Aminadab

These are the figures almost nobody looks at. High on the side walls of the Sistine Chapel, in the curved spaces above the windows, Michelangelo painted the ancestors of Christ, the long list of names from the opening of Matthew's Gospel. He did them last and fast, in 1511 and 1512, working alone and worn out after four years bent under his own ceiling. This one is labelled Aminadab. When restorers cleaned the frescoes in the 1980s, they found something the centuries of soot had hidden, a yellow ring painted on his upper arm, the badge that Jews in Michelangelo's Italy were forced by law to wear. Marked this way, Aminadab is shown plainly as what the Gospel says he was, a Hebrew forebear of Christ. He is also the only man on the whole ceiling wearing earrings, another sign used at the time to denote a Jew.