Experts in Florence are restoring drawings Michelangelo doodled on the walls of a cell-like room in which the artist hid for six weeks while the Medici family wanted him dead.
Mould had sprouted and salts had risen up the walls of the dank room under the Medici chapel. It was there that Michelangelo lay low in 1530 after losing the battle for a Florentine republic against the powerful Medici family, his former patrons.
”The sketches were badly deteriorated,” said Licia Bertani, the director of the Medici Museum in Florence. ”We had to do this work, or the drawings were going to disappear.”
The collection of around 50 ”doodles”, first discovered by Paolo dal Poggetto in 1975, include a self-portrait, a life-size risen Christ and some sketches experts believe are copies of figures the artist had painted earlier on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel.
Some have been covered with layers of paint or badly damaged by floods and the breath of thousands of people allowed to visit the small, unventilated cell after it was first discovered. Now, restorers have removed human remains found beneath the room, possibly victims of the plague, which continued to contaminate the air and walls.
Scholars, some of whom have questioned the authenticity of the drawings, will be able to view them by the end of this year.
Michelangelo initially flourished under the patronage of the Medici family, which lorded over Florence in the early 16th century. He designed the Medici chapel as the family burial place.
Relations turned sour when the artist became director of fortifications for the republic which ousted the Medicis from Florence in the late 1520s.
”I hid in a tiny cell,” he wrote, ”entombed like the dead Medici above, though hiding from a live one. To forget my fears, I fill the walls with drawings.”
The Medici sentence on Michelangelo was eventually lifted by Pope Clement VII, himself a member of the Medici family, so the artist could continue work on the chapel and tombs for the Medici princes. He left Florence in 1534 without finishing the job. – Guardian Unlimited Â