If you have not visited the Sistine Chapel, now's your chance....

Ahh, if it were only like that in real life ! We queued for two hours, shuffled along endless corridors, to get to a dim, hot room occupied by about 5000 Japanese tourists, with all that that entails....

Dinnae bother.
 
Aye, to have been in there with that camera when that was shot, without tourists. Fantastic find Chief, gotta share that. Ol' Michelangelo had his hands quite busy I'd say.

Caz
 
What a fabulous thing! I enjoyed it despite being a godless atheist and the Mrs enjoyed it even more being a dratted Fenian. lol
 
I was fortunate to see it both before and after the restoration.Dramatic !..the removal of the grime and candle soot,reveled a vibrant world of color,long lost....the last Judgment ,is a work by its self....the Miracle of course is this guy Michelangelo...He was a feisty guy,bitching ,complaining ,and knew he was getting robbed!..A rendition of St. Bartholomew,holding his skin,the face on the skin is Michelangelo's face,showing that the Pope Skinned his ass ..by not paying him enough him!....some things never change!.

Thanx Chief!
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That is startling. I had to pan slowly to avoid vertigo. Thank you for the link, I'll go back for more!

There was a neat story I heard about the Sistine regarding a bit of music, the Misereri by Gregorio Allegri. A quick check around the web, it appears to be true. Here's a quote from Wikpedia:

"Miserere, full name "Miserere mei, Deus" (Latin: "Have mercy on me, O God") by Italian composer Gregorio Allegri, is a setting of Psalm 51 (50) composed during the reign of Pope Urban VIII, probably during the 1630s, for use in the Sistine Chapel during matins, as part of the exclusive Tenebrae service on Wednesday and Friday of Holy Week. The service would start usually around 3AM, and during the ritual, candles would be extinguished, one by one, until one remained alight and hidden. Allegri composed his setting of the Miserere for the final act within the first lesson of the Tenebrae service.
It was the last of twelve falsobordone Miserere settings composed and chanted at the service since 1514 and the most popular: at some point, it became forbidden to transcribe the music and it was allowed to be performed only at those particular services, adding to the mystery surrounding it. Writing it down or performing it elsewhere was punishable by excommunication.<SUP id=cite_ref-grove_0-0 class=reference>[1]</SUP> The setting that escaped from the Vatican is actually a conflation of verses set by Gregorio Allegri around 1638 and Tommaso Bai (also spelled "Baj"; 1650–1718) in 1714.

Three authorised copies of the work were distributed prior to 1770 – to the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I, to the King of Portugal, and to Padre (Giovanni Battista) Martini.<SUP id=cite_ref-grove_0-1 class=reference>[1]</SUP> However, none of them succeeded in capturing the beauty of the Miserere as performed annually in the Sistine Chapel. According to the popular story (backed up by family letters), the fourteen-year-old Mozart was visiting Rome, when he first heard the piece during the Wednesday service. Later that day, he wrote it down entirely from memory, returning to the Chapel that Friday to make minor corrections. Some time during his travels, he met the British historian Dr Charles Burney, who obtained the piece from him and took it to London, where it was published in 1771. Once the piece was published, the ban was lifted; Mozart was summoned to Rome by the Pope, only instead of excommunicating the boy, the Pope showered praises on him for his feat of musical genius. The work was also transcribed by Felix Mendelssohn in 1831 and Franz Liszt, and various other 18th and 19th century sources survive. Since the lifting of the ban, Allegri's Miserere has become one of the most popular a cappella choral works now performed."<SUP style="WHITE-SPACE: nowrap" class="noprint Inline-Template" title="The material in the vicinity of this tag may use weasel words or too-vague attribution. from September 2009"></SUP>
 
THE ...AMERICAN ...MICHELANGELO!

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Constantino Brumidi....Artist of the Capitol



Next time at the capital...LOOK UP,and all around....Magnificent!!...vin



http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/senate/brumidi/index.html
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