Ancêtres du Christ : David et Salomon

Look up at the Sistine ceiling and your eye goes straight to the centre, to God reaching out to Adam. Almost no one looks here, in the curved spaces over the windows, where Michelangelo painted the ancestors of Christ. This one is named for David and Solomon, kings of Israel from the family line the Gospel of Matthew traces down to Jesus. He painted them around 1511, in the second half of the job, working fast and high on the scaffold. There are no thrones or crowns. They sit in shadow like ordinary people waiting, a mother, a child, a man lost in thought, brushed more loosely than the famous scenes below and long left in their shade.