Arguably the world's most famous work of art, millions of people visit it every year. Until now however nobody has been able to explain exactly what the Sistine Chapel's ceiling is actually trying to tell us. Though important and timely the film (airing as it does to celebrate the 500th birthday of the work) it is also the product of the detective work and obsessive scholarship by art critic Waldemar Januszczak which spans the last 30 years. During this time he has been trying to unlock the secrets of Sistine Chapel's complex pictorial codes and sumptuous iconography.

This major voyage of discovery traverses both centuries and nations, taking Waldemar from Texas to Jerusalem, from Portugal to Bologna, as he solves the vital clues which reveal for the first time the crucial answers to one of the world's most enduring art mysteries. Much of the inspiration for the Sistine Chapel finds its roots in antiquity but interestingly the scripture which inspired its birth, still finds powerful resonances in our recent history. Tracing strong and direct scriptural links between Michelangelo's masterwork and one David Koresh (cult leader of the Branch Davidians) Waldemar shows quite how powerful and pervasive these myths and prophecies remain.

What connects the massacre of the Branch Davidians in Waco in 1993 with the birth of printing and Michelangelo and Jerusalem and the Sistine Chapel and that angry minor prophet who wrote book 38 of the Old Testament, Zechariah? It is not, I admit, the sort of question one asks oneself merrily every day. But it is what I forced myself to keep asking as I poked about for the best part of 20 years in the nether regions of civilisation, round and round the houses, in and out of libraries, through Rome, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and a place in Portugal called Evora, seeking to crack the lost code of the Sistine Chapel.