The Sistine Chapel ceiling is the ultimate symbol of artistic devotion, yet the man who painted it insisted he was not a painter at all. This deep dive follows Michelangelo Buonarroti through the most grueling commission of his life: summoned to Rome by the warrior pope Julius II in 1505 to build a three-story tomb with 40 marble statues, then stranded when the project was shelved, fleeing the city in 1506, and finally forced back in 1508 to fresco a ceiling he begged the pope to give to his rival Raphael instead. Drawing on diplomatic correspondence, biographical accounts, and modern medical analysis, the episode traces how political coercion, a scheming architect named Bramante, and a medium Michelangelo barely understood combined to produce the defining work of the Renaissance.

Along the way, the conversation dismantles the myth of the a ...