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Giulio Carlo Argan, doyen of Italian art critics, believes Michelangelo took the Sistine as an opportunity of asserting the power of what his rival could not do: "Michelangelo, who was always in competition with Leonardo, wanted to reaffirm the traditional buon fresco technique. The Sistine is that affirmation." True fresco did not include the use of glue sizing and dark washes a secco. "No other fresco painter applied such a glue," says Head Restorer Colalucci, "so why should Michelangelo have done so? He knew very well that the final result could not have lasted long. To suggest that he gave his fresco a glue sizing is an insult to his technical ability. A fresco artist studies colors and their relationships, and balances them correctly so that they have unity from the moment they are applied."
Does this mean that Michelangelo did not retouch at all? Of course not. Nobody thinks that even Michelangelo could have got every passage of color and shade in the thousands of complex forms that make up the scheme of the Sistine right with the first layer of color on each. The Serpent coiled around the tree in the Temptation of Adam and Eve, for instance, far from being the more or less monochrome reptile of old, reveals the most delicate complexities of feathered stroking in green and yellow over reddish tones of shadow. The slow drying of the intonaco gave Michelangelo all the time he needed to correct his shadows without having to use the washes of black pigment and glue size that the critics believe to be his handiwork. And because his retouching was chemically integrated with the plaster, there is no reason to suppose that the solvent AB-57 would remove it.
The antis make much of the fact that AB-57 -- a dilute solution of ammonium bicarbonate, sodium bicarbonate, a fungicide and gelling agent in water -- has been used for cleaning stone. But on stone it is left for between one and 24 hours and is strengthened by the disodium salt of EDTA, a substance that aids in the removal of calcium compounds; on the Sistine frescoes it is used in a weak solution, in varying applications lasting at most three minutes. It is an efficient solvent but a bland reagent. The fear that the cleaning has taken off any of Michelangelo's a secco passages seems unfounded. According to Colalucci, these retouchings on dry plaster by his hand have all been identified. In restoration, each is isolated by a waterproof acrylic resin; the surrounding area is cleaned with AB-57; then the resin is taken off and the passage is cleaned with solvents that do not contain water.
The Vatican has certainly made some blunders in presenting this work to its audience. It should have allayed suspicions of haste by fully publishing its scientific analyses of the ceiling, its problems and its techniques of restoration. It was stupid to spring the cleaned lunettes on the public in 1984 under the killing glare of television wattage; that kind of lighting would make even Michelangelo's sculpture look flat, let alone his frescoes.