What is the name of the artist who originally painted the starry sky ceiling?

Piermatteo d’Amelia originally painted the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling as a starry sky.

Before Michelangelo’s celebrated fresco cycle, the chapel vault had a much simpler decoration: a blue ground scattered with golden stars. The work was created by Piermatteo d’Amelia, an Umbrian painter active in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Its appearance recalled other medieval and Renaissance celestial ceilings, including the starry vault associated with Giotto’s Arena Chapel in Padua.

Pope Julius II later decided that the old decoration should be replaced with a far more ambitious theological programme. Michelangelo began the new ceiling in 1508 and completed it in 1512, covering the earlier star field with scenes from Genesis, prophets, sibyls, and the ancestors of Christ.

The main mix-up is with the artists who painted the chapel’s earlier wall frescoes. Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Perugino, and Pinturicchio contributed to those wall cycles, but they did not paint the original starry ceiling. Piermatteo’s decoration survives mainly through descriptions and preparatory evidence rather than as the visible ceiling visitors see today.