Word: glue
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Michelangelo's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, is in its eighth year, with five years still to go. All the wall lunettes and three of the nine Old Testament scenes on the ceiling are finished, freed of 478 years of accumulated grime, crude repaints and successive coats of darkened glue size applied as a varnish by 17th and 18th century restorers. A quite different Michelangelo, one whose intensity and beauty of color matches his long-acknowledged grandeur as draftsman and iconographer, emerges. The vault of the Sistine is now the domain of light...
...plaster dries, the color is literally bonded in. Further touches may be put on a secco, on the dry plaster. The antis believe that some of the darkness of the Sistine ceiling and lunettes was put there by Michelangelo himself, in a dark wash of black pigment in glue size, brushed on after the fresco was dry to give more density to the figures and atmosphere to the space. They think this wash is being "indiscriminately" swabbed off along with the dirt. Beck claims that Colalucci and his team, who have done nothing but study the Sistine for the past...
What weakens the antis' case is that they have not produced clear physical or documentary evidence that any of the glue and lampblack on the Sistine was put there by Michelangelo himself. James Beck cites a phrase in an account by Ascanio Condivi, a Renaissance biographer, about Michelangelo applying "so to speak, the ultima mano" (final touches) to the mighty fresco cycle; but Condivi did not say what medium these touches were in. Giorgio Vasari (1511-74), whose Lives of Italian artists is a fundamental source on the Sistine, describes how "Michelangelo desired to retouch some parts a secco, painting...
...critics, believes Michelangelo took the Sistine as an opportunity of asserting the power of what his rival could not do: "Michelangelo, who was always in competition with Leonardo, wanted to reaffirm the traditional buon fresco technique. The Sistine is that affirmation." True fresco did not include the use of glue sizing and dark washes a secco. "No other fresco painter applied such a glue," says Head Restorer Colalucci, "so why should Michelangelo have done so? He knew very well that the final result could not have lasted long. To suggest that he gave his fresco a glue sizing...
...less monochrome reptile of old, reveals the most delicate complexities of feathered stroking in green and yellow over reddish tones of shadow. The slow drying of the intonaco gave Michelangelo all the time he needed to correct his shadows without having to use the washes of black pigment and glue size that the critics believe to be his handiwork. And because his retouching was chemically integrated with the plaster, there is no reason to suppose that the solvent AB-57 would remove...