This has probably been out there for a while, but I’m pretty sure it’s the first time *I* have seen it.
The Vatican has a virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel.
You can mouse around it. The navigation is weird, but if you work at it, you can see all of it. You can also zoom in and out with your mouse’s scroll wheel or the Shift and Ctrl keys.
A couple of thoughts:
1) I’ll bet there are Christian conservatives out there who will see this and suffer a terrible internal struggle over how gay it all looks. Seriously, you can see endless back shots of lovingly rendered muscular male asses, as well as little-boy penises sprinkled around like pedophile confetti. But because of where and what it is, it MUST be holy.
2) I always thought the anatomically correct cherubs in religious art were some sort of sexless holy figures, but I just realized they were LITTLE BOYS. Depicting them in the midst of bearded old men, as is done here, is not artistic license, but something that really happened in the inner recesses of the Mother Church. A thousand years ago, and probably still today.
3) If you were to go back in time to when Michelangelo painted it, and Church authorities presumably enjoyed private showings — and if you had a UV light like detectives use for finding blood or semen on crime scene floors, walls and furniture — I’d bet this place would light up like a cheap carnival Ferris wheel.
4) Yes, there are a few women, and even some exposed breasts, but my quick impression is that the dangly bits of the men outnumber them by a LOT.
Church art. A lot less holy than we ever imagined.