Word: michelangelos
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...paint their versions of Ecce Homo (Pilate presenting Christ to the mob). He bought the one that pleased him best, by Lodovico Cigoli, and eventually it passed to the Pitti Palace at Florence. Another version, by Domenico Passignano, is lost. The third, by the great Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, also disappeared...
...Venice city council-had been seen by the public, the battle began. The idea of a Frank Lloyd Wright house on the Grand Canal was enough. The art critic of the Italian weekly L'Europeo announced that "even if Wright were ten thousand times greater than Michelangelo, it would be presumptuous of him to wish to build on the Grand Canal." Letter writers to the London Times denounced the Wright invasion as "a piece of inexcusable vandalism." Mrs. Marie Truxtun Beale, a wealthy U.S. socialite, who helped raise more than $125,000 for repairs to St. Mark...
...Michelangelo's Conversion of St. Paul, in the Vatican's Pauline Chapel, had always troubled a Vatican official named Filippo Magi. The composition is dominated not by the prostrate St. Paul but by his horse, which Magi described as having "an expressionless and towering head similar to that of a mule." And curiously, the horse was bridled, though Michelangelo made a habit of painting horses without bridles. Last summer Magi persuaded a Vatican colleague, Professor Deoclecio Redig de Campos, that the strange beast might be the result of overpainting by some unknown bungler. De Campos took an infra...
Neither of the experts could determine from the photograph whether the second head was anything more than Michelangelo's own rough draft, but they resolved to gamble that it was complete, and set about removing the top head. "We were scared when we started scraping," De Campos confesses, "because, had there been nothing much underneath and had we beheaded that horse, no one would have ever forgiven...
...could guess who had tampered with the fresco, but apparently the damage was done centuries ago. Hardest to explain was the fact that, over those centuries, artists and scholars without exception accepted the mulish impostor as Michelangelo's work. "Probably," says De Campos, "it's because people take things for granted when a big name is involved...