A drawing of a portion of the altar end of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

The four drawings RCIN 991368-991370 and 970112 were apparently begun with the intention of copying the entirety of Michelangelo’s frescoes in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. The artist seems first to have drawn the framework of the ceiling and then inserted the figures, starting from those above the altar wall in the present drawing. But there are gaps, and the execution is of varying degrees of completeness.

Assuming the present drawing was made from the ceiling itself, rather than from an intermediate copy, it must have been executed while the two lunettes with Christ’s ancestors on the end wall over the altar (and the arms of Julius II between them) were still in place; around 1535 they were destroyed so that the whole altar wall could be taken up by Michelangelo's Last Judgment. RCIN 991369 also reproduces the ignudo to the left above the Delphic Sibyl, which was destroyed in an explosion of 1797. 

On the verso this sheet and two others is the pen inscription ‘Di Polidoro doppo Michelangelo Buonarota’. The attribution to Polidoro da Caravaggio is undoubtedly incorrect.