NEWS FEATURE: Vatican completes 20-year restoration of the Sistine Chapel

c. 1999 Religion News Service VATICAN CITY _ With the restoration of frescoes by Botticelli and other important Italian painters of the 15th century, the Vatican has completed a 20-year project to return the Sistine Chapel to its Renaissance splendor. The 12 brilliantly colored panels on the side walls of the chapel, showing scenes from […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ With the restoration of frescoes by Botticelli and other important Italian painters of the 15th century, the Vatican has completed a 20-year project to return the Sistine Chapel to its Renaissance splendor.

The 12 brilliantly colored panels on the side walls of the chapel, showing scenes from the lives of Moses and Christ, now vie for attention with Michelangelo’s”Creation”on the ceiling and”Last Judgment”on the wall above the altar.


Inaugurating the restored paintings at a celebration Saturday (Dec. 11) in the chapel, Pope John Paul II said that a”jewel of art is presented perfectly restored to the world.” But he was quick to add that the Sistine Chapel has another dimension.

It is important not only for its art but also because it is there that the College of Cardinals meets in conclaves to choose the Roman Catholic pontiffs, himself in 1978.”This place is dear not only for the masterpieces that it contains but also for the role it plays in the life of the church. It is here, in fact _ I recall with emotion _ that the successor of Peter is elected.” About 20 donors, most of them Americans, paid for the restoration, which cost $3.1 million and took almost five years. It followed 15 years of work on Michelangelo’s paintings and other decorations, paid for by a Japanese television company in return for reproduction rights.

The total cost of two decades of restoration was about $25 million.

Vatican officials said they were confident that no more restoration would be needed for at least a century.

Pope Sixtus IV, who gave his name _ Sisto in Italian _ to the chapel, commissioned a group of Tuscan and Umbrian artists to paint the frescoes of the lives of Moses and Christ in October 1481. It took them only until the spring of 1482 to finished the paintings, a fraction of the time needed to restore the frescoes five centuries later.

Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Cosimo Rosselli and Perugino, signed the contract. Their collaborators included Luca Signorelli and Pinturicchio.

Experts from the Vatican Museums, who carried out the restoration, made chemical and physical studies of the frescoes that helped them determine who had painted which panel and produced valuable information on the technique of the Renaissance masters and the materials they used.

Hidden under five centuries of dust, grime and candle grease, they discovered that a small white dog was prominent in four of the scenes. The animal had been the artists’ mascot and had climbed onto the scaffolding with them.


As was the custom, the artists gave figures in crowd scenes the faces of prominent men of the day. Ghirlandaio painted a garland on the head of a young boy in one painting in a play on his own name, which means garland-maker in Italian.

There originally were 16 frescoes, but Michelangelo, who began work in the chapel 26 years later, painted over two of them for the”Last Judgment.”The other two were lost when the lintel of the door below collapsed in 1522, killing two Swiss Guards.

John Paul said that by depicting parallel events in the lives of Moses and Christ, the artists had created”a hymn to Christ. Everything leads to him. Everything finds it fullness in him.””His baptism, wonderfully depicted by Perugino, expresses the fullness of what the Mosaic circumcision merely foreshadowed. Botticelli set the temptations that Christ overcame in symmetry with the trials endured by Moses,”the pope said.”The assembly of the new people, expressed by Ghirlandaio in the calling of the first apostles by the Lake of Gennesaret, corresponds to the gathering of the ancient people depicted against the dramatic background of the crossing of the Red Sea,”he said.”Christ, portrayed by Rosselli in the solemnity of his Sermon on the Mount, appears in comparison to Moses as the new legislator who has come not to abolish the law but to fulfill it. Again, the frescoes show Christ conferring the keys and at the Last Supper, which are also depicted in corresponding scenes from the Old Testament.” The Vatican’s restoration of Michelangelo’s frescoes set off controversy in the art world with some American experts claiming that the Vatican had caused irreparable harm to the paintings.

But Cardinal Edmund Szoka, president of the Pontifical Commission for the Vatican City State, said there have been no such protests over the latest work.”The Italians have been at this a lot longer than the Americans,”Szoka, former archbishop of Detroit, said.”They know what they’re doing. I don’t think there will be any controversy over this.”

DEA END POLK

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