The Ancestors of Christ: Hezekiah, Manasseh and Ahaz

Everyone looks up at the centre of the Sistine ceiling, at God reaching out to Adam. These figures sit far below that, in the curved spaces above the windows, and they are the ones almost nobody notices. Michelangelo painted them as the ancestors of Christ, the long line of names that opens Matthew's Gospel, ordinary-looking people waiting, tired, lost in thought, a mother beside her child. He reached this part late, around 1510, after years bent back on the scaffold, and by then he was working fast and loosely, sometimes straight onto the plaster without a full drawing. The cleaning of the 1980s lifted centuries of soot from these figures and brought back colours, sharp pinks, oranges and greens, far brighter than anyone had expected.