At the opposite, or eastern end, Ghirlandajo painted the Resurrection, and there was a corresponding picture of Michael contending with Satan for the body of Moses.
Such was the aspect of the Sistine Chapel when Michelangelo began his great work.

Perugino's three frescoes on the west wall were afterwards demolished to make room for his Last Judgment.

The two frescoes on the east wall are now poor pictures by very inferior masters; but the twelve Scripture histories and Botticelli's twenty-eight Popes remain from the last years of the fifteenth century.
Taken in their aggregate, the wall-paintings I have described afforded a fair sample of Umbrian and Tuscan art in its middle or _quattrocento_ age of evolution.

It remained for Buonarroti to cover the vault and the whole western end with masterpieces displaying what Vasari called the "modern" style in its most sublime and imposing manifestation.

At the same time he closed the cycle of the figurative arts, and rendered any further progress on the same lines impossible.
The growth which began with Niccolo of Pisa and with Cimabue, which advanced through Giotto and his school, Perugino and Pinturicchio, Piero della Francesca and Signorelli, Fra Angelico and Benozzo Gozzoli, the Ghirlandajo brothers, the Lippi and Botticelli, effloresced in Michelangelo, leaving nothing for aftercomers but manneristic imitation.
II Michelangelo, instinctively and on principle, reacted against the decorative methods of the fifteenth century.