Michelangelo: Multiple Choice Grammar Test

Michelangelo was, perhaps, the greatest artist in history. He painted(1) _________famous Sistine Chapel. His experience proved one thing: creativity is work. Michelangelo had 6,000 (2) _________feet of ceiling to cover - the size of four average house roofs.

Anyone who (3) _________a ceiling with a paint roller has caught a hint of the physical difficulty of (4) _________task. But Michelangelo’s plan (5) _________for 300 separate, (6) _________portraits of men and women. For more than three years the artist devoted all his laborious exhausting strain to (7) _________the vast overhead space with his tiny brushes.

Sometimes he painted standing on a huge scaffold, a paintbrush (8) _________over his head. Sometimes he sat, his nose inches from the ceiling. Sometimes he painted while (9) _________on his back. His back, shoulders, neck, and arms cramped (10) _________.

In the long days of summer he had light (11) _________17 hours a day, taking food and a chamber pot with him on the sixty (12) _________scaffold. For 30 days (13) _________a stretch he slept in his clothes, not even (14) _________his boots. Paint dribbled into his eyes so he could barely see. Freezing in the winter, sweating in the summer, he painted until at last the ceiling looked like a ceiling no more. He (15) _________it into the piece of drama, with creatures so real that they seemed to breathe.