Spandrel: Zerubbabel, Abiud and Eliakim

Zerubbabel was born in exile in Babylon, and his name is usually explained as seed of Babylon. Later he led a party of exiles home to Jerusalem and began rebuilding the Temple. In the triangular cell of the vault above his lunette, Michelangelo painted a family that looks ready for the road, and it is usually read as Zerubbabel's own, the child with his parents and a brother, although no name is written up here.

They sit on the bare ground against a dark background. The mother in front, in profile and well lit, wears a shimmering orange dress and a pale blue shirt with a yellow patch at the shoulder, and a white satchel hangs across her body. A half-naked child lies between her legs. Behind her, more roughly sketched, a man is dressed only in a red cloth from the waist down, and a second child sits in the half-dark. The spandrel lies beside the panel of the Flood and was one of the first painted, early in the first campaign, in three days of fresco.