The most ambitious and controversial art-restoration project of the 20th century, the cleaning of 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.
There is no gain without a sense of loss, however temporary. An equation between the ceiling's darkness and the profundity of Michelangelo's mind is old and runs very deep. To find such a father figure decking himself, as it were, in azure, malachite green, rose, yellow, lavender and pink, in the silky and atmospheric sheen of colori cangianti, or shifting colors, is disorienting; one is still apt to think of color as a feminine rather than a patriarchal attribute. One may recoil, feeling that it is somehow better to embrace the frescoes we know than the ones Michelangelo painted. And given the torment inflicted on great paintings by restorers over the years, one may be suspicious of all cleaning.
Hence the controversy that has risen over the past few months as the Vatican's head restorer, Gianluigi Colalucci, and his team on the scaffold move toward the cleaning of the most famous image in Western art, Michelangelo's Creation of Adam.
The most convinced antis are James Beck, head of the department of art history at Columbia University; Alexander Eliot, a former art critic of TIME; and Alessandro Conti, a Florentine historian of restoration technique who published a book on the issue. Eliot makes the ridiculous claim that "nearly half of the Sistine ceiling has already been reduced to postcard quality." Beck sees the cleaning as a "dangerous step, taken without real knowledge or adequate cultural background." Eliot compares the cleaning to the shuttle disaster; Beck, to Chernobyl.
Fresco is the most durable kind of painting known. It is done in water- soluble pigments on freshly laid sections of damp plaster -- the intonaco. When the 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 eight years, have still not studied it enough; and that the cleaning agent, AB-57, though used for cleaning fresco and stone since the early 1970s, is still insufficiently tested. The antis also decry the new look of the frescoes as "thinly, monotonously mannerist," flat and misleadingly "modern" in color.