Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel: A Different View, Winchester Discovery Centre

When commissioned to paint the Sistine Chapel in 1508 Michelangelo Buonarroti was widely considered to be a sculptor. Painting, if you can believe it, was not really his thing. His rivals knew this, and rubbed their hands at the thought of the upstart Florentine ruining the pontiff's ceiling. It took four years, a botched plastering job and a blow to the head administered by a frustrated Pope Julius II, but when it was finally finished, no one could argue that the results were less than sensational.

Thanks to a project working alongside the Vatican Museums, you don’t have to go to Rome and endure the long queues to see the ceiling for yourself, which towers 22 metres above head height. Reproductions of the 5000 square feet of frescoes are coming to the UK, giving the public a unique chance to get up close to this superlative icon of human achievement. The paintings have been photographed and reproduced at high resolution and the images transferred onto a series of panels to be exhibited across two displays at the Winchester Discovery Centre and a third display in The Great Hall.

Visitors will also be able to see The Last Judgement, painted on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, some 25 years after the ceiling was completed. Michelangelo was in his mid sixties when he took on this project and the religious climate had changed dramatically. Martin Luther’s reformation had swept through an increasingly protestant Europe, and in Rome the opulent nudes of the previous decades were considered unsuitable for religious buildings. Michelangelo was not immune to this prudish climate of austerity, although the figures in this tortured scene were painted unclothed. Not long after the artist’s death, however, their modesty was concealed with strategically placed drapes, until a restoration project, begun in the 1980s, started to remove them. If you want to get up close and personal to the genius himself, keep an eye out for the artist’s grisly self-portrait, painted onto the flayed skin of St Bartholomew.