By the time he finished four years later, he had transformed the pope’s commission into his personal statement on the grand themes of the Platonism of his day—and into the artistic masterpiece of the Renaissance. It is the perfect counterpart to The School of Athens, and Giovanni Pico would have been the perfect person to decipher the ceiling’s rich complexity and its various veiled meanings. For instance, he would have immediately recognized why Michelangelo broke the ceiling down into three separate zones, each stacked above the other. The lowest, running along the tops of the chapel’s
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