Robert Hughes provides the most informative account to date of the Sistine Chapel-cleaning controversy ((ART, April 27)). Regrettably, the before and after photographs accompanying the article are misleading. If the conserved fresco really looked like TIME's illustration, the critics would be right. However, the cleaned fresco is not flat and washed out but fully modeled and richly colored.
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...
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