Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling by Ross King

A Renaissance fable of vaulting ambition

You know what it's like to have the builders in: the dust, the din, the disruption, the don't-give-a-damn surliness of plaster-covered primadonnas. "Construction was going on with the greatest dust," wrote one seething bureaucrat when a bunch of louts arrived to trash his place of work, "and when so ordered the workmen did not cease." Typical. Pass the Yellow Pages.

Paride de'Grassi, Vatican master of ceremonies under Pope Julius II, may have been a bit of a control freak, but he did his job. A stickler for order, he kept the Masses running on time at the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Then the peasant-born, vainglorious Julius, forever dreaming up the sort of spin and hype that would bring fresh glory to his papacy, allowed a rough tradesman called Piero Rosselli to strip out the entire existing décor.

The general idea, it seemed, was to cover the vaulted ceiling with grandiose Biblical frescoes. And who had Julius now hired (in 1508) to wield the brushes and oversee a team, at a steep cost of 3,000 ducats – 30 times an artisan's salary? One Michelangelo Buonarroti, a tetchy and graceless Florentine aged 33. He had impressed the arty-farty set up there with some fancy sculpture (a giant nude "David", would you believe). But the man had no track-record as a painter. Worse, he had quarrelled violently with the Pope over plans for the pontiff's tomb. Sheer insanity to bring him back; yet the Boss insisted. It could only end in tears.

And so it nearly did, several times, before Pope and cardinals dropped in after vespers on 31 October 1512 to see the vast scaffold dismantled. According to Giorgio Vasari, Renaissance myth-maker in chief, the frescoes unveiled were "such as to make everyone astonished and dumb".

A story as irresistible as this deserves another telling. In fact, Ross King deftly stitches modern Michelangelo scholarship into his fluent and gripping narrative. The result is a delightful book that overturns many legends. Take that scaffold. Forget Charlton Heston groaning on his back (in The Agony and the Ecstasy). Rather, Rosselli and his gang built – after Michelangelo's design – a clever series of stepped arches which gave "the painters and plasterers decks on which to work". What bites the dust is the heroic image of the suffering, supine artist, biting all the dust himself.

The art of fresco emerges as a Renaissance extreme sport: painting against the clock as the intonaco lime mix dried. Here, the myth holds. Michelangelo did finish intricate foreshortened figures at "an almost mind-boggling velocity". Adam, outstretched hand and all, took only four days.

King briskly sketches the rash wars of Julius, the shaky fortunes of the Buonarroti clan, and the contrasting career of that conceited smoothie, Raphael. His story never flags, although this always engrossing book often takes the greatness of its art as read. At first, the Pope himself disagreed. He told Michelangelo that the chapel "really ought to be retouched with gold". (How well Julius would have got on with Gianni Versace.) The Florentine refused. "It will look poor," countered the Pope. "Those who are depicted there," joked the artist, "they were poor too."