Zerubbabel, Abiud and Eliakim

These three are names most people have never heard, Zerubbabel, Abiud and Eliakim, links in the long genealogy that opens the Gospel of Matthew, the human ancestors of Christ. Michelangelo set them in the lunettes, the curved fields above the windows of the Sistine Chapel, and he painted them near the end of the four years he spent on the ceiling, working high on the scaffold. By then his hand had loosened. The brushwork here is quicker and broader than in the famous scenes overhead, the figures ordinary families waiting, slumped, lost in thought. He finished the ceiling in 1512, and it was unveiled that autumn to a Rome that had watched the chapel stay shut for years.