(Art) Michelangelo's ceiling in the Sistine Chapel Essay

(Art) Michelangelo's ceiling in the Sistine Chapel - Essay Example â€Å"In the same way that a painter could reduce the human form or settings to a play of geometrical figures, so could the merchant simplify all things to geometrical configurations† (Lemaitre & Lessing, 1993, p. 15). This common language forced artists to examine the world a bit more closely while also giving them the ability to display more realistic images that were better able to illustrate the natural world. This led to the development of numerous artistic techniques including linear perspective, chiaroscuro and foreshortening, different artistic mediums such as frescoes and new methods of working in often difficult places. These techniques, medium and need to overcome new challenges were all employed by Michelangelo in completing one of his most famous works, the Sistine Chapel. Before he could even begin painting, the first challenge Michelangelo had to overcome was reaching the ceiling itself. The architect of the ceiling project, Bramante, provided Michelangelo with some scaffolding that was suspended from the ceiling on ropes. â€Å"When Michelangelo saw it, he was convinced that Bramante was trying to discredit him in the eyes of the pope because he knew that when the scaffolding was removed it would leave holes in the ceiling and ruin the painting† (Marszalek & Panagakis, 2004). To avoid this problem, Michelangelo created his own scaffolding which was basically a flat wooden platform supported by brackets. These brackets were built out from the walls near the tops of the windows instead of hanging from the ceiling. They had the extra bonus of being reached via a series of zigzag ladders. With the scaffolding problem solved, the old ceiling was removed and a new coat of a special kind of plaster was applied to start the fresco process. This first layer of plaster, â€Å"called the arriccio, would be spread over the entire ceiling to a thickness of roughly three-quarters of an inch,