There’s a new selfie trap / art exhibit in town that tries to recreate the heights of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, as ‘Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel: The Exhibition’ is back in SF at St. Mary’s Cathedral for a three-month run.
You’d be “forgiven” if you missed the 2021 exhibition recreating the highly Catholic Sistine Chapel ceiling fresco by Michelangelo that came to SF that year, considering its arrival unfortunately coincided with the Delta variant COVID surge that discouraged many of us from going to indoor gatherings. But we are blessed from the heavens that Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel: The Exhibition is now back for a three-month summer run, opening Saturday, June 21 at St. Mary’s Cathedral (1111 Gough Street), a building that is already known for its visual celestial phenomena.
SFist attended a preview of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel: The Exhibition, a touring exposition presented by a company called SEE Global Entertainment. It’s about three dozen very large panels depicting a sort of ‘greatest hits’ of the best-known Sistne Chapel frames, presented in a self-guided tour that requires about 60-90 minutes to fully take in.
“Using high-definition licensed photography and an innovative printing technique, the ceiling frescoes have been recreated in their original dimensions, allowing visitors to view the art up close — every brushstroke, every hue — without traveling to Rome,” the exhibition’s organizers say in a press release.
And in a clever nod to the Sistine Chapel itself, several of these works are actually hanging from the ceiling. The ceiling pieces focus on the Creation, Adam and Eve, and the whole Noah and the Ark business.
There are panels with descriptions of what’s going on in that segment from a Biblical point of view, plus some art theory on “Why Michelangelo did what he did” in that particular section of the fresco. The show does come with its own dedicated app to give you an audio tour, but the sound on the app did not work for us at all, rendering the app useless. (Update: Organizers tell SFist that having the ringer off on your phone can affect whether the sound plays on the app.)
Still, the informational panels are instructive enough for a pretty enlightening tour.
Even the cracks in the plaster are recreated for an authentic look and feel.
Seating is provided throughout the exhibit so you can sit and zone on that section of the work.
And oh yes there is nudity galore, and boy did Michelangelo like to paint his men with outrageously muscular buttocks. The exhibit comes with the interesting trivial detail (among many others) that other artists painted clothing over the nudity, considering all the nakedness to be too vulgar for churchgoers of the 1500s.
Some coloring book-type action is also available for the kids, or the grownups who enjoy that kind of thing.
Plus there is the obligatory gift shop at the end, with all manner of Sistine Chapel bric-à-brac, including a very clever Sistine Chapel ceiling on an umbrella.
We admit that we generally loathe these traveling Instagram-trap “experiences,” but Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel: The Exhibition is a far more solemn and intellectually stimulating day out than most examples of the genre (it will run you $26 on a weekday and $28 on a weekend, with discounts for kids, seniors, and veterans). It’s just pretty good recreations of art that you’ll likely never get to see in person, and does not rely on any high-tech tricks or digital gimmicks that might cheapen the Renaissance-era work. Our only beef is that the audio on the app didn’t work, and we will note that some attendees got confused by the exhibit’s location, which is at the entrance in the Cathedral Offices on the lower-level Gough Street parking garage side of Saint Mary’s Cathedral, and not the cathedral’s main entrance on Geary Street.
Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel: The Exhibition is open Tuesdays - Sundays (10:30 am – 5:00 pm) from June 21 – September 14, 2025, at Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption (1111 Gough Street, at Geary Boulevard). $26-$28, tickets here.
Images: Joe Kukura, SFist
