Michelangelo didn't paint the Sistine Chapel lying on his back.
The image of Michelangelo flat on a scaffold is a myth. His early biographers say he painted standing, head craned backwards, for four years. He was a sculptor who didn't want the job, suggested Raphael instead, and ended up covering the ceiling with more than 300 figures.
Pope Julius II commissioned the ceiling, and the contract was signed on 8 May 1508 for a fee of 3,000 ducats. Michelangelo thought of himself as a sculptor, not a painter, and had limited experience of fresco. He was reluctant, even proposing his young rival Raphael. According to the biographer Giorgio Vasari, the architect Bramante goaded the pope into insisting.
The pope's plan was modest: twelve Apostles in the spandrels within a geometric frame. Michelangelo found it had too few human figures and negotiated something vastly grander, later claiming the pope told him to do as he liked, a boast many historians think overstated. The result centres on nine scenes from Genesis, including The Creation of Adam, surrounded by prophets, sibyls and athletic nude youths.
Fresco is unforgiving. Pigment goes onto wet lime plaster, one day's patch at a time, and fuses with it as it dries. Early on the plaster grew mould and Michelangelo nearly gave up. He rejected Bramante's scaffold, which hung from holes in the ceiling, for a freestanding one. He started at the end furthest from the altar, with the story of Noah, and his first scenes are crowded with small figures, apparently because he misjudged how they would read from the floor. As he went on, his style grew broader; the final scene of God creating was painted in a single day.
Vasari and Ascanio Condivi both say he worked standing with his head tilted back, and the idea of him lying down comes from another biographer, Paolo Giovio. Michelangelo complained of the strain in a comic poem with a sketch in its margin. The ceiling was unveiled on 31 October 1512 and was admired and imitated at once. Its most recent restoration ran from 1980 to 1994.
Source: Wikipedia — Sistine Chapel ceiling · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
