Who deserves a place on the ceiling?

I am intending to paint an atheists version of the world famous Sistine Chapel ceiling. The original was painted by Michaelangelo and took him 4 years. Our ceiling is only around a third of the size and so will not take quite so long, my very limited talent is hardly going to challenge the maestro but its the idea that is important here. Rather than depicting biblical figures and creationist myths the new ceiling is to celebrate those 50 individuals who have made the most significant contribution to civilization (this has nothing to do with whether the individuals are atheists or not, the criteria is about their impact not their faith). Its a contentious proposition so we need all the help we can get to decide on the chosen few.

Below is a list of the contenders so far nominated for a place on the "Atheists Ceiling"

In the right hand side column is a list of those who are (almost) definitely up there already.

If you disagree and think any of these individuals should be taken off the list or, better still, you have a new nomination, then let me know. Send your nomination with a paragraph explaining why they deserve a place on the ceiling along with the other greats and I will add them for consideration. We are very aware that the list is currently predominately male and western and are keen to redress the balance, and are looking for heroes from all over the world, from all eras and of all sexes!

We currently have over 90 possibles and 22 probables so will at some stage have to devise a set of criteria to whittle these down. Again any ideas please send a post.

To make your nomination or leave a message, sipmly click on the "nominations" button below.

If you would like to email me direct my email is in the "My Profile" section

Possibles: Individuals who have been nominated for a place on the ceiling

If you want to know why these individuals have been selected, click on them for their Wikipedia entry

Alexander the Great - Greek ruler and explorer
Abu Abd Allah Muhammad al-Idrisi - Moroccan cartographer and scientist
Dante Alighieri - Italian poet
Aristotle - Greek philosopher, writer and scientist
Jane Austen - English writer
Johann Sebastian Bach - German composer
Christiaan Barnard - South African surgeon
Matsuo Basho - Japanese poet
Ludwig van Beethoven - German composer
Alexander Graham Bell - Scottish scientist and inventor
Karl Benz - German engineer
Clarence Birdseye - American Inventor
Bì Shēng - Chinese inventor of movable type printing
Niels Bohr - Danish physicist
Filippo Brunelleschi - Italian architect and sculptor
Michelangelo Buonarroti - Italian painter, sculptor and architect
Gaius Julius Caesar - Roman Emperor
Cai Lun - Chinese inventor of paper
Charlie Chaplin - American actor
Cleopatra - Ruler of Egypt
Constantine I - Serbian Roman founder of the Holy Roman Empire
Madam Curie - Polish/French physicist and chemist
King David - Hebrew ruler
Hywel Dda - Welsh ruler and creator of laws
Walt Disney - American animator
John Dalton - English physicist and chemist
Frederick Douglass - American statesman, abolitionist and reformer
Bob Dylan - American musician
Marcel Duchamp - French artist
Thomas Edison - American inventor
Elizabeth I - English Queen
Euclid - Greek mathematician
Michael Faraday - English physicist and chemist
Alexander Fleming - Scottish biologist and pharmacologist
Henry Ford - American industrialist
Richard Feynman - American physicist
Sigmund Freud - Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist
Bill Gates - American computer scientist and industrialist
Goethe - German writer, scientist and poet
D.W. Griffith - American film director
Hatshepsut - Egyptian pharaoh Queen
Jimi Hendrix - American musician
Hippocrates of Cos - Greek physician
Hero of Alexandria - Greek engineer
Hildegard of Bingen - German saint, scientist, composer and visionary
Homer - Greek poet
James Hutton - Scottish geologist
Imhotep - Egyptian physician, scientist, architect and inventor
Thomas Jefferson - American politician
Joan of Arc - Soldier and saint
Carl Jung - Swiss psychiatrist
Lord Kelvin - Irish mathematician, physicist and engineer
Martin Luther King - American civil rights leader
Genghis Khan - Mongolian Emperor
Ibn Khaldūn - Tunisian philosopher, social scientist and economist
Joseph Lister - English surgeon and pioneer of sterilization
Carl Linnaeus - Swedish botanist and zoologist
Auguste and Louis Lumière - French pioneers of cinema
Ada Lovelace - English, first computer programmer
Frank Lloyd Wright - American architect
Federico García Lorca - Spanish poet
Stanley Kubrick - American film director
Mahatma Gandhi - Indian philosopher and politician
Guglielmo Marconi - Italian scientist and inventor
Nelson Mandela - South African politician
Gregor Mendel - Austrian scientist
Thomas Midgley - American Mechanical engineer and chemist
Mohammad Ali - American Boxer
Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī - Persian mathematician and scientist
Florence Nightingale - English nurse
Emmy Noether - American mathematician
Jesse Owens - American athlete
Tom Paine - American Philosopher
Pablo Picasso - Spanish artist
Plato - Greek philosopher
Marco Polo - Italian explorer
Elvis Aaron Presley - American musician
Qin Shi Huang - Chinese ruler creator of great wall of china
Bertrand Russell - English philosopher
John Ruskin - English artist and philosopher
Sappho - Greek poet
Mary Seacole - Jamaican nurse
Shen Kuo - Chinese scientist - magnetic and true north
Adam Smith - Scottish philosopher and economist
Homer Simpson - American cartoon character
Marie Stopes - Scottish pioneer of contraception
Nikola Tesla - Serbian physicist and mathematician
Fox Talbot - English inventor of photography
François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture - Haitian liberator
Tu Fu & Li Po - Chinese poets
Sun Tzu - Chinese military strategist
Alan Turing - English mathematician
Virgin Mary - Mother of Jesus
Vyasa - Indian scribe of Hinduism
Watson and Crick - American / English scientists, discovery of structure of DNA
Orson Wells - American film director, writer and actor
Ida B Wells - American campaigner for civil and women's rights
Mary Wollstonecraft - English writer, philosopher and feminist
Malcolm X - American civil rights leader
Frank Zappa - American musician
Zhang Heng - Chinese scientist, poet and statesman


Visit our website for more information on the villa where the ceiling is to be painted and the beautiful region of Le Marche, at:

http://www.vacanzaitalia.co.uk

Whence God?

Since this is the atheists' version of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, there is obviously no place for God in the painting. However we can hardly contemplate a painting based on one so famous without reference to the iconic central panel of God creating Adam. Fortunately a perfect substitute for God has been suggested in the form of our earliest consestor. Consestor is the term coined by Richard Dawkins in his book "The Ancestor's Tale" for the earliest common ancestor of different lines of species.

According to Dawkins our first consestor, that is to say our nearest, chronologically speaking, common ancestor is the individual who was mother to both our lineage and that of the chimpanzees and gorillas. This individual lived around six to seven million years ago and while there is no firm fossil evidence that gives exact detail of what she would have looked like there is sufficient evidence of chimpanzee/homo fossils from around this period for us to have a stab at the appearance of our "Eve". In any event there is more evidence for our Eve than Michaelangelo had for his God!

So while we have the figure to replace God we are still not sure who should replace the Adam figure in the central scene, or indeed whether this should be a single individual, or even if it should be a real or fictional figure. Could it be argued that the archetype of humankind could be represented by a single fictional figure? say Homer Simpson. Do you have a better idea?

Note: While we are to have a single consestor, Dawkins is careful to point out that in fact there was not a single "mother" but rather a number of individuals, spread over a long period of time, who carried the genes from which both we and the chimpanzee/ gorilla linage evolved

The Two Ceilings

The original Sistine Chapel ceiling has around 50 identifiable characters and 300 characters in total included in 9 creation events and scenes from the life of Noah and 10 minor events depicted in small monochrome relief panels.

The original Sistine Chapel ceiling is barrel vaulted with small cross vaults over the side windows, this form is mimicked in the architectural devices used to divide up the ceiling – columns and caryatids. Interspersed amongst these are numerous anonymous naked or semi-draped male figures.

Size of Sistine chapel: 40x130 ft, 12x39.6m

Our ceiling in the Italian villa "Casa Bella Fonte" is 4.3 x 13m, so around one third the size of the original but of similar proportions.
Sistine Chapel – 1:3.25, Casa Bella Fonte - 1:3

Visit our website for more information on the villa and the region at:

http://www.vacanzaitalia.co.uk

Spooky but true.
The original Sistine Chapel is named after Pope Sisto IV for whom the chapel was built. The Atheist Ceiling will be painted in an Italian villa in Montalto della Marche which was the home town of Pope Sisto V!

Society and greats with no name.

Civilization is not just about individuals and events; without society there can be no civilization. What are the systems, customs and organizations that underpin civilization? Should the ceiling portray families? tribes? nations? government? democracy? the giving of gifts? capitalism? the work ethic?. Could we have civilization without an infrastructure of civil engineering? sanitation? transportation? What, if any, are the key aspects of infrastructure fundamental to civilization?

While history provides us with the names of many of those who have had great influence on civilization, there are of course many key figures who will always remain anonymous. Who first learned to control fire? to cook? who invented the wheel? who first herded animals? cultivated seeds? smelted metal? who painted the first picture? first made music or first used language to communicate?

Since we cannot realistically represent society and these early characters through named individuals, the idea is to replace the nine scenes in the original ceiling that represent biblical myths, with images that convey systems, events and acts that are central to civilization. If you have ideas on who and what should be portrayed simply click on the "nominations" button or post a comment

Real or Fictional?

Is there a case for fictional characters on the ceiling? Could there be a case for say God, the Devil, Zeus, or other more recent invented figures such as Dracula, Doctor Frankenstein, James Bond or Father Christmas, as you can see Homer Simpson has already made it onto the list of the nominated.

How it will be painted

Unlike Michaelangelo painting the original Sistine Chapel ceiling I don't really fancy breaking my back by looking up and painting above my head on tottering scaffolding tower for four year with paint dripping in my eyes, so I intend to cheat. The idea is to draw out the design on full size sheets of plasterboard, line these boards up with one another to ensure continuity of the images, then paint the boards while they are still vertical. As each board is painted they will be fixed to the ceiling with the gaps between the sheets filled with paster and then painted over to match in with the paintings on the sheets.

The Design

Michelangelo's original painting is designed to reflect the barrel vaulting of the ceiling and minor cross vaulting above the side windows. Michelangelo emphasizes the of the ceiling architecture to create triangular frames running either side of the ceiling, these frames are made into shallow niches, each providing a enclosure for major Biblical figures. Building on these triangular enclosures, Michelangelo divides the main expanse of the ceiling with classical columns and caryatids.

The ceiling of the room in the villa is a rather more prosaic rectangle with no architectural structure to provide a similar starting point, however the current idea is to use the same concept, that of architectural elements to divide the space for each of our heroes. Where Michelangelo looked to classical architecture to create his ground, on the basis presumably that the recently rediscovered classicism was held in high regard as the work of ancient masters and represented an ideal vision of antiquity, the new ceiling will use a more modern architectural style.

Currently there are two possible designs for the ceiling layout, firstly mimicking the triangular device used by Michelangelo the new ceiling would be divided using the geodesic architecture of Buckminster Fuller and latterly Norman Foster in the British Museum central court and Nicholas Grimshaw's Eden project. The other possibility is to use the architecture of Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace and Glass House at Chatsworth and Decimus Burton's design for the Palm House at Kew Gardens. This latter style has the advantage of containing some of the features of classical architecture and therefore redolent of the original ceiling.