Book review: "Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling" by Ross King

You know how sometimes you look at something and go "man, I bet that was a massive pain in the ass to do" ? The Sistine Chapel is like the Grand Poobah of those things.

This book had a lot of interesting facts but was pretty dry and read reeeeaaally slowly so I have tried to pull out the fun facts here.

• The Sistine Chapel was built to the same dimensions as Solomon's temple. It's three times as long as it is wide!
• When artists like Michelangelo would plan their pieces they would do them on large pieces of paper called cartone which is where we get our word for cartoon!
• The pope during this time was Julius II who was called the Warrior Pope because he was stirring up all kinds of trouble because he wanted a bunch of land that wasn't the church's and he did literally everything for his own glory and sounded like a jackass and not a good pope. They butted heads a lot, mostly because he didn't pay Michelangelo on time.
• One of Michelangelo's most ambitious unrealized projects was a bridge that would go over the Bosporus river and connect Europe and Asia which was an idea he got from Da Vinci. He drew up some plans but it never happened. HOWEVER in 2001 a Norwegian architect used the same plans on a Norwegian motorway which is SO COOL.
• Michelangelo featured some of Jesus' lesser known ancestors on the ceiling, which was a uncommon subject matter at the time
• The legend that Michelangelo painted the whole thing on his back is untrue. Though he did have to design scaffolding specifically for this job and it did involve some reclining. 

So, like I said before the content was good but it was a little dry, so 2.5 stars?