Italian Renaissance painting
In 1508 Pope Julius II succeeded in getting the Florentine sculptor Michelangelo (1475-1564) to agree to continue the decorative scheme of the Sistine Chapel. The Sistine Chapel ceiling was constructed in such a way that there were twelve sloping pendentives supporting the vault that formed ideal surfaces on which to paint the Twelve Apostles. Michelangelo soon devised an entirely different scheme, far more complex both in design and in iconography. The scale of the work, which he executed single handed except for manual assistance, was titanic and took nearly five years to complete.
Italian Renaissance painting
In 1480, a group of artists from Florence was commissioned with the work: Botticelli, Pietro Perugino, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Cosimo Rosselli. This fresco cycle was to depict "Stories of the Life of Moses" on one side of the chapel, and "Stories of the Life of Christ" on the other with the frescoes complementing each other in theme. "The Nativity of Jesus" and the "Finding of Moses" were adjacent on the wall behind the altar, with an altarpiece of the "Assumption of the Virgin" between them. These paintings, all by Perugino, were later destroyed to paint Michelangelo's "Last Judgement".
The remaining 12 pictures indicate the virtuosity that these artists had attained, and the obvious cooperation between individuals who normally employed very different styles and skills. 
The paintings gave full range to their capabilities as they included a great number of figures of men, women and children and characters ranging from guiding angels to enraged Pharaohs and the devil himself. Each painting required a landscape. Because of the scale of the figures that the artists agreed upon, in each picture, the landscape and sky take up the whole upper half of the scene. Sometimes, as in Botticelli's scene of "The Purification of the Leper", there are additional small narratives taking place in the landscape, in this case "The Temptations of Christ".