lt in 1473 by Baccio Pontelli, a Florentine
architect, for Pope Sixtus IV. It is a simple barn-like chamber, 132
feet in length, 44 in breadth, and 68 in height from the pavement. The
ceiling consists of one expansive flattened vault, the central portion
of which offers a large plane surface, well adapted to fresco
decoration. The building is lighted by twelve windows, six upon each
side of its length. These are placed high up, their rounded arches
running parallel with the first spring of the vaulting. The ends of
the chapel are closed by flat walls, against the western of which is
raised the altar.

When Michelangelo was called to paint here, he found both sides of the
building, just below the windows, decorated in fresco by Perugino,
Cosimo Rosselli, Sandro Botticelli, Luca Signorelli, and Domenico
Ghirlandajo. These masters had depicted, in a series of twelve
subjects, the history of Moses and the life of Jesus. Above the lines
of fresco, in the spaces between the windows and along the eastern end
at the same height, Botticelli painted a row of twenty-eight Popes.
The spaces below the frescoed histories, down to the seats which ran
along the pavement, were blank, waiting for the tapestries which
Raffaello afterwards supplied from cartoons now in possession of the
English Crown. At the west end, above the altar, shone three
decorative frescoes by Perugino, representing the Assumption of the
Virgin, between the finding of Moses and the Nativity. The two last of
these pictures opened respectively the history of Moses and the life
of Christ, so that the Old and New Testaments were equally illustrated
upon the Chapel walls. At the opposite, or eastern end, Ghirlandajo
painted the Resurrection, and there was a corresponding picture of
Michael contending with Satan for the body of Moses.

Such was the aspect of the Sistine Chapel when Michelangelo began his
great work. Perugino's three frescoes on the west wall were afterwards
demolished to make room for his Last Judgment. The two frescoes on the
east wall are now poor pictures by very inferior masters; but the
twelve Scripture histories and Botticelli's twenty-eight Popes remain
from the last years of the fifteenth century.

Taken in their aggregate, the wall-paintings I have described afforded
a fair sample of Umbrian and Tuscan art in its middle or
_quattrocento_ age of evolution. It remained for Buonarroti to cover
the vault and the whole western end with masterpiec