Sistine Chapel

The origin of the ban is a 1980s copyright deal that most visitors have never heard of. When the Vatican needed funding for the huge 1980–1994 restoration of Michelangelo’s frescoes, Japan’s Nippon TV won the bid — paying eventually about $4.2 million in exchange for exclusive photographic rights to the restored surfaces. Those commercial rights expired three years after each phase was completed, meaning the copyright shield was fully gone by 1997. But the Vatican has kept the blanket ban ever since for different reasons: humidity and CO₂ from stopped-and-photographing crowds are a real threat to the plaster, the two emergency exits make crowd flow critical, and the chapel is still a consecrated space where the popes are elected.

Yes, and it’s deliberate. The chapel measures roughly 40.9 metres long, 13.4 metres wide and 20.7 metres high — matching, in the standard modern reading, the proportions of Solomon’s Temple as given in the Old Testament (1 Kings 6): sixty cubits long, twenty wide, thirty high. That’s length equal to three times the width, and height roughly half the length. Baccio Pontelli built the room for Sixtus IV in 1473–1481 as a rectangular reception hall consciously modelled on the biblical Temple, staking the Renaissance papacy’s claim to continuity with the sacred building tradition of Jerusalem.

Nearly a decade before Michelangelo touched the ceiling, in 1481–82 Pope Sixtus IV brought in the greatest Florentine and Umbrian painters of the day — Botticelli, Perugino, Ghirlandaio, Cosimo Rosselli, Signorelli and Pinturicchio — to fresco the side walls. They painted a matched pair of cycles: the Life of Moses on the left wall and the Life of Christ on the right, with each scene of Moses lined up opposite a corresponding scene of Christ. The typological argument is that Christ fulfils and completes what Moses began. When Michelangelo returned decades later to paint the ceiling and the Last Judgment on the altar wall, he was working inside their room.

The cardinal-electors are physically locked in — the door is sealed shut behind them with the historical phrase cum clave (‘with a key’), which is where the word conclave comes from. They vote by paper ballot under Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, and after each round the ballots are burned in a small iron stove. Chemical additives colour the smoke: black smoke visible through a temporary chimney means no pope elected, white smoke means the church has a new pope. During a conclave, the frescoes get their most theologically loaded use of the entire year.

Yes — a much simpler one. The original 1481 ceiling was a plain deep-blue sky studded with gold stars, painted by Piermatteo d’Amelia. Structural cracks and Julius II’s ambition to rebuild the chapel’s decoration in a grander programme led to it being scraped off around 1508 for Michelangelo’s Genesis cycle. Only faint documentary records of the star ceiling survive; nobody in the modern era has ever seen it in place.

After Pope Sixtus IV (Francesco della Rovere), who commissioned it and had it built between 1473 and 1481 as his private chapel. In Italian Sixtus is Sisto, so the chapel is Cappella Sistina — the ‘Sixtine’ chapel. Confusingly, later popes also took the name Sixtus (Sixtus V, 1585–1590, is best remembered for reorganising Rome’s streets), but the chapel is named for its founder — Sixtus IV, not any of the others.