Dazzling in execution, epic in scale, breathtaking in its newly restored glory, this is Britain's Sistine Chapel ceiling.
It's a spectacular tribute, not to the glory of God as in the Vatican, but to the power and bombast of our Kings and Queens.
It is sumptuous, knock-your-socks-off, dynastic propaganda.
The Popes in Rome had Michelangelo; our Royal Family had Sir James Thornhill (1675-1734).
Here, in the Painted Hall at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, South-East London, he worked for 19 years until 1727 to cover every inch of wall and ceiling with elaborate scenes glorifying the reigns of William III and Queen Mary, Anne, and George I, in a hall designed by Sir Christopher Wren.
The richly detailed scheme promotes the strength of the Royal Navy, the Empire and the 'soft' power of the country's merchants.
A gallery assistant poses in The Painted Hall, which has been restored as part of a conservation project, at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich
Never was a PR man so gorgeously grandiloquent as Thornhill.
Like Michelangelo, he used a wooden scaffold to reach the ceiling. He would have stood or knelt beneath it, and wouldn't have been able to see the full effect until the scaffolding was taken down.
A team of masons, plasterers and decorative painters helped bring it to life, and although a German, Dietrich Ernst Andreae, may have painted the royal portraits, Thornhill took all the credit.
For years, day-trippers have ignored the hall. Instead, they visit the nearby Observatory to stand astride the Greenwich Meridian Line, marking the Earth's east hemisphere from the west.
In the Painted Hall, soot from decades of candles, combined with ten slapdash restorations and re-varnishings, had blackened the surface of the paintings and spoiled the purity of the colours.
Now, after two years' renovation, curators have completed an £8.5 million, 3,400 sq m project to restore the paintings to their
