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As the most visited site in Rome, the Sistine Chapel hosts about 19,000 pushing and shoving visitors each day.  Many of these art enthusiasts stand in a seemingly endless line for hours, enduring hot sun or driving rain as they wait for their chance to see the stunning artworks in the Chapel.

If you’re one of those people who cna’t stand the thought of the crowds, but long to see Michelangelo’s masterpiece, Vassar College has the solution for you! They’ve created a virtual Sistine Chapel in Second Life, so now there’s no need to stand in line or to shove your way through the crowds. You can admire Michelangelo’s stunning frescoes from the comfort of your own computer monitor. Will the experience be the same? Probably not. But Vassar’s virtual recreation is certainly a great way to prepare yourself for a visit to the real thing (or for an exam if you should happen to be taking an art history course).

Built in the 15th century by Pope Sixtus IV (the chapel takes his name), the Sistine Chapel walls were decorated by such celebrated artists as Botticelli and Perugino in the 1480s, while Michelangelo painted the ceiling with scenes from the Book of Genesis between 1508-12, and depicted the Last Judgment on the altar wall in the 1530s. The goal of Vassar’s Second Life recreation, is to allow up-close and virtual study of the both the 15th- and the 16th-century paintings, and for this reason they are depicted in great detail.

What’s the experience of visiting the virtual Sistine Chapel like? Because you’re freed from the constraints of space, time, and museum guards – not to mention crowds – you can get very very close to the paintings, even flying to the top of a wall for an inspection of a fresco’s minute details or sitting on a cornice below Michealngelo’s vault to admire the inlaid marble floor.

And there’s some added features. In the sixteenth century, Pope Leo X commissioned Raphael to design a series of tapestries showing the lives of Saints Peter and Paul.  These were to hang on the lower part of the chapel’s walls. Today those tapestries are kept in the Pinacoteca or painting gallery of the Vatican Museums, but in the Second Life reconstruction they’ve been installed in the chapel, making it possible to study these exquisite woven artworks in the place for which they were created.

The Sistine Chapel recreation was built by Steve Taylor, of Vassar College (AV: Stan Frangible.) It was built as a proof of concept, to explore how virtual reality might be used to learn about art and architecture, by experiencing the scale, context and social environment of a real-life space.