* Michelangelo ceiling frescoes 500 years old
* Sistine Chapel visited by five million people a year
* Critics says too many visitors damaging frescoes
By Philip Pullella
VATICAN CITY, Oct 31 (Reuters) – Michelangelo’s Sistine
Chapel ceiling frescoes turned 500 on Wednesday with the Vatican
warning it may eventually limit visitors to protect one of the
wonders of Western civilisation.
On October 31, 1512, only 20 years after the discovery of
America, Pope Julius II said an evening vespers service to
inaugurate the room where Michelangelo toiled for four years,
much of it on his back, to finish his ceiling frescoes.
The frescoes immediately became the talk of the town and
have since become the talk of the world.
The problem is that it sometimes feels that they have become
the walk of the world. The Sistine Chapel is arguably the most
visited room in the world.
With mass tourism growing, every year some five million
people, as many as 20,000 a day in summer, enter the chapel,
crane their necks upwards. Most are left awestruck.
The ceiling of the chapel, where cardinals meet in secret
conclaves to elect new the pope, includes one of the most famous
scenes in the history of art – the arm of a gentle bearded God
reaching out to give life to Adam in the creation panel.
Earlier this month, Italian literary critic Pietro Citati
sparked a storm by writing an open letter in a major Italian
newspaper denouncing the behaviour of crowds visiting what is
technically a sacred place.
Tourists, he said, “resemble drunken herds” as they
unwittingly risked damaging the frescoes with their breath,
their perspiration, the dust on their shoes and their body heat.
The atmosphere, Citati wrote, was anything but contemplative
as the tourists ignored the Vatican’s requests for silence,
composure and a ban on taking photographs.
SWEAT, DUST AND CARBON DIOXIDE
Citati became the latest critic to demand that the Vatican
severely limit the number of visitors to the Sistine, a must-see
for visitors to the eternal city.
Antonio Paolucci, the director of the Vatican Museums, said
he did not foresee limiting the number of visitors “in the short
and medium term” but said the museums might not have any choice
after that.
“Pressure caused by humans such as dust introduced, the
humidity of bodies, carbon dioxide produced by perspiration can
cause unease for the visitors, and in the long run, possible
damage to the paintings,” Paolucci said in an article in the
Vatican newspaper to mark the 500th birthday of the ceiling
frescoes.
“We might limit the access, putting a cap on the number (of
visitors). We will do this if tourism grows beyond the limits of
reasonable tolerance and if we are not able to respond
adequately to the problem,” he said.
Under the current system, visitors to the Vatican museums
can either book times to enter or wait in long queues outside,
but there is no cap on the total daily number.
In 1994, at the end of a 14-year restoration project,
technicians installed an elaborate system of dehumidifiers, air
conditioning, filters and micro-climate controls in the chapel.
But the number of visitors has grown in the past 18 years,
putting the system under stress.
Paolucci said Carrier air conditioning, a unit of United
Technologies, was studying a “new, high-tech, radically
innovative” project to protect the frescoes from atmospheric
damage. The new equipment should be ready in a year, he said.
The director of the museums said the Sistine, where
Michelangelo returned between 1535 and 1541 to paint the
monumental Last Judgement panel behind the main altar, is for
many a “fatal attraction, an object of desire”.
He said a way would have to be found to allow as many people
as possible to satisfy their artistic yearning while at the same
time defending the precious frescoes from damage.
