Michelangelo – A Different View on Tour
The crowds and neck ache that generally accompany visits to the Sistine Chapel's famous ceiling become a thing of the past when Michelangelo – A Different View comes to town. While Michelangelo painted his High Renaissance masterpiece 72 feet overhead between 1508 and 1512, visitors can now contemplate immaculately detailed reproductions of the world's most famous frescoes at their leisure. The art is mounted on pedestals and, in the case of centerpiece image The Creation of Adam, laid out on the floor. In 2014, the Vatican City licensed high-resolution images of Michelangelo's frescoes to event producer Martin Biallas. The impressively detailed A Different View has been on tour since 2015, when it debuted in Montreal. "Without having seen the Sistine Chapel," wrote Germany's Goethe in 1787, "one can form no appreciable idea of what one man is capable of achieving." Could he have ever imagined that one day the Sistine Chapel would come to us?
About Michelangelo – A Different View
Michelangelo Buonarroti was considered primarily a sculptor when he was commissioned in 1508 to paint over what had been a simple starry sky decorating the Sistine Chapel's ceiling. He would surely have been inspired by the frescoes of Jesus and Moses — painted by Sandro Botticelli, Pietro Perugino, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Cosimo Rosselli — that already adorned the chapel, and these too are on display in A Different View. Michelangelo parlayed his commission by Pope Julius II to paint the 12 apostles into a monumental cavalcade of biblical life, and ended up rendering more than 300 biblical characters in bright colors easily visible from the chapel floor. A gruesome self-portrait on the peeled skin of St. Bartholomew can be seen in The Last Judgment, painted 25 years after the ceiling was completed. The striking images on display in A Different View were photographed during the glorious restoration of the chapel that took place between 1984 and 1994. All roads may lead to Rome, but, in the case of Michelangelo – A Different View, the road leads to you, the viewer.