Spandrel: Asa, Jehoshaphat and Joram

On each long side of the ceiling, the vault dips down between the great seated prophets and sibyls into four curved triangles, and each of these spandrels sits directly over a lunette. Michelangelo used all eight to carry on the ancestors of Christ, but he changed the setting. Down in the lunettes the families sit on benches against a light background. Up here they sit on the ground, folded into the triangle, against a dark one. They have no names of their own. Lunettes with a spandrel above usually carry three names on their tablet, and one of them is taken to belong up here.

Below this one the tablet reads Asa, Jehoshaphat and Joram, and since the old man in the lunette is traditionally called Jehoshaphat, this group is usually read as the family of his father, Asa. A woman fills the front, dozing, her body sunk over one bent leg and propped on a cushion laid crosswise. Behind her a child and a crouching man are only shadows, barely sketched. It was painted in the second campaign. In the triangles above, two bronze-coloured nudes twist as if trying to force their way out of the cramped space, on either side of a ram's skull hung with golden ribbons.