An Unfamiliar Michelangelo

By ROBERT HUGHES

Down on the floor of the Sistine Chapel, it is winter tourist business as usual: the slow, noisy shuffling of packed bodies, as in a stockyard whose animals are all looking to heaven; the cricked necks, the bellowing guides, the august patterns on the remote ceiling. Up on the scaffolding, where the restorers are at work, things look quite different. The noise has receded; it is more like a hum of bees. The frescoes have moved forward, monopolizing one's whole field of attention, swollen, enormous in their intensity.

This is Michelangelo as he was not meant to be seen. One has the illicit thrill of inspecting the mechanism of illusion, of seeing what devices and abbreviations he used to make sure the figures would "read" from restricted angles 65 ft. below. One thinks of him on the ladder, carrying the scheme of exaggeration in his head like a brimful bucket. On the curved surfaces of the ceiling and spandrels, he used cartoons, full-size drawings whose outlines were transferred to the plaster. But the lunettes, or flat semicircular panels, around the top of the Sistine's windows, show no sign of these preliminaries. They were imagined on the spot, alla prima.

From 5 ft. away one sees how the chin of a woman is like a crag or how the white eyeballs of the old man on the left of the Jacob-Joseph lunette bulge like those of a bodhisattva in a "mad" Zen scroll; and how this is reinforced by colors nobody had seen since the end of the 16th century. They had begun to disappear almost from the moment Michelangelo began laying them on the wet plaster, in 1508.

The decision to clean the Sistine frescoes, made four years ago by the curatorial officers of the Vatican museums, headed by their director general, Carlo Pietrangeli, and their secretary-treasurer, Walter Persegati, is one of the most courageous ever made in the field of art conservation. The work has three stages and will take until 1992. The years 1980 to 1984 saw the cleaning of the lunettes, depicting the ancestors of Christ--until now the least visible part of Michelangelo's immense scheme. The years 1985 to 1988 will be spent on the ceiling and spandrels--the figures of the giant nudes, the prophets and the sibyls, and the narrative of the Old Testament. The last four years are reserved for The Last Judgment. In all, it will have taken the Vatican's small team of restorers (headed by the chief of its painting- restoration laboratory, Gianluigi Colalucci) longer to clean the 13,000 sq. ft. of fresco than it took Michelangelo to paint it.

To alter the look of the most grandiose and intimidating pictorial ensemble in the history of Western art is not a light matter. One of the difficulties of the job was, so to speak, metaphysical. Quite a body of interpretation has been raised on the traditional grayness of the Sistine frescoes. For Michelangelo was primarily a sculptor. He himself said so, especially when complaining that he had been forced to paint the Sistine, instead of getting on with the tomb for his tyrannous, charismatic patron, Pope Julius II. "I've grown a goiter at this drudgery," a poem of his on the matter begins, and finishes with the lines:

Now, John, I leave you to defend my honor, and my painting, which is dead.

This place is wrong for me, and I'm no painter.

It seemed, then, that "real" Michelangelo could be only sculptural. To such a world, color was irrelevant, a cosmetic. Or so it seemed to a succession of connoisseurs from the 17th to the 19th centuries. "Color would gravely damage this work," wrote an Italian, Giovanni Niccolini, in 1825. "It would no longer be the mental image of a feat beyond human conception."

Rarely had such an aesthetic misunderstanding been raised on the mere condition of a work of art. Michelangelo's sublime grayness was only grease and soot. The Sistine did not get electric light until somewhere around the turn of the century, and until then it was lighted by rows of fat tallow candles, which laid a pall of smoke all over the plaster. By the end of the 18th century or thereabouts, the frescoes were so dark that the Vatican had a coat of size, or dilute animal glue, put on to brighten them. It soon left the surface even darker than before. Another century or so of fumes and dark pseudo-Venetian tonal repaints (the fashion among the 19th century restorers) finished the job. By the 20th century, looking at the Sistine demanded a degree of concentration akin to listening to Beethoven through an inch of felt.

But fresco is a durable way of fixing a painted image: as long as the plaster holds, so will the color, which is chemically bonded into the plaster surface and does not fade. Consequently there was a good chance that the Sistine would contain the definitive version of Michelangelo as colorist and that it would be close to the bright high tones of his Doni Tondo in Florence's Uffizi. As the task of cleaning the lunettes went forward, this proved to be so. To work on the ceiling, the Vatican restorers had to construct a mobile steel bridge, carried on rails at window height; the rails rest on beams set into the same holes Michelangelo had cut into the wall to carry his original ponte, or bridge. Since this platform hides only one-fifth of the ceiling area at a time, the chapel stays open as cleaning goes on. Thus its final appearance, by 1992, will not be a shock; by then everyone will be used to the "new" Sistine, and the present slides and postcards will be curiosities. It is not likely that any big discoveries about the iconographic meaning of the frescoes lie in wait under the dirt, although doubtless some small details will be cleared up. And what is gone is gone: no amount of surface cleaning, for instance, can restore Michelangelo's nudes in The Last Judgment, draped at papal command by his pupil Daniele da Volterra.

Working with a solvent called AB-57, specially developed for use on fresco, the restorers found that the longaccumulated grime melted away like grease from tiles, disclosing an extraordinary range and delicacy of color underneath: fresh earthy greens, translucent Naples yellows, a panoply of subtle blues. This was an unfamiliar Michelangelo, a man preoccupied with the play of light. Moreover, the lunettes turned out, after cleaning, to have been remarkably spontaneous. Michelangelo painted them thinly from darks through lights, using broad, dilute washes like enormous watercolors, with lots of hatching and crisscrossing of color in the shadows. He worked so fast that in some places the restorers found the hairs from his brush still stuck in the plaster. In most cases, each lunette, with its greater-than-life-size figures, was finished in three days, and one cannot help thinking of them in terms of speed, luminosity and bravura, the last characteristics that would have suggested themselves to a viewer before cleaning. So where is the 19th century Michelangelo, the exalted Platonist of the Sistine? Still there, of course, but greatly enriched by the Vatican's decision to do the only right thing by his work.