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So much noise has been raised against the cleaning that it comes almost as . an anticlimax to discover that most experts on Renaissance art, and on Michelangelo in particular, strongly endorse it and reject out of hand the antis' allegations of haste or insufficient study. The scholars and restorers who have visited the scaffolding seem to agree that the extreme care with which the work proceeds, the constant testing, the minute adjustment of the strength of the solution to the chemical and stratigraphic analysis of each portion of the fresco, is very far from the absurd impression of the restorers that the antis give in their more rhetorical moments, almost as if they were a gang of purblind pedants swiping at the ceiling with mops and Easy-Off.
Last week a further vote of confidence came from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, a long-established nonprofit organization concerned with the care and preservation of Italian art. Six of the world's leading conservators of Italian painting (including John Brealey and David Bull, the head painting conservators at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Washington's National Gallery of Art), having inspected the frescoes at the foundation's behest, reported in an open letter that the "new freshness of the colors and the clarity of the forms on the Sistine ceiling, totally in keeping with 16th century Italian painting, affirm the full majesty and splendor of Michelangelo's creation."
What weakens the antis' case is that they have not produced clear physical or documentary evidence that any of the glue and lampblack on the Sistine was put there by Michelangelo himself. James Beck cites a phrase in an account by Ascanio Condivi, a Renaissance biographer, about Michelangelo applying "so to speak, the ultima mano" (final touches) to the mighty fresco cycle; but Condivi did not say what medium these touches were in. Giorgio Vasari (1511-74), whose Lives of Italian artists is a fundamental source on the Sistine, describes how "Michelangelo desired to retouch some parts a secco, painting backgrounds, draperies and skies in ultramarine, and ornaments in gold." But he was prevented by Julius II, who wanted his chapel finished on All Saints Day, Nov. 1, 1512, at which the artist dismantled the scaffolding and reluctantly declared the job done. Thus the aim of this ultima mano, this finishing off, would have been not to make the colors more tonally somber, as the antis suppose, but actually to make them brighter.
The pros also point to Michelangelo's ethic, so to speak, of fresco. Before he began work on the Sistine, Michelangelo knew all about the humiliating mess Leonardo da Vinci made by painting on walls with untested brews of oil, water and varnish bases, which began to come off almost as soon as they were put on. Though Michelangelo grouched about his immense Sistine task, there is no question of his mastery of pure fresco, which he had learned in Florence in 1488 from his master Ghirlandaio.