Michelangelo's 'Last Judgment'This book is about the creation of an acknowledged masterpiece and its wildly mixed reception by contemporaries. The Last Judgment was created at a moment of crisis when the spirit of Renaissance humanism was recoiling from the sense of a new threat within the church, as defections of the faithful to the new Protestant sects multiplied across Europe. Seen in this context, the examination of the fresco will be of interest to historians, historians of