Michelangelo

I just had a book come out from Palgrave McMillan, titled Last Judgment: Michelangelo and the Death of the Renaissance. It's a cool book about Michelangelo's most controversial fresco, painted on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel. Everybody knows about his famous Sistine Chapel ceiling, but I think that the Last Judgment is the most powerful painting I've ever seen. One of the things I discovered about it is that Michelangelo encoded the Copernican Universe in the fresco, and he did this at the request of the Pope, Clement VII, the last of the true Renaissance popes. If you look at the painting closely you can see it. Jesus, depicted as the sun god Apollo is in the middle, damning the sinners, with the souls of both saints and sinners revolve around him in elliptical orbits. This was not an accident, because the pope had received a special briefing on Copernicus a few months before Michelangelo began painting.