Almost 500 years after Michelangelo Buonarroti frescoed the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, the site still attracts throngs of visitors and is considered one of the artistic masterpieces of the world. Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling unveils the story behind the art’s making. In 1508, the powerful Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the newly restored Sistine Chapel in Rome. Michelangelo had little experience as a painter, even less working in the delicate medium of fresco, and none with the curved surface of vaults which dominated the chapel’s ceiling. He would spend the next four years laboring over the vast ceiling. Battling against ill health, financial difficulties, domestic problems, inadequate knowledge of the art of fresco, and the pope’s impatience, Michelangelo created figures so beautiful that, when they were unveiled in 1512, they stunned his onlookers. While he worked, Rome teemed around him, its politics, and rivalries with other city-states and with France at fever pitch, often intruding on his work. From Michelangelo’s experiments with pigment and plaster to his bitter competition with the famed painter Raphael, who was working on the neighboring Papal Apartments, Ross King’s Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling presents a magnificent tapestry of day-to-day life in early-sixteenth-century Rome.