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By 1508 Michelangelo already thought of himself as a sculptor, and only a sculptor. He was 33, he had carved the David in Florence a few years before, and he had come to Rome to build Pope Julius II a vast marble tomb, the job he actually wanted. Then Julius, a restless warrior-pope who spent as much time on campaign as in the Vatican, changed his mind and handed him a ceiling instead. Michelangelo tried to refuse. He suspected rivals had pushed the idea precisely because fresco was not his craft, and he might fail at it.

He signed the contract on the 8th of May, for 3,000 ducats, and went looking for assistants who actually knew how to paint on wet plaster. He couldn't keep them, and ended up doing almost the whole thing himself. The surface was enormous, some 500 square meters, more than 300 figures. He worked from a wooden scaffold of his own design, standing and craning backward, not flat on his back as the legend has it, plaster dripping into his face. It took four years. In a bitter little poem to a friend he complained that his belly had been shoved up under his chin, that his skin hung slack behind him, and that he was no painter anyway. He was wrong about the last part.

When the scaffolding came down in 1512, the ceiling did something Roman fresco had never quite done, bodies with the weight and twist of carved marble, painted as if their maker could not stop thinking in stone. The two reaching hands of God and Adam, almost touching, became one of the most copied images ever made. Julius, the pope who forced the job on him, was dead within a year, his great tomb still unbuilt. Michelangelo returned to that tomb on and off for decades. What survives of it, in a church across Rome, is a fraction of the first grand plan, and at its center sits Moses, carved at last from the stone he had wanted under his hands all along.