Lunette: Rehoboam and Abijah

When restorers examined this lunette, they found no joins between days of work at all. In the other lunettes you can trace where one patch of fresh plaster ended and the next began, but here Michelangelo seems to have worked straight through, adding wet plaster as he went until the whole field was done. It belongs to the second campaign, probably the second lunette he painted after the scaffold was moved.

The tablet names ROBOAM and ABIAS, Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, and his son Abijah. On the left a woman leans out in profile, one arm resting on the back of her seat, the only chair-back in any of the lunettes, and her other hand points to her belly. She is pregnant. Her red mantle, lined in yellow, falls over a foot raised on a step. On the right a young man has collapsed over his knee with his face turned to the wall and the other arm hanging loose. Behind him a boy is barely blocked in, as if trying to rouse him, his billowing cloak a single broad stroke of red ochre and black. Pen sketches of the sleeping young man survive on two pages of the so-called Oxford sketchbook, in the Ashmolean Museum.