Word: michelangelo
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...exposure," observes Dr. Stephen Kurtin, a New York City dermatologist. Michael, 46, a lean Manhattan executive typifies the trend. Over the past six months he has undergone a grand-slam rehab: eye lift, face-lift and collagen shots to plump out his facial wrinkles. "I had a body by Michelangelo and face by Goya," he says. "No matter how much exercise I did, the face didn't respond...
...should burn with a hard gemlike flame and that comme il faut means proper. They are too busy moving their curriculum between the trendy and the arbitrary. Why, for example, is Sartre listed but not Camus? Why Norman Mailer but not Saul Bellow or John Updike? Leonardo but not Michelangelo? Venereal disease but not AIDS? Why Beverly Hills but not St. Louis? Cole Porter but not Leonard Bernstein? Muammar Gaddafi but not Francois Mitterrand? Bogart but not Olivier or even Cagney? Such questions guarantee that the book will indeed spur discussions all summer long, but perhaps not the ones...
Illustrations of the conserved frescoes published to date show only details taken from the scaffolding under artificial light. But the cleaning is ultimately to be judged from the floor of the Sistine Chapel, as originally viewed by Michelangelo's contemporaries, with the full stretch of the ceiling bathed in natural light from the upper windows. So viewed, the frescoes are clear, strong and wonderfully harmonious -- fully in keeping with the central Italian fresco tradition...
...photographs you used of the frescoes before cleaning look disgustingly cruddy, while those taken afterward are washed down, inpainted and appallingly Disneyish. It is true that Michelangelo's lunettes had suffered from water seepage and required some restoration, but the vast barrel vault itself was relatively pristine; it did not need cleaning. The frescoes now present a fresh Michelangelo whose tie has been straightened to the strangulation point and whose ears are scoured until the ears themselves disappear. The "conservation" that has been done on the Sistine Chapel may be good for tourism, but it is death for the frescoes...
...keeping with the surrounding medieval structures and would emerge as a distasteful visual anachronism. A close examination of your color illustrations reveals that the Sistine Chapel's uncleaned surfaces have a warmth of spirit that is absent in the cleaned areas. The vitality of the "old" Michelangelo is absent in the bland, dispirited imagery that has emerged...