A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 4

There are many ways to generate story ideas. This month, I focus on one: Looking for ideas in news sources. Each of the items I’ll be posting for the next 30 days comes from a news site.

Today’s story idea: Michelangelo’s secrets in the Sistine Chapel?

At the age of 17 he began dissecting corpses from the church graveyard. Between the years 1508 and 1512 he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Michelangelo Buonarroti, known by his first name the world over as the singular artistic genius, sculptor, and architect, was also an anatomist, a secret he concealed by destroying almost all of his anatomical sketches and notes. 

Now, 500 years after he drew them, his hidden anatomical illustrations have been found — painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, cleverly concealed from the eyes of Pope Julius II and countless religious worshipers, historians, and art lovers for centuries — inside the body of God. 

This is the conclusion of Ian Suk and Rafael Tamargo, in their paper in the current issue of the scientific journal Neurosurgery. Suk and Tamargo are experts in neuroanatomy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. 

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Is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel a 500 year-old puzzle that is only now beginning to be solved? What was Michelangelo saying by constructing the voice box of God out of the brain stem of man? Is it a sacrilege or homage?

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The mystery is whether these neuroanatomical features are hidden messages or is the Sistine Chapel a Rorschach test upon which anyone can extract an image that is meaningful to themselves. The authors of the paper are, after all, neuroanatomists. The neuroanatomy they see on the ceiling may be nothing more than the man on the moon.