Prophet Jeremiah

Jeremiah was the prophet who lived to see Jerusalem fall. For years he had warned its kings, and early in the 6th century before Christ the Babylonian army took the city and burned the Temple. Tradition made him the author of the Lamentations, the poems that mourn that destruction, and he came to be called the weeping prophet.

Michelangelo gave him no tears. He sits slumped on his throne with his legs crossed, his elbow on his knee and his hand over his mouth and beard, his head bowed. Behind him two smaller figures stand in shadow. His place is at the altar end of the ceiling, right beside Jonah, who presides over the altar wall, and he was painted around 1511 or 1512.

Because the figure seems so absorbed and so weary, some writers have read it as a portrait of Michelangelo himself. Nothing he wrote says so, and the tablet beneath the throne names the prophet plainly, Hieremias.