Mark Megahan
Scrawling all over the walls of your room is generally considered vandalism but when the graffiti is drawn by Michelangelo, nobody minds too much. Fearing for his life, the young artist was forced to hide in virtual imprisonment underneath the Medici Chapels in Florence.
Secret room of drawings
The room is tiny and cramped. Underneath layers of plaster, crews of workmen renovating the Medici Chapels discovered a shocking surprise. Michelangelo Buonarroti made a huge name for himself in the art world but some of his early drawings only recently became accessible to the public.
Most famous for the frescoes which cover the Sistine Chapel from floor-to-ceiling, he’s also the master sculptor who carved “David” and the architect who designed the “dome of St. Peter’s which dominates the Rome skyline.”
The “secret room” in Florence was discovered during renovation back in 1975. They were planning to build “a new exit for the venue.” Restorers carrying out very careful “cleaning experiments” found “multiple drawings of human figures under two layers of plaster.”
That was the last thing they expected to find in “a corridor underneath the sacristy which had been used to store coal.” The cell like space is 10 feet wide by 8 feet high. The only redeeming feature is 33 feet of length.
After the plaster was methodically removed, several drawings were revealed all around the room. The various sketches of figures were done in two mediums, charcoal and “sanguine,” which is a sort of rust-colored chalk or crayon.
Both materials were “often one on top of the other, and of different sizes.” While the style looked really familiar, they were authenticated as the work of Michelangelo by the former director of the Medici Chapels, Paolo Dal Poggetto.” It was an easy call to make.
Hiding from Pope Clement VII
Michelangelo was forced to hide in the basement “for several weeks in 1530.” Pope Clement VII had just returned to Florence and he wasn’t in a good mood. The Medici family member had been kicked out of Florence “by a republican government for whom Michelangelo had worked.” In a snit, he ordered the artist put to death.
It took two months for Mike’s friends to get the Pope calmed down and bribed enough to rescind the death sentence. That’s when Michelangelo returned to work in Florence, spending the next four years turning those drawings on the walls of the secret room into pieces of sculpture, as commissioned. As soon as he was done, he split for Rome and never looked back.
It’s pretty well confirmed that one set of the drawings became the “legs of one of the statues in the New Sacristy.” The room is only now open to viewing by the public after nearly 50 years.
“This place grants today’s visitors the unique experience of being able to come into direct contact not only with the creative process of the maestro, but also with the perception of the formation of his myth as a divine artist,” Francesca de Luca explains. She’s curator of the Museum of the Medici Chapels.
The restoration, Paola D’Agostino confirms, has been “time-consuming, constant and painstaking work.” Never before open to the general public, starting November 15 it will be open for visits.
Access to the secret room will still be tightly restricted “in order to preserve the drawings.” They’re selling exactly 100 tickets a week in groups of four. They’ll be priced at “20 euros, or $21.30, though visitors must also pay for entry to the site (10 euros) plus a 3 euro reservation charge.“
