The Last Judgment (Michelangelo)

On the towering altar wall of the Sistine Chapel a beardless, athletic Christ raises his arm and the universe convulses: the dead claw up from their graves at the lower left, the damned are dragged and ferried down to hell at the right, and saints brandish the instruments of their martyrdom - Bartholomew holds his own flayed skin, its sagging face a self-portrait of the painter. Painted a quarter-century after the ceiling, also in this collection, it trades that serene order for a storm of fear and judgment, the post-Reformation mood darkened. The mass of nudes so scandalized critics that drapery was later added by another hand.