Visitors to the Sistine Chapel for the next three months will see Michelangelo's Last Judgement replicated in high definition on a canvas, behind which restorers from the Vatican Museums' Laboratory for the Restoration of Paintings and Wooden Materials will carry out cleaning operations. Extraordinary maintenance on the Last Judgment has in fact begun, starting with the installation of scaffolding in the Sistine Chapel. The last conservation intervention on Michelangelo's mature masterpiece, which was commissioned from Buonarroti in 1533 by Pope Clement VII for the Sistine Chapel's altar wall and only initiated under the new pontiff, Paul III, took place in 1994. Michelangelo began painting the enormous masterpiece in the summer of 1536 and completed it in the autumn of 1541, covering an area of approximately 180 square meters and featuring 391 figures. On October 31, that year, Paul III held solemn vespers in front of this extraordinary painting, which, as Giorgio Vasari wrote, "filled all of Rome with amazement and wonder". The Last Judgment is currently the subject of a specific maintenance campaign, which is being driven by the presence of a widespread whitish haze, which is the result of the deposition of microparticles of foreign substances carried by air movements. The intervention will enable the removal of these deposits, which will result in the recovery of the chromatic and luminous quality that Michelangelo intended. This will fully restore the formal and expressive complexity of the work, and will renew the amazement that accompanied the conclusion of the major twentieth-century restoration, approximately 30 years later.