Benedict XVI to celebrate Vespers
at the Sistine Chapel to mark 500 years
since Michelangelo's ceiling frescoes
were inaugurated by Julius II
Just as Pope Julius II did on October 31, 1512, Pope Benedict XVI will preside at the celebration of Vespers at the Sistine Chapel today to mark the day when his predecessor inaugurated the vaulted ceiling that had been painted with frescoes by Michelangelo in 1508-1512.
Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel:
Five centuries of blinding light
by Antonio Paolucci
Director of the Vatican Museums
Translated from the 10/31/12 issue of
Every day, at least 10,000 persons - and up to 20,000 during the peak tourist season - visit the Sistine Chapel. People of every origin, language and culture. Of every religion or no religion at all.
The Sistine Chapel is the fatal attracation, the object of the desire, the irrenunciable goal of museumgoers, the migrants of what has come to be called cultural tourism.
But the Sistine Chapel, although it is part of the standard tour of the Vatican Museums, is not a museum. It is a religious space, a cosnecrated chapel. More than that, it is the true and proper emblematic site of the Roman Catholic Church.
Here, great liturgies have been celebrated, and here, cardinals gathered in conclave have elected Popes for more than five centuries. At the same time, the Sistine is also the figurative and artistic synthesis of Catholic theology.
The history of the world - from the Creation to the Last Judgment - is represented in the Chapel, along with the destiny of mankind redeemed by Christ. The Sistine tells the story of salvation for each and everyone, even as it is an affirmation of the primacy of the Bishop of Rome
It illustrates the story of a Church which has absorbed, transformed and adopted the legacy of the Old Testament. It is the ark of the new and definitive covenant that God has established with the Christian people.
It was not accidental that the architext Baccio Pontelli, who worked on the chapel from 1477-1481, to modify and elevate the pre-existing structure, wished to give what would be Pope's Cappella Magna (main chapel), the measurements of the Temple of Jerusalem as it is described in the Bible.
Whoever enters the Sistine Chapel, in fact, enters an immense theologico-cultural charade that is difficult to comprehend at first glance. There are images (like the Creation of Man, and Original Sin) which will evoke in the vistor's memory - provided he comes from a country with a Christian culture - fragments of the Bible stories he learned as a child.
There are other images - the Prophets, the Sybils, some episodes of the Old Testament - that the ordinary visitor may not know at all. Because who, even among visitors who are practising Catholics, would know anything about the Punishment of Aman, or the raising of the serpent of bronze, or who would be able to explain, with a minimum of correctness, who was the Sybil Cumana or the Prophet Jonah?
And then, there is Michelangelo with his great celebrity who - like a too-strong light who blinds everyone around him - also occupies the attention of the visitor, which makes it more difficult for him to have a systematic grasp of the system of symbols with which Michelangelo worked.
There are various ways entering into the 'Sistine system', and all are necessary.
First of all, there is iconographic understanding in order to decipher the symbols. One must look, look again, and then look once more, at the scenes illustrated in the frescoes to try and locate them in time, in history, in the doctrine that has given them meaning.
Then one must grasp the stylistic message, which is a difficult task for those who do not have the right historico-critical knowledge to do so.
On that October 31, 1512, when Pope Julius II celebrated Vespers to inaugurate Michelangelo's frescoed vault - which he completed after immense effort that lasted four years (1508-1512) - the Pope could not have imagined that the frescoes covering more than a thousand square meters would unleash onto the history of art a violent torrent bearing not just happiness but also devastation, as Woelfflin wrote in 1899.
In fact, after Michelangelo's monumental work on the vaulted ceiling of the Sistine, the history of art in Italy and in Europe would change radically. Nothing could be as before. The vault started that era in art that the manuals call Mannerism.
The vault, wrote Giorgio Vasari, would become the lamp destined to light the history of art styles for the next generations of artists.
To understand the radicality of the revolution achieved by Michelangelo, one must compare his frescoes with those that Julius II's uncle, Pope Sixtus IV (for whom the chapel is named), had commissioned for the walls of the chapel from the best artists in his time - Ghirlandaio, Botticelli, Perugino, Luca Signorelli.
The visitor who first feasts his eyes on the frescoes on the vault and then at the frescoes on the wall will have the impression that Michelangelo and the other artists were separated in time by 300 years and not by 30 years.
This comparison will suffice to make even the first-time visitor who can only spare an hour in the Sistine Chapel understand the depth and extent of the mutation that Michelangelo Buonarroti had wrought in the art of painting - a revolution that was philosophical, spiritual and religious and not just stylistic.
In addition - to the knowledge of iconography and the competencies of the art historian, one must also have the sensibility of an art conservator - there is also an approach to the Sistine that concerns how the 'usage' of our day weighs on this supreme document of human civilization.
It is an approach that I know ever well because it concerns my responsibility as the director of the Vatican Museums. Five million visitors come into the Sistine Chapel every year - at least 10,000 a day, and double that during the peak of the tourist season. That represents a very difficult problem.
The human presence, with the dust on his clothes, with the humidity that bodies have, with the carbon dioxide exhaled during breathing, all this are not just inconvenient for the visitors who are sometimes packed into the chapel, but are also factors that could damage the paintings in the long run.
We could limit access at any one given time, setting a maximum number. And we shall do so if the touristic pressure should incrase beyond the limits of reasonable tolerability and if we fail to confront the problem effectively.
But I believe that in the medium term, capping the number of visitors at any one time will not be necessary. Meanwhile - and this is the goal that has occupied our efforts in recent months - we must put to use all the most advanced technological means that are capable of filtering out dust and other pollutants, that will allow fast and efficient air flow and exchange, along with temperature and humidity controls.
This is being carried out, using the most sophisticated and radically innovative technology, by the multinational Carrier which is a world leader in the climatization industry. I am confident that within a year, the new installation will be functioning.
Giovanni Urbani, a great contemporary architect, says that it is not for our time to be given a new Michelangelo, but we are given progress in technology which will allow us, if we use it correctly, to conserve the Michelangelo works that history has passed on to us in good condition for as long as possible.
The restoration of Michelangelo's frescoes:
When the colors of genius
were recovered for posterity
Translated from the 10/31/12 issue of
The dramatic difference between the Sistine vault frescoes before and after the massive clean-up restoration; below, a composite of the panel on Original Sin, with the left side before the clean-up, and the right, afterwards.
On March 25, 1990, Pope John Paul II inaugurated an exhibit entitled "Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel: The technique, the restoration, the myth", which was organized in close collaboration by the Vatican Museums and the Vatican Apostolic Library.
The following day, an international conference on the same topic opened at the Palazzo della Cancelleria.
Noth initiatives were born from the same need: to put at the disposition of the public all the information that had been gathered in order to allow a first complete analysis of the problems that had to be confronted and the results of the restoration.
The exhibit was primarily addressed to the wider public, the conference to the narrow circle of specialists, who were shown, among other things, the first tests of the 'clean-up' done on the Last Judgment, creating a kind of bridge between the problems of the past and those of the present, and an occasion to review the stages of the extraordinary operation that led to the recovery of the original colors of Michelangelo's masterpiece.
Between 1964 and 1974, under the supervision of Deodecio Redig de Campos who was also director of the Vatican Museums at the time, the cleaning of the panels illustrating the stories of Jesus and of Meses was undertaken using the best available means at the time.
That work had been preceded in 1935-1938 by consolidating the plasterwork on half of the vault and of the minor lunettes (half-moon shaped panels). Getting to the bridge over the entrance wall to the chapel, they had come almost to the lunettes painted by Michelangelo on the ancestors of Jesus.
Chief restorer Gianluigi Colalucci took the occasion to try cleaning out out a postage-stamp sixed area on the lunette representing Mathan and Eleazar. The attempt was then extended to the whole lunette.
What emerged, pefectly conserved under a thick layer of dust, some and gum, were the original colors as Michelangelo painted them - "those colors", said Carlo Pietrangeliu, then the director general of Pontifical monuments, galleries and museums, "that we had been accustomed to see in the first generation of Florentine Mannerists and that Michelangelo himself had used in his tondo (round painting) of the Holy Family".
"It became necessary at this point," he continues, "to reflect on what we could do - we were faced with the enormous responsibility of carrying out a daring operation, whose results would eventually prove extremely important to the history of art. One consideration impelled us to proceed without delay - in many places of the painted surfaces, the images appeared 'torn' because of the variations in humidity and temperature over time, by layers of glue that had been slapped on the frescoes over the centuries to improve the visibility of the images or to cover up the fading caused by infiltration of rainwater into the ceiling. The clean-up was therefore urgent not just to recover the original colors, but in order to assure the very conservation of the frescoes."
To carry out the restoration of the ceiling frescoes, an appropriate mobile scaffold was built of light metal suported by the short beams that had supported Michelangelo's own scaffold and that were revealed after cleaning the lunettes along the walls of the chapel.
Between June 1980 and October 1984 the first stage of restoration, the work upon Michelangelo's lunettes, was achieved. The focus of the work then transferred to the ceiling, which was completed in December 1989 and from there to the Last Judgment. The restoration was unveiled by Pope John Paul II on 8 April 1994. The final stage was the restoration of the wall frescoes, approved in 1994 and unveiled on 11 December 1999.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 31/10/2012 03:47]