![]() Only a few highly skilled men working closely together can do that, and the fewer the better.”įrom their laborious and technically ingenious washing has emerged a brilliantly colored ring of strong figures representing Christ’s ancestors as envisioned by Michelangelo, as well as the prophets, sibyls and decorative bronze male nudes in the chapel’s lunettes and spandrels, the areas between the ceiling and windows. ![]() “Because restoring and cleaning over the huge surfaces of the Sistine-about 13,000 square feet of Michelangelo fresco-is a matter of careful balance on all surfaces. “Why don’t we use more people to do the job faster?” Persegati asked rhetorically. The chapel has been closed to tourists only for brief periods in the last four years, to permit scaffolding changes that allow the restorers to work out of the sight of the visitors. The results so far have been a revelation not only for art scholars, but also for the hundreds of thousands of ordinary visitors who have been allowed to pass through the chapel while the team of three restorers proceed with the step-by-step cleaning. “When we saw that the result was quite remarkable, we decided to go ahead.” “We were restoring the paintings of the Popes that flank the windows beneath Michelangelo’s lunettes and decided to clean a very small side of one of them,” said Walter Persegati, secretary and treasurer of the Vatican Museums who, with the director general of pontifical monuments, Carlo Pietrangeli, made the decision. But it was made almost by chance, according to one of the men involved. The decision to proceed with the restoration of Michelangelo’s monumental work, made four years ago, has been hailed as one of the wisest and most courageous in the history of art restoration. “Each was executed in three days, and to understand the speed with which he painted, you must realize that each group measures about 7 feet at the base by 11 feet high, and most of the human figures in the lunettes are 7 feet tall.” “The swift, almost furious execution of the images-sometimes the hairs of the brush remain in the plaster-makes the lunettes look like large colored sketches,” Mancinelli said. His name is synonymous with the glory of the Renaissance.As for Michelangelo’s use of dull colors, the cleaning, by the chief Vatican art restorer, Gianluigi Colalucci, and his two master restorer assistants, Maurizio Rossi and Pier Giorgio Bonetti, has revealed that the master painted so vividly-with bright apple-greens, orange-reds, striking yellows and subtle blues-that one critic said they “almost leap out of the wall.”Īnother of the more intriguing discoveries made by the cleaners was that Michelangelo worked at a rapid pace, at least around the lunettes, the 12 windows high on the walls where the ceiling begins to arch. Sculptor, painter, poet, architect, and sincere Christian-he embodied the grand tensions, complexities, uncertainties, and achievements of his era. Michelangelo himself became the true Colossus of Tuscany. Neither was a gigantic figure ever carved from the mountain face by the shores of Tuscany. Although 94 wagonloads of marble were quarried and shipped back to Rome, the papal tomb was never completed according to the original plan. While Michelangelo was considering the landscape, he was seized with the idea of carving a colossus out of a mountain that would be visible to seafarers from afar (one presumes comparable to the great Colossus of Rhodes, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world). ![]() When the pope saw Michelangelo's design, he was so delighted that he dispatched the artist immediately to the stupendous marble quarries of Carrara, not far from the Italian coast in Tuscany, to find suitable stone. In 1505, Pope Julius II called a much-admired Florentine sculptor named Michelangelo to Rome to create a huge, freestanding tomb with approximately 40 over-life-size marble statues, all to be made within five years. Michelangelo Buonarotti reached the pinnacle of fame as a sculptor, painter, and architect, yet he longed for something more. ![]()
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