshon sits in one of the lunettes, the arched fields above the windows, down at the edge of Michelangelo's great scheme where the light is poor and the crowd's necks are already craned higher. He painted these last, in 1511 and 1512, at the very end of four years on the scaffold, and by then he was working fast and largely freehand, without the careful full-size drawings he had used earlier. It shows in the loose, broad brushwork. The lunettes hold the ancestors of Christ, the long line of names from the opening of Matthew's gospel, and Nahshon is one of them, here a young man in a red robe, absorbed in a book. Michelangelo took the whole commission grudgingly, insisting he was a sculptor rather than a painter, and he signed nothing up here.