A design system troweled onto the vault Michelangelo painted between 1508 and 1512 — three hundred figures muscling across a fictive marble architecture on raw lime plaster. Everything sits on a cool gray-white intonaco ground and is built from cangiante shot-colour: coral that turns lilac in shadow, apple-green tunics, cerulean sky, golden ochre.

It reads like the ceiling after the 1980s cleaning stripped the soot away — startling, bright, matte, and impossibly alive. The architecture keeps rigorous order; the figures do all the ornament. Nothing is glossy, nothing is gilt: this is fresco pigment, weighty and sculptural, not Byzantine glitz.