Question: Of the fourteen lunettes, which one was painted first?
About the article "Sistine Chapel ceiling", section "Treatment".

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Michelangelo's depiction of the Genealogy of Jesus departs from an artistic tradition for this topic that was common in medieval times, especially in stained-glass windows.
This so-called Jesse Tree shows Jesse lying prone and a tree growing from his side with the ancestors on each branch, in a visual treatment of a biblical verse.
The figures in the lunettes appear to be families, but in every case they are families that are divided.
The figures in them are physically divided by the name tablet but they are also divided by a range of human emotions that turn them outward or in on themselves and sometimes towards their partner with jealousy, suspicion, rage or simply boredom.
In them Michelangelo has portrayed the anger and unhappiness of the human condition, painting "the daily round of merely domestic life as if it were a curse".
In their constraining niches, the ancestors "sit, squat and wait".
Of the fourteen lunettes, the two that were probably painted first, the families of Eleazar and Mathan and of Jacob and Joseph are the most detailed.
They become progressively broader towards the altar end, one of the last being painted in only two days.
The Eleazar and Mathan picture contains two figures with a wealth of costume detail that is not present in any other lunette.
Prior to restoration, of all the paintings in the Sistine Chapel, the lunettes and spandrels were the dirtiest.
Added to this, there has always been a problem of poor daytime visibility of the panels nearest the windows because of "halination".
Consequently, they were the least well known of all Michelangelo's publicly accessible works.
The recent restoration has made these masterly studies of human nature and inventive depiction of the human form known once more.
Section References
For a long time the only murals attributed to Swanevelt were the two lunettes in the sacristy of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, of which only one survived.
Art historian Susan Russell proposed that a frieze with seven scenes from the life of the Old Testament's Joseph in the east wing of Palazzo Pamphilj in Piazza Navona was also painted by him. 
Giuseppe Pedretti (1694–1770) was an Italian painter of the late-Baroque or Rococo period, active mainly in Bologna.
He was a pupil of the painter Marcantonio Franceschini and his son Giacomo Franceschini.
Pedretti painted lunettes in the nave for the church of Basilica of San Domenico in Bologna.
He painted altarpieces in the church of the Immaculate Conception of Crevalcore.
One of his pupils was the wax sculptor Anna Morandi Manzolini. 
The most important original frescos in the chapel are the paintings of the five lunettes (1488-90).
Four of them depict the Fathers of the Church in front of a blue background: St. Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine and Gregory the Great.
The central lunette is filled with the sculpted coats-of-arms of Cardinal Costa (the wheel of St Catherine) which is supported by two painted angels. 
Ancestors of Christ.
Between the large pendentives that support the vault are windows, six on each side of the chapel.
There were two more windows in each end of the chapel, now closed, and those above the High Altar covered by the Last Judgement.
Above each window is an arched shape, referred to as a lunette and above eight of the lunettes at the sides of the chapel are triangular "spandrels" filling the spaces between the side pendentives and the vault, the other eight lunettes each being below one of the corner pendentives.
Michelangelo was commissioned to paint these areas, as part of the work on the ceiling.
The structures form visual bridges between the walls and the ceiling, and the figures which are painted on them are midway in size (approximately 2 metres high) between the very large prophets and the much smaller figures of Popes which had been painted to either side of each window in the 15th century.
Michelangelo chose the Ancestors of Christ as the subject of these images, thus portraying Jesus' physical lineage, while the papal portraits are his spiritual successors according to Church doctrine.
(see "gallery")Centrally placed above each window is a "faux" marble tablet with a decorative frame.
On each is painted the names of the male line by which Jesus, through his Earthly father, Joseph, is descended from Abraham, according to the Gospel of Matthew.
However the genealogy is now incomplete, since the two lunettes of the windows in the Altar wall were destroyed by Michelangelo when he returned to the Sistine Chapel in 1537 to paint The Last Judgment.
Only engravings, based on a drawing that has since been lost, remain of them.
The sequence of tablets seems a little erratic as one plaque has four names, most have three or two, and two plaques have only one.
Moreover, the progression moves from one side of the building to the other, but not consistently, and the figures the lunettes contain do not coincide closely with the listed names.
These figures vaguely suggest various family relationships; most lunettes contain one or more infants and many depict a man and a woman, often sitting on opposing sides of the painted plaque that separates them.
O'Malley describes them as "simply representative figures, almost ciphers".
There is also an indeterminate relationship between the figures in the spandrels, and the lunettes beneath them.
Because of the constraints of the triangular shape, in each spandrel the figures are seated on the ground.
In six of the eight spandrels the compositions resemble traditional depictions of the Flight into Egypt.
Of the two remaining, one shows a woman with shears trimming the neck of a garment she is making while her toddler looks on.
The Biblical woman who is recorded as making a new garment for her child is Hannah, the mother of Samuel, whose child went to live in the temple, and indeed, the male figure in the background is wearing a distinctive hat that might suggest that of a priest.
The other figure who differs from the rest is a young woman who sits staring out of the picture with prophetic intensity.
Her open eyes have been closed in the restoration.
Section References