Michelangelo was no beauty queen and left no documented self portrait except a cartoon, doodled in the margin of one of his poems, showing the artist painting the Sistine Chapel Ceiling.

“Moreover, the drawing reveals Michelangelo’s sense of humor since the figure he is drawing is not one of the massive heroic participants from the stories of Genesis that would ultimately populate the ceiling, but rather, one with cartoon-like features including huge eyes and hair standing straight up on ends.”

Indeed it awesomely does. I don’t know about you, but it gives me a kind of Sistine Chapel moment: the feeling of a finger reaching across half a thousand years - callused, paint-stained, chipped nails - and playfully poking my own finger. And maybe scribbling a doodled autograph.