Los antepasados de Cristo: Salmón, Booz y Obed

These are among the least noticed figures Michelangelo ever painted, tucked over the windows of the Sistine Chapel where few visitors think to look up. By 1511 he had been on the scaffolding for three years, Pope Julius II was pressing him to finish, and half the ceiling had just been uncovered to the public. The lunettes like this one, listing the ancestors of Christ, he saved for last and painted fast, sometimes a whole one in a couple of days, straight onto the wet plaster with barely any preparation. So the figures come out loose and oddly private, a family sitting and waiting, a woman with a child, ordinary people named in the gospel genealogy. The names Salmon, Boaz and Obed are lettered on a painted tablet between them.