When Michelangelo`s ceiling decoration of the Sistine Chapel was unveiled in 1512, we are told by an onlooker, the splendid cycle of paintings ”made the whole world rush to see it and left them speechless with wonder.”
A rush of a different kind began a couple of years ago, after the art-world gossip circuits began to buzz with alarming reports from some art historians. The gist of the talk was that the current cleanup of the dirty frescoes might be taking off far more than just dirt. From afar, these reports sounded very bad-Michelangelo`s own brushwork in danger, colors ruined by zealous restorers, the unity of this great artwork put in dire peril by irresponsible touchups.
But now that more than 3,000 art historians, conservation experts and art critics have taken the 65-foot ride up the rickety elevator to the movable scaffold where the work is going on, looked up close and come down singing hymns of praise to the Vatican cleaners, the whole fuss now seems more academic-in the worst sense-than ever.
The nay-saying art historians have seen the sand washed out from under their arguments by serious, careful counter-arguments. The scholars who`ve sifted the archival and physical evidence in this complex matter have decided that the squad of scrubbers working under head restorer Gianluigi Colalucci are doing their various jobs very well indeed.
For the rest of us, however, the chief argument for what`s being done is what has been done to this moment. The parts of the ceiling frescoes that have been scrubbed free of the grime, rabbit glue and bad patch jobs of almost 500 years are startlingly beautiful, compelling in their sheer artistic truth and vitality. Conservators and scholars can do many notable things, but they cannot produce the great, radiant and surprising art now being liberated from the murk of centuries.
Looking up at the Sistine`s vault awash in morning sunlight, standing on the crowded chapel floor, Vatican Museums curator Fabrizio Mancinelli points to the ”Fall and Expulsion of Adam and Eve,” now completed.
After cleaning, Adam and Eve have turned out to be adolescents when created, young adults in the garden and old people after the apple-”something that has never been seen, never been noted before,” says Mancinelli, who heads the entire project. And the snake has become a beautiful woman, not the ugly crone of the art-history books. The celebrated scene of God`s gift of life to Adam now takes place in an ethereally smoke-blue sky, not against crack-riven, gritty storm clouds.
A REAL EDUCATION
”There is just an enormous amount of information there,” Mancinelli says. ”Things have become more radical.”
The great ceiling paintings are being cleaned in the order Michelangelo painted them, from the ceremonial entrance to the chapel toward the altar-which is in reverse order of the Bible stories they illustrate.
The first-scrubbed picture, therefore, was the ”Drunkenness of Noah”
(1984); the last-scrubbed will be ”God`s Separation of Light and Darkness,” at the very beginning of creation. This summer, the huge scaffold stands under the ”Separation of the Sky and Water”-meaning that the adjacent ”Creation of Adam” is now finished, along with most of the ceiling.
On the Vatican`s public-relations front, however, things have become more peaceful. ”When you start cleaning, opening a small window, it is always shocking, and this is why the controversy started,” Mancinelli says. ”People have an attitude toward Michelangelo that they do not have for any other artist.”
But if Beck and the handful of anticleaners he led have been routed by a battalion of experts-and by the visually magnificent results of the cleaning- some muttering may perhaps still be in order. Not because the work is going too far, but because it now may be in danger of not reaching its stated intention.
TAMPERING WITH THE GOAL
That goal has always been to restore everything ruined by natural or cultural forces, remove everything added by human tinkering after Michelangelo climbed down off his scaffold for the last time, and generally to return the ceiling murals and the great wall painting of the ”Last Judgment” to their appearance of opening day.
In practice, however, some overpaintings done after Michelangelo`s day will have to remain. The famous limp finger Adam extends toward God, for example, was destroyed during an earlier attempted restoration and carefully painted back in by the restorer (or, more properly, the destroyer). If Adam is to have an index finger at all, then, it`s not going to be the one put there originally.
But the preservations of repainting go beyond such understandable instances to include some 16th Century diaperings of nudity undertaken at the behest of offended popes. ”The draperies cover what was a little too controversial,” Mancinelli says. ”They are a peculiar kind of thing which belongs to the history of the chapel. It was not the fact of having nudes, not the fact that they were naked, but because they resembled pagan idols.”
Thus the ”Last Judgment`s” St. Catherine, who is known to be quite naked under the drape thrown over her by a later hand, is to be left discreetly veiled-which is not what Michelangelo had in mind.
True, the drape belongs to the painting`s history. But so do the dirt, the glue slathered all over the murals in the 18th Century, the clumsy restorations and ”improvements” of various hands. But quite apart from the illogic of doing so, to leave the loincloths and drapes untouched is to deny
(if only a little) the sexual candor-the vision of transfigured carnality-that is at the center of Michelangelo`s accomplishment in the Sistine.
Mancinelli insists that the coy overpaintings at issue are very few. In 1993, when the entire project, is finished, it will be interesting to see whether the careful preservation of these little censorings will reap the same high praise the cleaning and restoration as a whole will surely receive. –
