Prophet Isaiah

Isaiah was the prophet Christians quoted more than any other. His book says that a virgin will conceive and bear a son called Emmanuel, and the Gospel of Matthew applies those words to the birth of Christ. Michelangelo painted him in the first campaign on the ceiling, in the second bay from the entrance, facing the Erythraean Sibyl.

Giorgio Vasari, who knew Michelangelo, singled the figure out and described it closely. Isaiah sits with one leg crossed over the other. He has shut his book on one hand to keep the place where he was reading, and rests the other elbow on it. A boy behind him has called out, and the prophet answers with a turn of the head and nothing more.

Around 1512 Raphael painted his own Isaiah on a pillar of the church of Sant'Agostino in Rome, for Johann Goritz, a learned prelate of the papal court. Vasari claimed that Raphael repainted it after being let into the chapel, in Michelangelo's absence, to see the ceiling. Modern scholars doubt the repainting, while agreeing that Raphael's massive prophet owes a clear debt to the ceiling.