Visit the Sistine Chapel in virtual reality

The frescoes in the Sistine Chapel are among the greatest artistic monuments of mankind. Now you can view them in virtual reality without travelling to the Vatican.

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) spent a whole four years working on his greatest work, the monumental ceiling and wall paintings of the Sistine Chapel. The central motif, which depicts the Creation of Adam, is one of the most famous works of art in the world. Nowadays, you have to queue alongside numerous other tourists, sometimes for hours, to enter the chapel and catch a glimpse of the frescoes. Those who are unable to travel to the Vatican or want to view the paintings in peace and quiet now have the opportunity to do so in virtual reality.

Digitisation of the Sistine Chapel

It was Christopher Evans who launched the mammoth project to fully digitise the Sistine Chapel. Evans is a Michelangelo expert and lead animator at Epic Games. He and his team drew on historical drawings and documents as well as photogrammetry and created a reconstruction of the vault with centimetre precision, including a true-colour, high-resolution reproduction of the frescoes.

Now the free app "Il Divino: Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling in VR".

The virtual journey into the Sistine Chapel is possible with or without VR glasses.

This makes learning history fun

The app offers a guided tour and a free exploration mode. If you choose the first option, you are given an entertaining introduction to the history and structure of Michelangelo's work of art via an audio commentary, while you can move freely within the chapel by teleportation.

At the end of the introduction, you can either climb onto Michelangelo's original wooden structure, on which the artist painted the ceiling fresco, or use a movable mechanical lift to reach the height of the windows. In the first case, you get a sense of the working conditions under which Michelangelo worked and learn about his painting technique; in the second case, you can click on each individual segment of the ceiling and wall painting and then hear an introduction to the motif in question. The VR app offers over a hundred such clickable elements. You should therefore plan enough time to explore them. According to the WebsiteYou should also come back, because updates and additions are also planned.

Source: mixed / sistinevr