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The Sistine Chapel ceiling took four years. I painted it lying on my back on scaffolding sixty feet above the floor. My neck was permanently bent afterward; I could only read letters by holding them above my head. My vision was damaged. My hands were scarred. Pope Julius had designed the ceiling; I redesigned it — adding the nine scenes of Genesis, the prophets, the sibyls, the ancestors of Christ — a theological argument in paint that required more invention than any commission I had received. I was thirty-three when I began it.