New photographs of the Sistine Chapel's artworks have been presented in a massive book that shows them in 1:1 ratio.

In other words, the photos show the artworks as the actual size Michelangelo painted them.

The book will enable art lovers to have a close-up view of the masterpieces for the first time. Read more

It's interesting how we can become used to the old and soiled. I suspect there is a parable somewhere in that.

If we visit the Sistine chapel today, we'll see a ceiling of vivid scripture as Michelangelo painted it. With hundreds of other visitors, we'll walk with heads upturned in awe.

There is one place where everyone stops. It's under the picture of The Creation of Adam.

God is leaning towards Adam who appears to have fallen backwards, his arm extended as though he's trying to return to God. His finger is almost touching God's, but we get the feeling this won't happen. We notice that both Adam and God are strongly muscled, a reminder that Michelangelo was first and foremost a sculptor.

We stand still, gazing at the painting. There is much in the detail that is alive with expression. It claims our eyes and our hearts.

Why does this particular picture hold our attention? What did Michelangelo intend us to see?

Over the centuries there have been many theories about The Creation of Adam, people interpreting body language and background as they saw it. The cloak-like shape behind God, for example: does it represent an unfolding universe? Is it formed like a uterus to suggest the birthing of creation? Or does that shape resemble a brain and wisdom? All of these have been historical interpretations.

For some of us, though, the potent image is the gap between God's finger and Adam's finger. God is leaning forward as a father reaches for his child, but Adam is helpless and falling away.

We can see much pathos in that gap between the fingers. It is a space of loss and yearning, and we feel it deeply. It belongs to us, and no effort on our part is going to close it.

What then, fills the gap?

I believe Michelangelo tells us in another part of the painting. The answer is beneath God's left arm and hand. There is a young woman there, secure in the crook of God's elbow. Tradition says this is Eve waiting to evolve from Adam's side, but if we look closely, we see the woman has the same face as that of Michelangelo's sculpture of The Pieta. The woman is Mary.

Further along, God's left hand rests on a baby. Both the woman and the baby are in subdued colour, suggesting they have not yet come into incarnation.

The artist is telling us who closes the gap between us and our Creator.

It is the Beloved. It is Christ Jesus.

• Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator.

The replica, which has been approved by the Vatican, is open to the public until June 30.

The replica was created using more than 2.7 million photographs printed on cloth and hung from a metal framework.

The replica includes the frescos of Michelangelo, and sculptures and decorations also adorn the model.

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Since Pope Francis was elected in March, 2013, more than 5.5 million people have been through the chapel.

This amounts to 20,000 a day and 30,000 on Sundays, when entrance is free.

But the perspiration and breath from so many people threatens the survival of masterpieces by Ghirlandaio, Botticelli, Pinturicchio, Perugino and, most famously, Michelangelo.

Vatican authorities refuse to reduce the number of visitors, as they insist the faithful have a right to see the room where cardinals have elected new popes for more than five centuries.

The present air-conditioning system, installed in the mid-1990s, was designed for only half the current number of visitors.

So the Vatican is installing a powerful new system which is hoped to be operative in October.

A new energy-efficient LED lighting system is also being installed.

An extensive restoration on the Sistine Chapel was completed in 1994.

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Born in 1475 to an impoverished but aristocratic family in Caprese, a hillside town near Florence, Michelangelo Buonarroti grew up with an innate sense of pride, which as he aged, would feed his volatile temperament. When he failed to excel at school, his father apprenticed him to Domenico Ghirlandaio, a Florentine frescoist. Cocky from the start, the 13-year-old Michelangelo succeeded in irritating his fellow apprentices, one so badly that the boy punched him in the face, breaking his nose. But in Ghirlandaio's workshop, Michelangelo learned to paint; in doing so, he caught the attention of Florence's storied Medici family, whose wealth and political standing would soon put Michelangelo on the map as an artist and, in 1496, chart his course south, to Rome.

"It's almost as if Michelangelo goes from zero to 65 miles per hour in a second or two," says William Wallace, an art history professor at Washington University in Saint Louis. "He was 21 when he arrived in Rome, and he hadn't accomplished a lot yet. He went from relatively small works to suddenly creating the Pietà."

It was the Rome Pietà (1499), a sculpture of the Virgin Mary cradling the body of her son Jesus in her lap, and the artist's next creation in Florence, the nearly 17-foot-tall figure of David (1504) that earned Michelangelo the respect of the greatest art patron of his age: Pope Julius II. The 10-year partnership between the two men was both a meeting of the minds and a constant war of egos and would result in some of the Italian Renaissance's greatest works of art and architecture, the Sistine Chapel among them. Continue reading

Sources

• Smithsonian.com
• Image: Sistine Chapel