Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel are perhaps the most famous and iconic paintings of the Italian Renaissance. From the time of their completion in 1512 until the present day, they have attracted the attention, admiration, and awe of visitors worldwide. But until the development of photography, they could be studied only through small drawn or printed copies of dramatically reduced size. Without one’s visiting the Chapel personally, it was impossible to acquire a sense of the scale and power of Michelangelo’s masterpiece.

The present work is a survivor of a remarkable and mostly forgotten chapter in the study and veneration of Michelangelo’s work. It is a life-size drawn and painted copy of one of the mighty figures from the ceiling, the Persian Sibyl, made by a British artist working in the 1820s on a scaffold sixty feet above the floor of the Sistine Chapel. Combining tracings from the fresco, chalk drawings, and brushwork with paint media, William Bewick sought to reproduce not only the design of the figure in actual size, but, as significantly, the effect the work had on the viewer.

Michelangelo had placed the monumental figure of the Persian Sibyl on a stone throne as she peered intently at her book of prophesies. As a legendarily aged figure, she is enveloped in robes for warmth and due to her failing vision holds the book close to her eyes. Bewick eliminated the architectural setting and the attendant figures present in Michelangelo’s fresco to focus on the sibyl herself. His aim is less in the faithful reproduction of the colors—which of course have changed dramatically since Bewick’s time—than the rendering of the shape and forms of the figure.

It is astounding to be confronted by Michelangelo’s figure in its true size—permitting both an appreciation of the power of the image, and the tremendous effort of the artist who labored to create it, as well of Bewick to replicate it.