Sayonara Michelangelo: The Sistine Chapel Restored and Repackaged

By Waldemar Januszczak

Sayonara Michelangelo is an attempt to bring the divine back down to earth, a referendum, to point out that the Sistine Ceiling was painted by a man, not a legend. Waldemar Januszczak has two things at his disposal, history and humor, both of which ensue in furious abundance. Michelangelo would not have approved.

Januszczak arrived at his privileged position through a strange partnership: the restoration of the Sistine Ceiling was underwritten for the Catholic Church by a Japanese Television Channel, NTV, in exchange for the Global media rights. Living in Japan at the time, Januszczak managed to receive permission to spend hours on the scaffolding, inches from a divinely inspired work art, to debunk its myths and misconceptions and plant it in the realm of human achievement. It turns out the ceiling, so immaculate from below, is a mass of tectonic plates of plaster that undulate across a leaky architecture. Over the centuries, salt leached into the brickwork, causing severe cracking and some parts of the fresco to fall to the floor. It had to be repaired. The myth-busting revelations that followed are a fascinating by-product.

The Michelangelo legend is so outsized it inspires humor almost by itself. It came to Hollywood in the form of Moses. Charlton Heston — who resembles the Michelangelo’s statue of Moses and should have played Paul Bunyan — portrayed the artist in The Agony and the Ecstasy. He was, in build and stature, the opposite of the short, pug-nosed Michelangelo — a mark he earned for unmercifully asserting the superiority of his drawing skills as a student and received a (not unjust) punch in the nose. The culprit, Torrigiano, left an indelible mark on history in every hidden self-portrait that Michelangelo painted.

The stories of Michelangelo, which have grown with each telling, belie the historical evidence. It was a small man that scrubbed the beard of God broad in unrefined brush strokes. He was not a giant/Charlton Heston/Moses, lying on his back with paint on his face. He was practical man, who stood up with paint on his falling face. He built his scaffold in holes drilled above the cornices of the windows, where no one could see them and his spacious scaffold was replicated in lightweight alloy by restorers five hundred years later. Bristles of the artist’s brush have been left behind in the dried putty by the effort to cover up to 200 sq. ft. in a day. Michelangelo learned, as he went backward through Genesis, that the eye can only see so much at a distance of sixty feet. In the final frame the crowd around drunken Noah is reduced to a single, robed God separating the light from the darkness.

The portrait of the man that emerges from under the grime of history is that of a brilliant, workaholic, whinger (see his letters). He designed the ceiling himself, but executed it with assistants. And he signed the ceiling with the kind of contradiction and arrogance that got him in so much trouble and earned him legendary status: Michelangelo Scultore (Michelangelo Sculptor).