Carrier Context:
Unique Projects


  Out Of Darkness:
  Restoring The Frescoes' Brilliant Past

As long as they exist, the frescoes' significance will be analyzed, dissected and debated by theologians and critics. But for millions of us with ordinary stiff necks, the frescoes of Michelangelo exist just as powerfully outside these realms of formal, esoteric knowledge.

If we are willing to admit our innocent, unsophisticated awe in their presence, we will find their glory in the fact that one of our species created them. One of us, given a giant's share of craft and vision, elicited from pigment and flat plaster a monument as round, as moving, as lasting as sculpted Carrara marble.

As an artist, Michelangelo depended on that God-given light to create. As observers, we depend on it for our vision of the artist's greatness. Resident as we are in the final years of the 20th century, we are the lucky ones, for millions of others within the last four and a half centuries have seen Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel frescoes through smoked lenses. The frescoes' colorful brilliance has been shrouded in layers of oily black soot, dulled animal glue, ordinary dirt and the more recent residue of Rome's automotive gnats that swarm just outside the Vatican's ramparts.

The accumulated grime of centuries dulled colors and erased detail. It flattened the frescoes and robbed them of their succulent roundness.

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