Museum report·Vatican City
Michelangelo's Homemade Multi-Tipped Brushes Gave the Last Judgment Its Glow, Vatican Restorers Find
Close study during the first major cleaning of the Sistine Chapel's Last Judgment in more than 30 years has shown that Michelangelo painted with custom brushes carrying up to ten tips, recreating in paint the cross-hatching of his sculpture.
Michelangelo painted The Last Judgment with tools he appears to have made himself. Vatican restorers working on the Sistine Chapel fresco have found that the artist used custom brushes fitted with several tips at once, a device that let him lay down groups of parallel strokes in a single gesture and reproduce on a flat wall the flickering light effects he achieved in carved stone.
The discovery came during the first major restoration of the altarpiece in more than three decades, completed in April. With scaffolding in place, chief restorer Paolo Violini could study the paintwork at close range for the first time. He noticed that the strokes often ran in wavy, parallel groups, and that when one stroke wobbled, the strokes beside it wobbled in exactly the same way. The only explanation, he concluded, was a brush with multiple heads, each tipped with a small brush of its own. Examination of the surface suggests Michelangelo used several such tools, including one with three tips and others reaching nearly six inches wide with as many as ten.
The technique mirrors the sculptor's workshop. Violini believes Michelangelo was translating the cross-hatching produced by the gradina, a multi-pointed chisel, into paint, using rows of parallel lines set against each other to build up light and shadow. Barbara Jatta, director of the Vatican Museums, writes in the new book documenting the conservation that Michelangelo painted as a sculptor. The same campaign also brought a self-portrait of the artist back into view, examined in the volume by art historian Fabrizio Biferali.
The restoration itself stripped away a whitish film of calcium lactate, a salt formed when lactic acid from visitors' perspiration reacted with the plaster, which had dulled the fresco's colours and softened its contrasts since the last major cleaning in 1994. Painted between 1536 and 1541, The Last Judgment covers the wall behind the chapel's altar with more than 300 figures rising to heaven and sinking to hell, and its restored vibrancy is now visible again in full.
