The Fall and Expulsion from the Garden of Eden on the Sistine Chapel Ceiling
Michelangelo's Fall and Expulsion, one of the nine Genesis scenes painted on the Sistine ceiling between 1508 and 1512. The chapel it decorates was built as a fortified structure: the walls beneath this vault are thick enough to stand a siege, and the decoration was added to a building designed to be defended.
The Sistine Chapel is named for Sixtus IV, who had it built between 1475 and 1481 on the foundations of an older papal chapel, with walls and a guarded upper level suited to a papacy that had recently been driven from Rome more than once. The painted programme came afterwards and in stages — the wall frescoes under Sixtus, the ceiling under Julius II, the Last Judgement under Paul III — so that the room the conclave now meets in is a fortress finished as a gallery. See the construction and decoration of the Sistine Chapel.
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