Prophet Daniel

Michelangelo painted Daniel as a young man. In the book that bears his name he is a Jewish exile, carried off to Babylon as a youth, who rises at the royal court by reading what no one else can read, the king's dreams and the mysterious words that appear on the palace wall during Belshazzar's feast. The same book follows him into the reign of the Persian kings who took Babylon, and across the vault from him Michelangelo placed the Persian Sibyl.

There are no lions here. Michelangelo shows him at work on texts. A huge open book is held up from below by a muscular nude boy, and Daniel turns aside to write on a second book at his right. He sits in the fourth bay from the entrance, in the half of the ceiling painted during the second campaign, and the tablet beneath him reads DANIEL.