by Ross King
In the 1520s, Marcantonio Raimondi, the pre-eminent engraver in Italy, made prints of a number of the scenes. Many other sets of prints appeared in the decades that followed, with engravers as far away as the Netherlands reproducing Michelangelo’s figures, one set of which was bought at auction, in the following century in Amsterdam, by a famous painter and enthusiastic collector named Rembrandt van Rijn. Such engravings, as well as artistic excursions to the Sistine Chapel itself, served to inscribe Michelangelo’s work on the European imagination, ensuring that no artistic education could be complete without a thorough knowledge of his work. When Sir Joshua Reynolds exhorted his students at the Royal Academy in London to copy from Michelangelo’s fresco – which he called ‘the language of the Gods’,9 and which he himself had copied during his visit to Rome in 1750 – his injunction must almost have seemed redundant. Artists had long been using the Sistine Chapel as a storehouse of ideas, and they continued to do so long after Reynolds – so much so that the French Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro later observed that artists treated the works of Michelangelo as a ‘portfolio’ through which they could ‘rummage’.10 Indeed, from Peter Paul Rubens, who made chalk studies of the Ignudi and The Brazen Serpent in 1602, and whose ‘Sturm und Drang’ style, developed when he returned to Antwerp, featured heroically straining nudes; through William Blake, whose first graphic work of art was a pen-and-wash copy of an Adamo Ghisi engraving of the Sistine fresco; to the great Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, who spent seventeen months sketching and studying frescoes in Italy in the early 1920s, and whose first public mural, Creation, painted in the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria in Mexico City in 1922, features a nude Adam seated on the ground with his left knee retracted – almost every painter of note, for more than four centuries, would ‘rummage’ through Michelangelo’s seemingly inexhaustible portfolio, reproducing gestures and poses whose contours and configurations are now as familiar as the shape of Italy on a map.
Still, not everyone who saw Michelangelo’s fresco was entirely impressed. For Pope Hadrian VI, a puritannical scholar from Utrecht who succeeded Leo X in January of 1522, it seemed yet another example of the kind of Roman decadence that Martin Luther was using to whip up enmity against the Church. Unhappy about celebrating Mass beneath images that were, in his opinion, more appropriate to a bathhouse than a Christian chapel, Hadrian threatened to bring the fresco crashing to the floor. Fortunately, he died after a reign of only eighteen months.
Michelangelo’s fresco has weathered the centuries remarkably well, serving as an admirable illustration of Vasari’s confident assertion that fresco ‘resists anything that would injure it’. It has survived, more or less intact, such depredations as a leaking roof, buckling walls and, in 1797, an explosion in the Castel Sant’Angelo that shook the chapel so violently that large chunks of plaster fell from the vault, including a patch on which the Ignudo above the Delphic Sibyl was painted.fn1 It has also endured centuries of insidious assault by numerous pollutants: clouds of incense and candle smoke from thousands of Masses; smoke from the ballot papers ceremonially incinerated by the cardinals at the end of each papal conclave;fn2 corrosive emissions from Rome’s oil-fired central heating and its million automobiles; and even the breath of the 17,000 daily visitors who release more than four hundred kilos of water into the air of the chapel, setting off a damaging cycle of evaporation and condensation.
The fresco has not come through entirely unscathed, of course. The candle smoke and incense, as well as the braziers used to heat the chapel in winter, darkened the fresco with layers of soot and grime even during Michelangelo’s own lifetime, leading to various attempts to restore its original brilliance. Following Domenico Carnevale’s repairs and retouchings in the 1560s, other interventions were made in the centuries that followed. In 1625, a Florentine artist named Simone Laghi used linen rags and slices of stale bread to remove as much as he could of the accumulated grime. He was followed in the next century by Annibale Mazzuoli, who cleaned the surface with sponges dipped in Greek wine, which the Italians used as a solvent. Mazzuoli and his son then retouched certain passages a secco, like Carnevale, and slathered a protective varnish across the surface.11
Restoration procedures eventually resorted to more precise techniques. In 1922, recognising the importance of preserving its priceless art collection, the Vatican founded its Laboratory for the Restoration of Pictures. Six decades later, this institution took on its greatest challenge. Prompted by concerns that the glues and varnishes from previous restorations were starting to flake and, in so doing, pulling away flecks of Michelangelo’s paint, the most thorough intervention in the fresco’s history commenced in June 1980. Funded by a Japanese television network, NTV, the Vatican’s chief restorer, Gianluigi Colalucci, launched a multimillion-dollar operation that would involve dozens of experts and take twice as long as Michelangelo had needed to paint the fresco in the first place.
Colalucci’s approach, overseen by an international examining committee, was a combination of high-tech wizardry – including a computer that digitised images from the vault and stored them in a giant database – and old-fashioned elbow grease. Spectrum technology determined the chemical compositions of Michelangelo’s paints, isolating them from those of subsequent restorers like Carnevale. The restorers’ secco additions were then removed, along with the grime and other extraneous substances, using AB57, a special cleaning solvent made from, among other things, sodium bicarbonate. The restorers applied this solvent on compresses of Japanese paper, leaving them in place for three minutes before cleansing the surface with distilled water. Cracks in the plaster were filled with stucco romano, a mixture of lime and marble dust, while any corroded patches received injections of a solidifying substance called Vinnapas.
With these steps completed, the fresco was retouched in a few places with watercolour paints. Standing on a special aluminium scaffold whose design mimicked Michelangelo’s, the Vatican’s restorers added these water-colours in parallel, vertical strokes, allowing future generations to tell where the work of Michelangelo ends and that of this latest restoration begins. Finally, to protect the colours from the pollutants that caused the damage in the first place, parts of the fresco were coated with an acrylic resin known as Paraloid B72.
Further measures were also taken to safeguard the fresco. To keep the chapel’s microclimate under control, the windows were hermetically sealed and banks of low-heat lights installed, together with a state-of-the-art air-conditioning system that filters the air and maintains a constant temperature of twenty-five degrees Celsius. An anti-dust carpet was laid on the stairs leading down from the Vatican apartments (where Raphael’s frescoes have also been restored using a similar array of techniques). The entire operation, documented with 15,000 photographs and twenty-five miles of 16mm film, was finished in December 1989.12
Such a comprehensive restoration of one of the great landmarks of Western civilisation did not proceed without criticism, especially since the removal of five centuries of scum revealed such unexpectedly brilliant colours that the Vatican’s restorers were accused by their detractors of having created a ‘Benetton Michelangelo’.13 Fought with a shrill animus on the front pages of newspapers and journals during the mid to late 1980s, the controversy drew into the fray personalities such as Andy Warhol and Christo, the Bulgarian-born artist famous for wrapping up buildings and stretches of coastline in colourful fabric. Criticism ultimately hinged on whether or not Michelangelo himself had applied many of the glue-based pigments and varnishes that Colalucci’s solvent had stripped away along with the film of soot. Opponents of the restoration claimed Michelangelo had made significant and extensive secco additions to the fresco, deepening its shadows and unifying the entire composition with darker tones. The restorers argued, on the other hand, that Michelangelo painted almost entirely in buon fresco, and that these darker tones were the accident of both airborne pollutants and the obscuring varnishes of incompetent restorations.
A number
of inconsistencies in the Vatican’s account of the cleaning were seized on by the critics, foremost among whom was the renowned American art historian James Beck of Columbia University. The Vatican first reported, for instance, that the application of Paraloid B72 was ‘thorough, complete and overall’, only to retract this statement a few years later when critics argued that the resin might eventually turn opaque, asserting instead that no protective coating of any sort was applied to the fresco other than in a few places on the lunettes.14 Similarly vacillating accounts have been offered regarding Michelangelo’s possible use of ultramarine, a pigment that; if present, was almost certainly removed by the solvent.15
Despite anxieties about its methods, the restoration brought to light an extraordinary amount of new information regarding Michelangelo’s technique, influences and collaborations. Although disagreement persists as to how extensively Michelangelo retouched the painting a secco, it seems clear that, after a faltering start, he increasingly used buon fresco, the method he had learned in the workshop of one of Florence’s greatest practitioners, Domenico Ghirlandaio. The full extent of the role played by Michelangelo’s helpers also became clearer. The idea of Michelangelo at the head of a team of assistants dashes the cherished notion of the artist toiling alone on his scaffold, on his back, like Charlton Heston in the 1965 film adaptation of Irving Stone’s novel The Agony and the Ecstasy. This image was exposed as nothing more than an appealing fallacy that, together with the camouflaging layers of soot and glaze, vanished beneath the tissue-paper poultices of AB57.16 Michelangelo himself was largely responsible for this myth, as were Vasari, Condivi and, much later, the German poet Goethe, who wrote, following a trip to Rome in the 1780s, that without visiting the Sistine Chapel we cannot understand what one man is capable of achieving.17 We now know that the fresco in the Sistine Chapel was not the work of a single individual. But for the millions of visitors who negotiate the labyrinth of the Vatican’s galleries and corridors to enter the chapel and seat themselves on its rows of wooden benches, staring upwards in unwitting imitation of the Prophet Jonah, the vision that rises above their heads is no less spectacular.
fn1 The unstable walls were the result of an old problem – the foundations on which the chapel was originally built. The entrance wall was the worst affected. In 1522, as Pope Hadrian VI entered the chapel, the door lintel collapsed, barely missing Hadrian and killing a Swiss Guard.
fn2 This ceremony involves stuffing the ballots into an old stove connected to the chimney of the Sistine Chapel, the pulling either the ‘black’ or the ‘white’ handle on the stove. Chemicals released by these handles ensure that the smoke issuing from the chimney is either black or white, indicating that the conclave has either succeeded (white) or failed (black) to elect the new Pope. In August 1978, during the conclave that elected John Paul I, the chapel itself was filled with a noxious black smoke after someone neglected to sweep the chimney. The III cardinals were nearly suffocated and further layer of grime added to the fresco.
The ROBOAM ABIAS lunette
Perugino The Giving of the Keys to St Peter
The NAASON lunette
The JOSIAS JECHONIAS SALATHIEL lunette and spandrel
The Prophet Jonah
WORKS BY RAPHAEL
The portrait of Pope Julius II painted for Santa Maria del Popolo in 1511
The Dispute of the Sacrament
The School of Athens
The Expulsion of Heliodorus
The Mass of Bolsena
The Triumph of Galatea from the Villa Farnesina
Notes
1: THE SUMMONS
1 Ascanio Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo, 2nd edn, trans. Alice Sedgwick, Wohl, ed. Hellmut Wohl (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), p. 6. All further references will be to this edition.
2 Quoted in Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo, 5 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1943–60), vol. 1, The Youth of Michelangelo, p. 91.
3 For Michelangelo’s summons to Rome, see Michael Hirst, ‘Michelangelo in 1505’, Burlington Magazine 133 (November 1991), pp. 760–6.
4 For the rivalry between Sangallo and Bramante, see Arnaldo Bruschi, Bramante (London: Thames & Hudson, 1977), p. 178.
5 The Letters of Michelangelo, 2 vols, ed. E.H. Ramsden (London: Peter Owen, 1963), vol. 1, pp. 14–15.
6 Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo, p. 35.
7 Ibid.
8 The Letters of Michelangelo, vol. 1, p. 15.
9 Quoted in Ludwig Pastor, The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages, 40 vols, ed. Frederick Ignatius Antrobus et al. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1891–1953), vol. 6, pp. 213–14.
10 Quoted in Christine Shaw, Julius II: The Warrior Pope (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 304.
2: THE CONSPIRACY
1 See Bruschi, Bramante, pp. 177–9.
2 Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo, p. 4.
3 Ibid., p. 39.
4 The Letters of Michelangelo, vol. 1, p. 15.
5 This charge is made in Condivi’s Life of Michelangelo, p. 30.
6 The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, trans. George Bull (London: Penguin, 1956), p. 31.
7 See Roberto Salvini and Ettore Camesasca, La Cappella Sistina in Vaticano (Milan: Rizzoli, 1965), pp. 15–23. The foreman in charge of the actual construction was Giovannino de’ Dolci. For a comparison between the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem and the Sistine Chapel, see Eugenio Battisti, ‘Il significato simbolico della Cappella Sistina’, Commentari 8 (1957), pp. 96–104; and idem, Rinascimento e Barocca (Florence: Einaudi, 1960), pp. 87–95.
8 Under a later pope, Innocent VIII, Pontelli became the Inspector General of the fortifications in the Marches, where he built three more fortresses: at Osimo, Iesi and Offida. But Pontelli also worked on the basilica of Santi Apostoli in Rome, commissioned by Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, who became Julius II.
9 See Karl Lehmann, ‘The Dome of Heaven’, Art Bulletin 27 (1945): pp. 1–27.
10 This letter is reproduced in Il Carteggio di Michelangelo, 5 vols, ed. Paola Barocchi and Renzo Ristori (Florence: Sansoni Editore, 1965–83), vol. 1, p. 16.
11 The idea of commissioning Michelangelo to paint the fresco may even have come from Sangallo himself. See Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, 2 vols, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere, with notes and introduction by David Ekserdjian (London: Everyman’s Library, 1996), vol. 1, p. 706.
12 Il Carteggio di Michelangelo, vol. 1, p. 16.
13 Ibid.
14 Recently it has been discovered that Michelangelo was associated with Ghirlandaio’s workshop as early as June 1487, when, at the age of twelve, he collected a debt of three florins for the master. See Jean K. Cadogan, ‘Michelangelo in the Workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio’, Burlington Magazine 135 (January 1993). pp. 30–1.
15 Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo, p. 10.
16 Two other early paintings sometimes attributed to Michelangelo are, in the opinion of some art historians, of debatable authenticity: The Entombment (in the National Gallery, London) and the so-called Manchester Madonna.
17 Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting, 2 vols, trans. A. Philip McMahon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), vol. 1, pp. 36–7.
18 Giorgio Vasari, Vasari on Technique, trans. Louisa S. Maclehose, ed. G. Baldwin Brown (New York: Dover, 1960), p. 216.
3: THE WARRIOR POPE
1 For an eyewitness account of debauchery at the Borgia court, see At the Court of the Borgias, being an Account of the Reign of Pope Alexander VI written by his Master of Ceremonies, Johann Burchard, ed. and trans. Geoffrey Parker (London: The Folio Society, 1963), p. 194.
2 Cellini, The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, p. 54.
3 The Letters of Michelangelo, vol. 1, p. 15.
4 Quoted in Pastor, History of the Popes, vol. 6, pp. 508–9.
5 Ibid., p. 509.
4: PENANCE
1 For details of the relationshi
p between the two men, see James Beck, ‘Cardinal Alidosi, Michelangelo, and the Sistine Ceiling’, Artibus et Historiae 22 (1990), pp. 63–77; and Michael Hirst, ‘Michelangelo in 1505’, pp. 760–6.
2 Quoted in Pastor, History of the Popes, vol. 6, p. 510.
3 Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo, p. 38.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 The Letters of Michelangelo, vol. 1, p. 148.
7 Ibid., p. 38.
8 Ibid., p. 19.
9 Ibid., p. 20.
10 Ibid., p. 21.
11 Ibid., p. 36.
12 In 1538, Michelangelo would erect this statue in its present position in the Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome.
13 The Letters of Michelangelo, vol. 1, p. 40.
14 Ibid.
15 See de Tolnay, Michelangelo, vol. 1, p. 39.
5: PAINTING IN THE WET
1 I Ricordi di Michelangelo, ed. Paola Barocchi and Lucilla Bardeschi Ciulich (Florence: Sansoni Editore, 1970), p. 1.
2 James Beck, ‘Cardinal Alidosi, Michelangelo, and the Sistine Ceiling’, p. 66.
3 Michelangelo had paid the troublesome Lapo d’Antonio eight ducats per month, or the equivalent of a salary of ninety-six ducats per year, for assisting him with the bronze statue in Bologna.
