Conservator fought off critics to restore colour to Michelangelo’s chapel frescoes ‘U
Until you have seen the Sistine Chapel,’’ the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote in Italian Journey, an account of his travels across Italy in the 1780s, ‘‘you can have no adequate conception of what man is capable of accomplishing.
‘‘One hears and reads of so many great and worthy people, but here,’’ he continued, marvelling at the frescoes adorning the ceiling of the Vatican chapel, ‘‘above one’s head and before one’s eyes, is living evidence of what one man has done.’’
That man was Michelangelo Buonarroti, who began painting the Sistine ceiling in 1508. But for generations
– until the restoration effort undertaken in 1980 by Gianluigi
Colalucci, chief conservator of the Vaticanmuseums – visitors saw not only the living evidence of what Michelangelo had achieved, but the ravages that time had wreaked on his art.
A dusky hue had come to hang over the chapel, darkening Michelangelo’s representations of God giving life to Adam and Christ dispatching the saved and the condemned to their fates. The darkness, scholars determined, was the result of the accretion of dust and dirt, fungi, varnishes and wine used in primitive restorations, and soot from candles lit during papal conclaves and other religious observances.
To paint the Sistine ceiling, Michelangelo laboured atop a towering scaffolding, his neck craned skyward and paint dripping on to his face. In an enterprise that captivated the international art world, Colalucci, who has died aged 91, assumed the same position for the delicate task of cleansing the chapel of the layers of filth that had accumulated during the intervening centuries. It took Michelangelo four years to paint the ceiling, and 10 for Colalucci and his small team of restorers to clean it, not including the four years they then spent on The Last Judgment.
The restoration, although deeply controversial at the time, is regarded today as one of the most consequential undertakings in art history – an artistic resurrection that liberated Michelangelo’s work from a shroud of grime and allowed millions of visitors to experience the full palette of his colours as they had not been seen since the 16th century.
‘‘It changed art history. All of a sudden there was a new Michelangelo,’’ Renaissance scholar Carmen Bambach, a curator at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, told the New York Times, describing Colalucci’s work as ‘‘a gift that is of lasting, monumental contribution’’.
One of the most experienced conservators in Italy, Colalucci was hired by the Vatican in 1960. He became chief restorer in 1979, the year before the work on the Sistine Chapel began, and retired from the Vatican Museums
‘‘It changed art history. All of a sudden there was a new Michelangelo.’’
Gianluigi Colalucci
art conservator b December 24, 1929 d March 29, 2021
in 1995, the year after it was concluded.
Some artists and historians feared that any hand laid to Michelangelo’s frescoes could subject the Sistine Chapel to ruinous harm. In 1987, a group of artists including Christo and Andy Warhol petitioned Pope John Paul II to order a ‘‘precautionary’’ pause in the restoration. James Beck of Columbia University denounced it as an ‘‘artistic Chernobyl’’, while another preservationist accused Colalucci of ‘‘cleaning Michelangelo like a rug’’.
Colalucci, who displayed a seemingly constant equanimity under international scrutiny, once commented that ‘‘you don’t do this kind of work if you’re the nervous sort’’. Acknowledging his critics’ reservations, he observed that dirt had befouled the frescoes for so long that even experts struggled to imagine the chapel in a different light.
Through the painstaking application of a mild solvent, inch by inch across the chapel’s vault, Colalucci and his colleagues revealed the blazing greens and oranges and pinks and blues beneath the accumulated grime. The Last Judgment, on one wall, was even dirtier than the ceiling.
Colalucci reflected in National Geographic that ‘‘there comes a day for each of us when nothing will ever be the same again’’. For him, that day was when John Paul II celebrated a mass in the newly restored chapel. It ‘‘became transfigured by the sacredness of the mass, a sacredness that emanated not only from the Pope, but from the very frescoes that the day before I’d considered simply works of art’’, he wrote. ‘‘I felt like I had been struck by a bolt of lightning, and suddenly understood two important things: the transcendent spirituality ofmichelangelo’s paintings and the true meaning of working inside the Vatican.’’
Gianluigi Colalucci was born in Rome, and visited the Sistine Chapel for the first time at age 14. After high school, he attended the Institute for Restoration in Rome, graduating in 1953. He spent the early years of his career working in private and public art collections in Sicily. He restored celebrated frescoes of Raphael, and helped to restore Giotto’s frescoes in Scrovegni Chapel in Padua.
Survivors include his wife, Daniela Bartoletti Colalucci, and two sons. – Washington Post