The Calling of the First Apostles

Domenico Ghirlandaio painted two frescoes in the Sistine Chapel in 1481 and 1482, and this is the one that survives. The other, a Resurrection, was on the entrance wall. In 1522 the architrave over the chapel door collapsed and ruined it, and the scene there now was painted afresh half a century later, under Pope Gregory XIII, by the Flemish painter Hendrick van den Broeck.

The subject here is Christ gathering his first followers by the Sea of Galilee, told in three moments. Far back on the left he calls the brothers Peter and Andrew from their fishing boat. On the right, further along the shore, he calls two more brothers, James and John, from the boat of their father Zebedee, where the nets are being mended. In the foreground Peter and Andrew kneel before him, Peter in yellow and orange, Andrew in green, the colours painters traditionally gave them.

In a chapel built for the popes, the calling of Peter, whom the Church counted as the first of them, had an obvious place. Around the kneeling brothers stand men in 15th-century dress, and one on the right is often identified as John Argyropoulos, a Greek scholar from Constantinople who taught in Florence and later in Rome.