Word: michelangelos
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What they had was a major discovery-the world's only group of mural sketches by Michelangelo Buonarroti, more than 50 large drawings, done in charcoal on the rough plaster of the walls and inadvertently protected by later whitewashing against age, flaking and the 1966 flood. After several months of restoration, the discovery is being exhibited in Florence this week...
Tourist Swarms. Like many such discoveries, the Michelangelo works were found partly by accident. For years, Dal Poggetto and his colleagues have been worrying about the crowds of tourists-sometimes 4,000 a day-who come swarming into the chapel to see the seven brooding marble statues that Michelangelo carved to commemorate the Dukes Lorenzo and Giuliano de' Medici. There is only one door for the tourists to enter and leave the chapel by way of the crypt...
...chapel's other doors. There are eight in all, two on each wall, but four of them are blank. A sealed door leads to the adjacent Church of San Lorenzo, and the last two open into small unused rooms on either side of the altar (Michelangelo called them lavamani, or washrooms). One of these lavamani had traces of various 16th century sketches under its old whitewash. The other had a trap door in its floor leading to a long, narrow storeroom. Perhaps, Dal Poggetto thought, the storeroom could become another exit to the street. But before digging into...
What Giovannoni found was that Michelangelo had evidently used the walls as a big doodling sheet, filling them with visual reflections on projects past and to come. They appear to be: a sketch for the legs of Duke Giuliano, a risen Christ striding forward from a wall by the staircase, a figure of Zacharias writing the name of John the Baptist on a tablet at the prompting of an angel, a memory of the Laocoon-the great Hellenistic figure group that had so impressed Michelangelo when he saw it, newly dug up from a vineyard, in Rome. Though...
...Poggetto has a theory. In 1527 the Medici, who had virtually become kings, were expelled from Florence by a wave of republican sentiment. When the Medici resumed their grip on the city in 1530, a purge of republicans followed, and a cutthroat named Alessandro Corsini was hired to murder Michelangelo-who had vocally sided with the republican cause. According to an old tradition, the great sculptor, who was then at work on the Medici tombs, hid in the bell tower of a church on the other side of the Arno. But ten years ago, a memoir was discovered...