The Creation of Adam

The story of The Creation of Adam

Adam lies on a hillside, one arm draped over his knee, and reaches with the other toward God, who comes flying in on a cloud of angels with his own arm outstretched. Their fingers do not touch. That gap of a few inches of plaster is the most famous space in Western art. Michelangelo painted it around 1512 on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, lying on scaffolding, as one of nine scenes from Genesis. Adam is limp and God is all motion, and the whole idea of the picture is the instant before the spark.

On a wall, this is a wide, pale image that reads as sculpture. The dominant colors are the soft flesh tones of the two figures, a gray-green hillside, a plaster-blue sky, and the rose and lavender of God's cloak, so it is warm without being colorful. It suits a study, a hallway, a stairwell, a living room, or a home office, and it fits classic, academic, and neutral-modern interiors. The image is more than twice as wide as it is tall, so it wants a long, low wall: above a console, a bed, or a bench. We offer it in the Mini at 17.6 × 8 in, the Petite at 24.2 × 11 in, and the Small at 26.4 × 12 in, and the Small is the one for a wall of its own.

Michelangelo's The Creation of Eve is the next panel along the ceiling. Raphael's The School of Athens was painted a few rooms away in the same years, and Leonardo's The Last Supper is the other great wall of the Italian Renaissance. More from Michelangelo.

Printed in our studio from a public-domain photograph of the fresco after its cleaning, so the colors are the bright ones Michelangelo used, not the smoke-darkened ones of old postcards.