Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel

The exhibition has been planned and mounted in close collaboration with the Vatican Museums and the Vatican Library. It is being held in a moment of transition between the end of the cleaning of the vault and the beginning of the work on the Last Judgment and opens in conjunction with an international conference, organised by the Vatican Museums with the goal of providing a scholarly forum for discussing the key issues of the restoration and its results to date. The exhibition seeks to offer the most exhaustive vision possible by bringing together documents from Rome and the Vatican, which trace of the history of the Chapel and the vicissitudes of Michelangelo’s frescoes, with a selection of copies and engravings from the 16th century. Upon completion of the structural analysis of the Chapel, a 1:20 model of the entire structure was made (including the great ceiling, cellars and apartments of the masters of ceremony), based on the photogrammetric survey of the vault, which, once stored on computer, provided the basic scheme on which data regarding the state of conservation of Michelangelo’s decoration and techniques were inserted and filed. The exhibition provides ample illustration of the intervention through graphic and photographic documentation on both the preliminary laboratory investigations and the actual cleaning, which is further documented in a video filmed during the work on the second half of the vault. A great deal of space is given to analysing Michelangelo’s techniques for planning and carrying out his work (thanks to photographs taken during the restoration) through tracings of the indirect engravings that materialised the negatives of Michelangelo’s lost cartoons, through another video that reconstructs, moment by moment, the transposition of the cartoon and pictorial realisation of the Creation of the sun and the moon, and through a series of autograph drawings (from the Vatican Library collection, the British Museum in London, the Ashmolean in Oxford, and the Uffizi and Casa Buonarroti in Florence). The choice was limited exclusively to those studies that would document the diverse typologies of the various steps and, at the same time, the transformation between the vault and the Last Judgment. A model reconstructing the imagined architecture of Michelangelo’s vault in the same scale as the actual architecture makes a further contribution to studying planning process, while another model of the part of the vault depicting the Lybic Sybil and the section of the bridge below enables the visitor to verify the true proportions of the surface on which Michelangelo worked, to observe the visual deformation addressed daily, and to immerse themselves in the conditions experienced by the artist and the restorers. A series of drawings, paintings and prints (on loan from the Vatican Library and other sources) proposes to outline but by no means exhaust the issue of the more or less immediate and lasting success of Michelangelo’s frescos in the Sistine Chapel. The prints, all of which are from the Vatican Library, constitute the greater part of those completed in the 16th century and record, for the vault, the focus concentrated on the isolated images of the Soothsayers and the Nudes, with the nearly constant exclusion – with but a few exceptions – of the Scenes from Genesis. For the Judgment, immediate interest led to the printing of a large number of copies most of which were done, even after Daniele da Volterra’s censoring, from Venusti’s painting of 1549, on display here after being cleaned for the occasion. The drawings, instead, comprise only a small selection of significant works, from the copiously faithful copies by Rubens to those employing single motifs in a different context, as in Raphael?s sketch, recently discovered in Stockholm and drawn at nearly the same time as the dismantling of the bridge of the vault. Caravaggio’s painting of Young St John, liberally modelled after one of the Nudes from the end of the century, is of the same nature. The selection is purposely limited, as already mentioned, to briefly sketch a theme, highlighting the reasons for interest but leaving the task of further investigation to other exhibitions and institutions.

Venice, Island of San Giorgio Maggiore
27 April – 28 July 1991

Information
Institute of Art History
Island of San Giorgio Maggiore – 30124 Venice
tel. +39 041 2710230
fax +39 041 5205842
e-mail: arte@cini.it

in collaboration with ‘Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana’