On what date was the Sistine Chapel first consecrated for public worship?

The Sistine Chapel was first consecrated for public worship on 15 August 1483.

Pope Sixtus IV consecrated the chapel on the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin, giving the building a liturgical identity before its later fame as a center of Renaissance art. The date came soon after the chapel’s construction and initial decoration.

The chapel’s name comes from Sixtus IV, whose Latin name was Sixtus. Its first major decoration campaign involved painters such as Perugino, Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Cosimo Rosselli, who worked mainly on the side walls.

Michelangelo’s ceiling was painted much later, between 1508 and 1512, and his Last Judgment was completed in 1541. Those later masterpieces can make it easy to associate the chapel’s origin with the sixteenth century rather than its 1483 consecration.