Discorso della Montagna

Long before Michelangelo painted the ceiling, the walls of the Sistine Chapel were frescoed. Around 1481 Pope Sixtus IV brought a team of the finest painters in Italy, among them Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and Perugino, to line the chapel with scenes from the lives of Moses and Christ. Cosimo Rosselli was reckoned the least gifted of the group, and the story goes that he made up for it by loading his frescoes with real gold and costly blue, which delighted the pope and irritated his rivals. Here Christ preaches to a crowd on the hillside, and in the corner he reaches out to heal a kneeling leper. Directly across the chapel Rosselli painted Moses, so the old law and the new face each other.