Thread by @Telegraph

⛪🎨You can now experience the magnificent frescoes of the Sistine Chapel at home.

A new book costing £16,500 allows you to enjoy some of the greatest art ever created, from the comfort of your sofa

A thread 🧵👇
telegraph.co.uk/luxury/art/can…

📗The three volumes of ‘The Sistine Chapel’, each 2ft high, present a life size, inch by inch rendition of Michelangelo’s 5,000 sq ft ceiling

📘Volume 3, presents all 14 metres of The Last Judgement, to scale

The Creazione di Adamo, which usually spans over 5 metres, is also preserved across the pages

👁️The images are so well defined that it is possible to study shadows underlip, the veins on a wrist, the gradations of an iris

You can also spot cracks and fissures that have spidered across the plaster with age - many from an explosion at a gun depot nearby in 1797💥

Experiencing the book, Fake or Fortune presenter @philipmould said, “The printed page has never done a great service to works of art. But I was blown away”

📸Producing the books was a five-year endeavour, two Italian photographers spent 67 nights taking the 270,000 images required.

They could only work when the site was closed, meaning their rigging had to be put up and taken down 67 times

This gargantuan effort mirrors that of Michelangelo himself, who was left crippled after completing the work, complaining “I feel the back of my Brain upon my neck”

The book also includes the 14th century frescoes that line the chapel’s long walls

Such as Pietro Perugino’s Baptism of Christ, which sits to the right of the altar

The publisher, Maneula Roosevelt said, “It’s not an ordinary way of doing things, but we could not do anything less. We are publishers, but we are dreamers too, and this was a labour of love”

Have you visited the Sistine Chapel? Tell us your memories below 👇

You can read more about this fascinating piece of art history here👨‍🎨👇

telegraph.co.uk/luxury/art/can…