Out of Darkness: Restoring The Frescoes' Brilliant Past
No one knows who mandated the ceiling's theme. After Michelangelo reportedly told Julius II that a mere rendering of Christ's 12 apostles (as originally proposed) would be a poor use of the space, the artist wrote to a friend saying he had been given a free hand to design whatever he wanted.
In essence, the ceiling's Old Testament and classical vignettes point forward in time toward the salvation that was to be man's through Jesus Christ's birth, death and resurrection.
The ceiling's possibilities are endless.
As long as they exist, the frescoes' significance will be analyzed, dissected and debated by theologians and critics. But for millions of us with ordinary stiff necks, the frescoes of Michelangelo exist just as powerfully outside these realms of formal, esoteric knowledge.
If we are willing to admit our innocent, unsophisticated awe in their presence, we will find their glory in the fact that one of our species created them. One of us, given a giant's share of craft and vision, elicited from pigment and flat plaster a monument as round, as moving, as lasting as sculpted Carrara marble.
As an artist, Michelangelo depended on that God-given light to create. As observers, we depend on it for our vision of the artist's greatness. Resident as we are in the final years of the 20th century, we are the lucky ones, for millions of others within the last four and a half centuries have seen Michelangelo's Chapel frescoes through smoked lenses. The frescoes' colorful brilliance has been shrouded in layers of oily black soot, dulled animal glue, ordinary dirt and the more recent residue of Rome's automotive gnats that swarm just outside the Vatican's ramparts.
The accumulated grime of centuries dulled colors and erased detail. It flattened the frescoes and robbed them of their succulent roundness.
But thanks to a decade-long effort by the Vatican's restorers, the mask has been lifted. Michelangelo supplied the originals, but in many ways, much of the credit for today's frescoes belongs to restorers like Gianluigi Colalucci, who, together with Maurizio Rossi, Piergiorgio Bonetti and Bruno Baratti, have cleaned the chapel's walls and ceiling by hand.
The frescoes, despite their age and discoloration, were in very good condition, primarily because the artist played by the rules of the buon fresco technique.
As the day began, Michelangelo, or an assistant, mixed a batch of lime with water and a volcanic ash called pozzolana. Michelangelo then spread a day's worth of wet plaster onto the ceiling and began painting. When the lime combined with the water in the plaster and carbon dioxide in the air, it formed calcium carbonate - the basic formula for limestone. Trapped in that stony matrix were bits of pigment that their colors to the robust surface.
 |
Vatican records reveal that within 20 years after his death Michelangelo's frescoes were being "restored" to erase the effects of the environment 323 a pre-electric environment characterized by votive candles and flaming braziers used for heat and light. The earliest restoration attempts involved lightly scrubbing the surface with stale bread. Later technicians daubed Greek wine on the surface to remove soot. The most significant change began as 16th century restorers brushed animal glue on the frescoes to smooth a surface roughened by salt that refracted light, dulled colors and reduced contrast.
The early restorers' attempts were successful, but only in the short term since animal glue, like the glop we used as aspiring five-year-old artists, darkens with age.
For months before the modern-day restorers began their actual cleaning, a battery of art historians and scientists used non-destructive evaluation techniques to probe the ceiling's plaster, the clumsy applications of glue, and sooty encrustations to determine which was Michelangelo's work and which came later.
Working at less than half the speed of Michelangelo, the restorers slowly began stripping away those centuries of gloom using distilled water and a paste of relatively benign chemicals, including ordinary baking soda.
Next >>
|
|
