Salmon, Booz, Obed

Everyone looks up at the centre of the Sistine ceiling, at God giving life to Adam. This is one of the parts nobody looks at. Running along the tops of the walls, just above the windows, Michelangelo painted the ancestors of Christ, the long list of names from the opening of Matthew's gospel, and by 1511 he was racing through them. Here are Salmon, Boaz and Obed, three generations tied to the story of Ruth. On one side an old man broods with a stick, usually read as Boaz, and on the other a woman many take for Ruth cradles a sleeping baby she has just finished nursing. Freed from the grand theology overhead, Michelangelo painted these families loosely and fast, in broad wet strokes, almost like private sketches high on the wall.