Michelangelo's Last Judgement is visible again in something close to its original colour. The Vatican Museums have finished the first cleaning of the vast fresco in more than three decades, stripping away a whitish film that had dulled its contrasts and muted its palette since the last intervention in 1994.

The film was calcium lactate, a salt formed where lactic acid from visitors' perspiration met the calcium in the plaster. Millions of visitors pass through the Sistine Chapel each year, and over time the deposit settled across the surface of the fresco, which Michelangelo completed in 1541 behind the chapel's altar. A team of around thirty restorers, technicians and diagnostic experts worked behind scaffolding installed in February 2026, brushing deionised water through a double layer of Japanese paper so the salt dissolved without touching the paint beneath.

The work was deliberately restrained: a controlled cleaning rather than a full restoration, designed to be reversible and to leave the original paint layer untouched. Vatican Museums director Barbara Jatta had insisted the procedure was technically simple, but the close contact it required gave conservators an unusual opportunity to study the fresco at arm's length.

That scrutiny has paid off in new observations about how Michelangelo worked. Restorers found fresh evidence of his brushwork and of the way he resolved problems of volume and drawing across the crowded composition. As one of the museum's senior restorers put it, every intervention on the wall still teaches the team something new about the artist. The chapel remained open to visitors throughout the work, with the scaffolding hidden behind a full-size reproduction of the fresco.