Pope Sixtus IV commissioned a team of Florentine and Umbrian masters, including Botticelli, Perugino, and Ghirlandaio, to fresco the side walls of his new chapel with scenes from the lives of Moses and Christ. The payment records from this period document the intense, competitive collaboration among Renaissance Italy's greatest painters working side by side on scaffolding.
Long before Michelangelo lay on his back painting the ceiling, the Sistine Chapel's walls were already a gallery of Renaissance genius. Sixtus IV summoned the finest painters of the age—Botticelli, Perugino, Cosimo Rosselli, Domenico Ghirlandaio—to Rome in 1481, offering handsome payment and a chance to outdo one another in full public view.
Botticelli contributed several scenes, including the Temptation of Christ and the Punishment of the Rebels, packing them with portraits of contemporary Romans and subtle propaganda supporting papal authority. The painters worked in a spirit of rivalry that pushed each to greater technical daring, setting a precedent for the chapel as a proving ground for artistic ambition that Michelangelo would later dominate.
Records of payments to the artists around this date give historians a rare ledger-level glimpse into how Renaissance masterpieces were actually produced: as commissioned labor, tracked in florins, amid deadline pressure and courtly politics.