Everyone knows the image of Michelangelo lying on his back, painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It is wrong. He stood on a scaffold, craning his neck upward for four years, from 1508 to 1512. He even wrote a poem about it, complaining that the work had given him a goiter and bent his body like a bow.
The Creation of Adam is a small part of that vast ceiling, one of nine scenes from the Book of Genesis along the center of the vault. Pope Julius II had hired Michelangelo, who thought of himself as a sculptor, not a painter, and had resisted the commission. In this scene, God streaks across the sky with a crowd of figures under his cloak, and Adam lounges on the earth, a limp hand stretched out.
The famous detail is the gap. The two fingers do not touch. Adam's hand hangs loosely, as if life has not quite arrived, and God's finger is pointed and ready. The small space between them is one of the most reproduced details in the history of art, and no one can say for sure what Michelangelo intended by it.
A theory published in 1990 by a physician, Frank Meshberger, suggested that the red cloak and the figures around God form the shape of a human brain, a hidden sign that God gives Adam intelligence along with life. Art historians remain divided about it, and it may be a coincidence, but it has become part of the painting's legend.
The ceiling was unveiled in 1512. It changed Western art almost at once, and the pose of Adam has been quoted, parodied and reworked ever since. Look at the cracks in the plaster across the scene. They are the marks of five centuries of a building settling.
Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam appears on our: