Get Ready for Rome

We know that Michelangelo's painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was an extraordinary achievement, but what subjects does he represent and what teaching do they convey?

Michelangelo used painted architecture and numerous nudes to divide the Sistine Chapel ceiling into separate panels and give it a complex design. Today we summarize the elaborate arrangement he came up with.

Michelangelo dominates the Sistine Chapel, but the chapel's walls feature twelve frescoes by the previous generation of great Florentine artists. We look at two by Botticelli as an introduction to all twelve.

We return for a second introduction to the Sistine Chapel and outline some of the main challenges Michelangelo had to overcome in painting the ceiling.

This episode introduces the twelve frescoes on the side walls of the Sistine Chapel, which invite a comparison between the lives and laws of Moses and Jesus.

We today make a first visit to the Sistine Chapel and look generally at the three different waves of Renaissance frescoes that decorated it. Two of these are by Michelangelo.

The difficulty of seeing Ancient Rome is that not much of it exists. The distinguished archeologist Rodolfo Lanciani documents this, and today we compare his ways of explaining its disappearance with those of Edward Gibbon.

American troops liberated Rome from German occupation just 2 days before D-Day. What made it possible, and why did the liberation occur when it did?

We have taken an introductory look at the reasons Paganism was replaced Christianity, but why have so many of the magnificent buildings the pagans built simply disappeared? Was it simply the work of time? We begin today with Gibbon's answer to this question.

We today consider Gibbon's explanation of how the Christians of Constantine's century advanced their faith by taking active measures against paganism. As he makes his case, Gibbon also extends his unflattering portrait of the followers of the new faith, perhaps to weaken their successors in his own day.