Topics: Cleansing; Grace; Redemption; Restoration; Sanctification
References: 2 Corinthians 5:17; Philippians 1:6
For five years in the early 1500s, the artist Michelangelo lay on his back and painted scenes depicting the fall and the flood on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome.
But the magnificent art started to fade almost immediately. Within a century of completing his work, no one remembered what his original frescoes had looked like. Painter Biagio Biagetti said in 1936, “We see the colors of the Sistine ceiling as if through smoked glass.”
In 1981, a scaffold was erected to clean the frescoes that adorn the chapel. With a special solution, Fabrizio Mancinelli and Gianluigi Colalucci gently washed a small corner of the painting. They then invited art experts to examine the work. The results were stunning. No one had imagined that beneath centuries of grime lay such vibrant colors.
This was not the Michelangelo known by art critics. That artist was the master of form, his paintings resembling sculpture more than painting. This “new” artist was also the master of color—azure, green, rose, and lavender.
Mancinelli and Colalucci’s success prompted the restoration of the entire ceiling. The task was completed in December 1989. It took twice as much time to clean the ceiling as the artist utilized to paint it. But the result was breathtaking. For the first time in nearly five hundred years, people viewed this masterpiece the way it was intended, in all of its color and beauty.
—Al Janssen, The Marriage Masterpiece (Tyndale, 2001)