Saved from Death

In a sepulchral chamber hidden beneath Florence's Medici Chapel, accessible only through a trap door and a winding staircase, Sabino Giovannoni scraped away at the accumulated layers of soot, grime and whitewash. Slowly, almost reluctantly, the face of a woman began to emerge, a primeval woman who looked remarkably like the Eve in the Sistine Chapel. After several hours, Giovannoni telephoned Medici Chapels Director Paolo dal Poggetto. "Come over quickly," he said. "We've got something important here."

What they had was a major discovery--the world's only group of mural sketches by Michelangelo Buonarroti, more than 50 large drawings, done in charcoal on the rough plaster of the walls and inadvertently protected by later whitewashing against age, flaking and the 1966 flood. After several months of restoration, the discovery is being exhibited in Florence this week.

Tourist Swarms. Like many such discoveries, the Michelangelo works were found partly by accident. For years, Dal Poggetto and his colleagues have been worrying about the crowds of tourists--sometimes 4,000 a day--who come swarming into the chapel to see the seven brooding marble statues that Michelangelo carved to commemorate the Dukes Lorenzo and Giuliano de' Medici. There is only one door for the tourists to enter and leave the chapel by way of the crypt.

Dal Poggetto began wondering whether he could devise some alternative entry through one of the chapel's other doors. There are eight in all, two on each wall, but four of them are blank. A sealed door leads to the adjacent Church of San Lorenzo, and the last two open into small unused rooms on either side of the altar (Michelangelo called them lavamani, or washrooms). One of these lavamani had traces of various 16th century sketches under its old whitewash. The other had a trap door in its floor leading to a long, narrow storeroom. Perhaps, Dal Poggetto thought, the storeroom could become another exit to the street. But before digging into the walls, he assigned Restorer Giovannoni to take "soundings" by scratching away a few test layers of whitewash.

What Giovannoni found was that Michelangelo had evidently used the walls as a big doodling sheet, filling them with visual reflections on projects past and to come. They appear to be: a sketch for the legs of Duke Giuliano, a risen Christ striding forward from a wall by the staircase, a figure of Zacharias writing the name of John the Baptist on a tablet at the prompting of an angel, a memory of the Laocoon--the great Hellenistic figure group that had so impressed Michelangelo when he saw it, newly dug up from a vineyard, in Rome. Though a few of the sketches may be by Michelangelo's assistants, the authenticity of most of them was accepted by nearly all the experts who visited the room as restorers brought them to light. Says Professor Herbert Keutner, director of the German Art History Institute in Florence: "Their discovery was the most wonderful and amazing surprise for Michelangelo's anniversary." (Buonarroti was born in 1475.)

Cutthroat Foiled. But what were the drawings doing in that narrow chamber? Dal Poggetto has a theory. In 1527 the Medici, who had virtually become kings, were expelled from Florence by a wave of republican sentiment. When the Medici resumed their grip on the city in 1530, a purge of republicans followed, and a cutthroat named Alessandro Corsini was hired to murder Michelangelo--who had vocally sided with the republican cause. According to an old tradition, the great sculptor, who was then at work on the Medici tombs, hid in the bell tower of a church on the other side of the Arno. But ten years ago, a memoir was discovered in the handwriting of Giovanni Battista Figiovanni, the prior of San Lorenzo who was in charge of the Medici tombs project. "I saved him from death," the prior wrote of Michelangelo, "and I saved his belongings too." It was in this very room--well hidden by its trap door, but at street level and adequately lit, even furnished with a cistern for water--that the prior, Dal Poggetto argues, hid the sculptor during the fall of 1530.

Before those weeks of refuge, Figiovanni wrote, Michelangelo had been impossible to deal with; he was a man "with whom Job would not have kept his renowned patience for even one day." After it, "Michelangelo asked me pardon a thousand times." No doubt he was immensely relieved to be out in the air again, and carving. The drawings he left on the walls--evidently done behind shutters at night, for his lines are in places visibly interrupted by the grease from guttering candles--were a means of passing the time during that irritating concealment. They are not among the sculptor's greater works, but anything by Michelangelo's hand is, needless to say, of interest.

Only one problem now remains for Dal Poggetto. Since the general public cannot be let into the storeroom containing the drawings (the space is too confined, the risk of damage too large), he will have to find yet another exit-corridor from the Medici tombs. And for the moment, there seems to be none.

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