Extraordinary maintenance for the Last Judgment: Michelangelo’s masterpiece regains its former light – Rome – Arte.it

Roma – While the Sistine Chapel will always remain open to welcome believers and visitors, behind a canvas that displays the image of the Final judgmentthe restorers from the Vatican Museums Restoration Laboratory for Paintings and Wooden Materials will carry out the cleaning work of Michelangelo’s greatest work.
The extraordinary maintenance started with the installation of the scaffolding Final judgment which will last approximately three months.
As Barbara Jatta, director of the Vatican Museums, stated, extraordinary maintenance will be carried out on Michelangelo’s mature masterpiece “About thirty years after the last intervention, completed in 1994 under the supervision of General Director Carlo Pietrangeli and carried out by the chief restorer of the Laboratory for the Restoration of Paintings and Wooden Materials of the Vatican Museums, Gianluigi Colalucci.” “Dedicated to Buonarroti in 1533 by Pope Clement VII for the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel – illustrates Fabrizio Biferali, curator of the Department of Art of the 15th and 16th centuries – the judgment only began with the new Pope Paul III, who would appoint the Tuscan artist ‘supremum architectum, sculptorem et pictorem’.» of the Apostolic Palace, releasing him from the contractual obligations for the tomb of Julius II, so that he could devote himself exclusively to the Sistine undertaking.

Michelangelo began painting the scene in the summer of 1536 and completed the work in the fall of 1541, covering an area of ​​180 square meters and 391 figures.
Faced with that extraordinary painting that, as Giorgio Vasari is said to have written, “filled all Rome with amazement and amazement”On October 31 of that year, Paul III was able to celebrate solemn vespers.

Following Colalucci’s intervention, which marked a turning point in the understanding of Michelangelo’s palette, the paintings in the Sistine Chapel were in the following years the subject of continued research and supervision by the Vatican Museums, which became necessary to evaluate their state of conservation.

To protect the frescoed surfaces, the Restoration Laboratory has initiated a preventive maintenance program of the entire decorative complex, through the systematic removal of deposits that have accumulated over time. Over the years, operations carried out exclusively at night using mobile platforms have affected the walls with Michelangelo’s lunettes, the Popes series and the great fifteenth-century scenes.

“The Last Judgment, which has been excluded until now – adds the chief conservator of the Laboratory for the Restoration of Paintings and Wooden Materials Paolo Violini – is today at the center of a specific maintenance campaign, made necessary by the presence of a widespread whitish veil, caused by the deposition of microparticles of foreign substances carried by air movements, which over time has weakened the chiaroscuro contrasts and has standardized the original colors of the fresco”.

The extraordinary maintenance intervention, which will also involve the Scientific Research Cabinet, the Conservator’s Office and the Photographic Laboratory, is supported by the Florida Chapter of the Patrons of the Arts at the Vatican Museums. It will restore to the masterpiece the chromatic and luminous quality desired by Michelangelo, in addition to the formal and expressive complexity of the work, and renew thirty years later the amazement that accompanied the completion of the great twentieth-century restoration.