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Michelangelo: The Sistine Ceiling
A sculptor, a ceiling he never asked for, and plaster that will not wait.
Rome, from the tenth of May 1508. In buon fresco, pigment binds only to plaster that is still wet, so every morning is the same question: how much do you dare lay before dusk. Real people, documented where the sources allow it, and a ceiling that remembers every day you misjudged.
How it plays
Lay the giornata
A giornata is a day’s plaster. Lay a small one and the calendar eats you; lay an ambitious one and you have promised more than the day may hold.
Cover it before it sets
A careful hand covers less ground and is worth more; a rapid one covers more and is worth less. Lay wider than your brush can reach and the rest is scraped off, leaving a join across whatever happened to be there.
Answer to the Pope
Julius pays irregularly and waits badly. Uncover a finished stretch and his patience returns; uncover too little and it costs you. Run out of it, or out of days, or out of money to pay the workshop, and the scaffold comes down.
The real thing
This game is about a real place and real people. These are objects they made, photographed by the museums that hold them — not our drawings of them.
Michelangelo’s own red-chalk studies for the Libyan Sibyl, one of the figures you paint in this game. He drew the shoulder, the hand and the toes separately before committing any of it to wet plaster — which is the working method the game is about.
Studies for the Libyan Sibyl (recto); Studies for the Libyan Sibyl and a small Sketch for a Seated Figure (verso) — Michelangelo Buonarroti · ca. 1510–11 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, 24.197.2 · CC0. See it at the museum