You might not love your day job, but you probably don’t dislike it as much as Michelangelo disliked his. The iconic Renaissance artist famously despised painting the Sistine Chapel, which took him four years to complete (1508 to 1512) and nearly broke his spirit in the process. 

“I am not in the right place,” he wrote in the last line of a sonnet to his friend Giovanni da Pistoia after a year of work. “I am not a painter.” History may disagree — the Sistine Chapel is among the most revered works of art in the world — but the physical ailments he endured clearly took their toll.

Michelangelo is said to have suffered an enlarged thyroid, cramped thighs, a tight chest, and a knotted spine while creating his magnum opus. In the same poem, he described the project as “torture” and noted, “My brush / above me all the time, dribbles paint / so my face makes a fine floor for droppings!” 

Michelangelo devised a scaffolding system so he could paint the ceiling while standing, but it only helped so much. The Sistine Chapel is more than 5,000 square feet, and it seems that the artist — who considered himself a sculptor above all else — spent much of his time on the project believing he’d bitten off more than he could chew. At least he got centuries and centuries of acclaim out of it.