Michelangelo Buonarroti painted The Creation of Adam in 1511 as one of nine narrative panels along the central spine of the Sistine Chapel ceiling in the Vatican palace, on commission from Pope Julius II. The 280 × 570 centimetre fresco shows the bearded God-the-Father reaching toward the reclining naked Adam across an approximately two-centimetre gap between their two extended forefingers.

Michelangelo spent his twenties dissecting cadavers by candlelight in a Florentine monastery. The bodies he was looking at became, fifteen years later, the figures on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. He always said he was a sculptor, never a painter. The paintings prove him right.

Two hundred years of Italian painting, sculpture, and architecture in the names that still matter — Giotto, Masaccio, Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and the three painters who carried the late Renaissance into Venice and beyond.