BELLEVUE, Wash. — At Bellevue's Shops at the Bravern, big names like Prada and Louis Vuitton may be overshadowed by one of the biggest names in art, Michelangelo.
His Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes are now on display at the old Nieman-Marcus. That's where we met site manager Amber Rogers, who once waited five hours to see the real thing in Rome.
"It's really great in person, actually," she told us. "The only problem is that you are kind of rushed through the experience. There is a very limited time, and you are not allowed to take pictures. You're really crowded in with a whole lot of people."
Here, there is no time limit and crowds are sparse.
Though the works are considered among the major artistic accomplishments of human civilization, Michelangelo, already a famous sculptor, wanted nothing to do with painting the Sistine Chapel.
"He was not a painter," Rogers said. "He hated the idea of painting, so he left Rome and had to get chased down and brought back to paint he ceiling."
The original job took Michelangelo five years. Looking up every day for hours was not healthy. He developed a goiter. He became resentful. When Michelangelo returned 20 years later to do The Last Judgment, a depiction of end times, he took his revenge.
"There's definitely a lot of demons in this painting," Rogers said. "And on the faces of those demons are people Michelangelo didn't like."
One detested church official was painted with horns on his head and a snake wrapped around his body. Proof, that hundred of years ago, even the greatest artists couldn't resist adding Easter eggs, even to their greatest works of art.
"Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel: The Exhibition" runs Tuesdays-Sundays (10 a.m. to last entry at 6 p.m.) through Oct. 30; The Shops at The Bravern (in the former Neiman Marcus store), 11111 N.E. Eighth St., Suite 100, Bellevue. Tickets start at $21 for adults, $14.70 for children 4-12. Parking is free (bring your parking ticket from the garage to be validated). The exhibition is wheelchair accessible.
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