The Last Judgment (Michelangelo)

Michelangelo's Last Judgment covers the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, painted between 1536 and 1541, more than twenty years after he finished the ceiling. A muscular Christ at the center raises his arm, the saved rise on the left, and the damned are dragged down toward the boat at the bottom right. The crowd of naked bodies caused controversy that ran for years, and in 1564 the Council of Trent's congregation decided that some figures should be covered, so the drapery on several of them came later. Compare the crowded, swirling blues here with the ceiling's calmer order and you see how far Michelangelo's art had traveled.