This vast surface is divided into:-- Four large pictures stretching over more than one-third of the width of the roof, and containing from five to more than forty-five figures, some of them twelve feet in height.
Five pictures, half the size of the last, with from one to eight figures in each.
Twenty colossal nude figures of Athletes.
Ten circular medallions.
Seven large figures of Prophets.
Five large figures of Sibyls; these Prophets and Sibyls would be eighteen feet high if they stood upright, and most of them have secondary figures of angel boys between them, twenty-three in all.
Twenty-four decorative pilasters of two children each, in monochrome.
[Image #26] THE PROPHET DANIEL SISTINE CHAPEL, ROME (_By permission of the Fratelli Alinari, Florence_) Four large triangular compositions representing the Redemptions of Israel, and containing from five to twenty-two colossal figures.
Eight triangular spaces above the windows, representing the Ancestors of Christ, containing from two to four colossal figures.
Twenty-four groups in the semicircular spaces above the windows, also of the Ancestors of Christ, of from one to four colossal figures.
Ten large figures of children forming brackets under the figures of Prophets and Sibyls, at the springing of the arches between the windows.
Twenty-four bronze-coloured colossal figures filling up the spaces in the architectural framework.
Thus, the vault may be regarded as a gallery of one hundred and forty-five separate pictures by Michael Angelo.

There is one reservation, and that is, that the twenty-four groups of two children forming pilasters are in pairs, of the same outline but reversed; as they are differently lighted they may still be taken as different pictures.

These pilasters form the sides of the thrones of the Prophets and Sibyls, and repeating them in reversed outline on either side of the same throne has a very valuable decorative effect, well known to the old Italian workmen, who frequently repeated the forms of their fruit and flower decorations in this manner, by the expedient of reversing the paper-pricking from one and the same cartoon.

It is interesting to find Michael Angelo resorting to this simple trick to get the effect of balance in figure decoration.

The light and shade of the reversed figures follow the general scheme of the illumination, so that the figures traced from the same cartoons look very dissimilar when painted, but if the outlines are traced from a photograph, and reversed on the corresponding figures, they will be seen to coincide.
It seems impossible to explain the exactness in any other way, a few measurements on the vault itself would make it certain.