Art: 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.)