Shedding light on Sistine glory

Press, 25 February 1987, Page 19

Shedding light on Sistine glory

From

DAVID WILLEY,

London

“Observer,” in Rome

One of the art world’s most important events this century — the restoration of Michelangelo’s panoramic ceiling painting in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel to its original state — is now half complete. It was first unveiled by Pope Julius II on the morning of All Saints’ Day in 1512. The painstaking work of removing the accumulation of four and a half centuries of grime and candlesmoke has been sponsored by a Japanese television company.

It hopes to recoup its million dollar investment from the sale of film and photographic reproduction rights. The cleaning began in 1980 and is scheduled to be completed in 1992.

The result, seen either from the floor 18 metres below or from scaffolding used by the skilled team of Vatican restorers, is a revelation. Comparing

the dulled and muddy colours of the unrestored half of the ceiling with the brilliant tones and striking figure painting of the part cleaned with chemical solvents, is like suddenly removing a pair of sunglasses and emerging into the sunlight On the ceiling of the chapel where the solemn election of a Pope takes place on the death of his predecessor, Michelangelo painted the pagan and Hebrew prophets and the entire story of the Creation from the Bible. Working alone, it took him only four years to complete, a third of the time it is taking the team of eight to carry out a restoration. It Is not until you take the small Swiss-built lift to the moveable scaffold just a few feet from the ceiling that you realise the enormous difficul-

ties under which the Renaissance artist worked. The ceiling itself is very uneven, and while Michelangelo was working on it, cracks had alreay begun to appear. The cause was the laying of the foundations of the new St Peter’s Basilica nearby. One Christmas morning a few years after he had finished, two of the Pope’s Swiss Guards were killed when a heavy piece of masonry above the entrance door fell on them. Because of the limitations of fresco technique — the area you can cover in a day is small, once the water-based pigment dries on the prepared wet plaster corrections are difficult — the 5500 sq ft ceiling had to be divided up into tiny sections. The marks where Michelangelo pricked out the outlines of his figures from the paper cartoons from which he first worked can still be seen. As the Sistine Chapel was built as the private chapel of the Popes, millions of candles were burned there before the installation this century of electric light Oil lamps and bra-

ziers for heating all helped to blacken the ceiling. The ceiling was cleaned for the first time about IQO years after Michelangelo completed it? A seventeenth-century manuscript reports: “It was cleaned figure by figure with linen rags and the dust was removed with slices of cheap bread or any such lowly stuff.” After a lonely day painting on the scaffolding, Michelangelo sometimes relaxed by composing sonnets. In the margin of one of them Vatican researchers found a tiny selfportrait of the artist at work.

This finally scotched the theory that Michelangelo had painted lying down, slung from a hammock. He stood up on a wooden scaffolding fixed to the chapel walls, not the floor. Adam and Eve were painted naked and have remained so, but many of the figures in the Last Judgment were deemed indecent by a counter-Reforma-tion Pope who employed another artist, Daniele Da Volterra, to paint on loincloths. The restorers have yet to decide whether to remove them.