The restoration of Michelangelo’s Bandini Pietà at the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo has been completed, revealing the original marble and answering questions that have long been asked about this iconic masterpiece. The restoration began November 23, 2019, and was supposed to be completed by summer of 2020, but a certain virus had other ideas. Conservators were able to get back to work in September of last year, and now the rejuvenated Pietà is back.

Michelangelo sculpted three pietàs over his lifetime. The first, now in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, features a preternaturally young Mary seated with Jesus’ body draped across her lap. The second, the Rondanini Pietà now at the Castello Sforzesco in Milan, features a more mature Mary standing up, holding the body of her son. Only the Bandini Pietà has figures other than Mary and Christ, and indeed, the dominant figure in the composition is Nicodemus who looms large behind Mary the Mother, Mary Magdalene and the limp, twisted form of Jesus.

This was Michelangelo’s most audacious sculpture. He was inspired by the Laocoon Group, a large sculpture depicting the death of the Trojan priest and his sons that had been praised by Pliny in antiquity. The Laocoon was rediscovered in 1506 under a vineyard next to the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. Michelangelo, dispatched by Pope Julius II, was present to witness its excavation and its exceptional artistry had a strong influence on him. He too wanted to create a group of figures out of a single massive block of marble, only his masterpiece would beat the Laocoon in size and number of figures. It was meant to adorn a chapel in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome where Michelangelo planned to be buried. That the face of Nicodemus is a self-portrait of Michelangelo was a sculptural representation of his devotion to Christ.

He worked on this group for almost a decade, starting in 1547 when he was in his mid-70s and concluding in 1555. The story told by Michelangelo’s friends and fellow artists Giorgio Vasari and Ascanio Condivi was that Michelangelo, enraged by the intractable flaws he kept encountering throughout the three-ton block of marble, took a hammer to the work until his servant Antonio da Casteldurante begged him to stop. Michelangelo agreed to let Antonio keep the sculpture and its broken pieces and to let Florentine sculptor Tiberio Calcagni, a friend and collaborator of his, repair it. Calcagni bought it from Casteldurante on behalf of banker Francesco Bandini.

Bandini kept it the garden of his villa in Rome and it remained in the family after his death. It passed through a couple of hands before being sold to Cosimo III de Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, in 1671. It took three years for him to figure out how to transport the huge piece to Florence. The Pietà has been in Florence ever since in several different locations.

Aside from occasional cleanings, no restoration work has been recorded after Calcagni reattached body parts and controversially altered Mary Magdalene’s face. There is one documented intervention. In 1882, a plaster cast was made of the sculpture. The residue from the plaster left the marble surface dry with large areas of bright white marring the surface. Restorers tried to fix that by applying layers of wax on top of the residue, and over time the wax darkened and mixed with dust to change the surface colors to a deep, uneven amber.

To address these issues in the least invasive manner possible, a multi-disciplinary team of conservators studied and documented the condition of the Pietà. They then cleaned and restored it in a custom-built “open laboratory” so visitors could see them at work behind a plexiglass wall. In the process, the team discovered that much of the origin story relayed for 500 years is likely apocryphal.

Diagnostic inspection led to the discovery that the marble came from quarries in Seravezza, in the province of Lucca, rather than from Carrara as had been believed. This discovery is significant because the quarries in Seravezza were owned by the Medici, and Giovanni de’ Medici, soon to be Pope Leo X, had enjoined Michelangelo to use marble from the quarry for the façade of the church of San Lorenzo in Florence. How this huge block of marble got to Rome where Michelangelo carved this Pietà from it between 1547 and 1555 is still a mystery.

Michelangelo was unhappy with the quality of the marble from these quarries because it revealed sudden veining and minute cracks difficult to detect from the surface. Thanks to the restoration, it has proven possible to confirm that the block used for the Pietà was indeed flawed, as Vasari tells us.  In his Lives of the Artists, Vasari describes it as hard and full of impurities and that sparks flew from it with every blow of the chisel. Numerous small inclusions of pyrite were discovered, and they most certainly would have caused sparks when hit with a chisel. More importantly, the presence of numerous minute cracks, particularly on the back and front of the base, suggests that Michelangelo may well have encountered them when carving Christ and the Virgin’s left arms and was forced to stop working on it. This is a more likely hypothesis than that of a now ageing Michelangelo, unhappy with the result, trying to destroy the sculpture in a moment of distress and frustration by taking a hammer to it, because the restorers found no sign of any hammer blows, unless, of course, they were erased later by someone else.

Based on these discoveries, it was decided to proceed by first conducting cleaning trials in order to identify the most suitable methodology. Once established, the restoration process proper began where the deposits were thickest, using a non-invasive, gradual, and controlled method of cotton pads soaked in deionised and lightly heated water. For the wax build-up applied to the group’s surface, small, closely spaced splashes and drippings caused by candles on Florence Cathedral’s high altar, behind which the group had stood for 220 years, cleaning with water was supplemented with the use of a scalpel in the toughest areas.

The open laboratory will remain in place for six months so that visitors to the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, accompanied by guides, can see the Pietà up close. The tours of the laboratory run through March 30th, 2022.

A thumbprint has been found on the buttocks of a wax model of a sculpture by Michelangelo in the collection of the V&A Museum. The dark red wax figure was made around 1516-1519 and is the only autograph model by Michelangelo in the museum.

Senior curator Peta Motture says: “It is an exciting prospect that one of Michelangelo’s prints could have survived in the wax. Such marks would suggest the physical presence of the creative process of an artist. It is where mind and hand somehow come together… he destroyed a lot of [the wax models] himself. A fingerprint would be a direct connection with the artist.”

The model, or bozzetto, is a rough sketch of Young Slave, an unfinished marble sculpture now in the Galleria in Florence. It was meant to be one of the many, many statues Michelangelo planned for the tomb of Pope Julius II but never completed. The first plan for Julius’ tomb, commissioned in 1505, eight years before his death, was a monumental free-standing multi-story mausoleum with more than 40 statues, life-sized and larger, that was supposed to be installed in the Cappella Maggiore of St. Peter’s Basilica. The Young Slave was one of four intended to be used as columns, telamons in prisoner form, for the lower level of the tomb. They were deleted from the plans during one of the many downsizing redesigns and remained in Michelangelo’s studio until his death when they were given to Duke Cosimo I de Medici.

Julius died in 1513 with no tomb in sight. His heirs demanded that Michelangelo come through, albeit in much reduced form with a wall tomb. Even the smaller-scale tomb took another thirty years for Michelangelo to complete. The finished product was a modest arrangement with seven statues including the famous Moses with horns in the minor basilica of St. Peter in Chains.

Over the decades, Michelangelo created many drawings and models for this boondoggle of a papal tomb, and because he was already famous in his lifetime, his contemporaries managed to snag some of those preparatory works before the temperamental master could destroy them (which he did to many of them). The V&A’s Young Slave is one of very few surviving wax models by Michelangelo.

The wax figure is 6.5 inches high (the full-sized marble is more than seven feet tall) and was molded onto a metal armature allowing the artist to alter it easily as he worked on his final vision. Indeed, the sketch model has several points of difference from the marble, particularly in the left leg. Also the shoulders and back were never carved in the marble.

According to art historian Giorgio Vasari, who was a personal friend of Michelangelo’s, the wax was prepared by mixing animal fat, turpentine and black pitch to make it malleable but durable. The red color was produced by adding red earth, vermillion or red lead. Vasari also said that Michelangelo had a unique method for using his wax models to make the sculptures. He put the bozzetto in a box, filled it with water until the model was fully submerged, then removed the water gradually. Whatever parts peeked up above the water first, he carved out of the marble.

NB: We don’t know if this is accurate because Vasari never saw Michelangelo carve anything at all. Michelangelo adamantly refused to allow anyone to observe his process, not even his friends. That’s one of the reasons his prep sketches and models were so coveted by other artists, because it was the only way they would ever get a glimpse into how the Michelangelo magic happened. It’s also why there’s a very good chance that the thumbprint was Michelangelo’s because he was the only one who got to see his unfinished works, let alone touch them.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., has acquired a painting by 16th c. Ferrarese master Dosso Dossi, reuniting it with its other half, which has been in the museum since 1939.  The Trojans Building the Temple to Venus at Eryx and Making Offerings at Anchises’s Grave (c. 1520) has not been seen since the mid-19th century. It emerged at Christie’s Old Masters auction on April 21st where it was purchased  for $400,000 by an anonymous individual who then donated it to the NGA.

The Trojans and its companion piece, traditionally titled Aeneas and Achates on the Libyan Coast, were part of a cycle of 10 paintings made to encircle the cornice of the study of Alfonso I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara. The works depicted scenes from the Aeneid and adorned the top of the room. On the walls below them were five large-scale works by Bellini, Titian and Dossi.

The richly decorated study was one of the Camerini d’Alabastro (small rooms of alabaster), a suite of private rooms Alfonso had built and clad in white marble (hence the moniker) to make a striking backdrop for the bright colors and dynamism of the Venetian masters he’d commissioned to decorate the walls with scenes from Greco-Roman mythology. Feast of the Gods, a collaboration of Giovanni Bellini and Titian which is also in the NGA, Feast of the Cupids (Titian), Bacchanal of the Andrians (Titian), Bacchus and Ariadne  (Titian), adorned its lower walls. Dossi was not Venetian, but he was heavily influenced by Titian’s palette and finely-detailed landscapes.

The Trojans Building the Temple to Venus is a scene from Book V of The Aeneid when the Trojan refugees set out for Italy with a much-reduced fleet after Juno tricks the women into burning the ships. Some Trojans stay behind and  found a city. Aeneas makes offerings at his father’s tomb (foreground), and in the distance at Eryx a new temple to Venus is being dedicated.

When Alfonso II, the last duke of the legitimate Este line, died without heir in 1597, the Pope refused to recognize the Holy Roman Emperor’s appointment of Duke of Modena Cesare d’Este, Alfonso II’s cousin from the cadet branch of the family. Pope Clement VIII claimed Ferrara and kicked the cadet branch out of the city. Ferrara would be administered by a Papal Legate acting as a civil governor until the 19th century.

The masterpieces in the Camerino d’Alabastro and the rest of the great Este collections were confiscated by Papal Legate Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini who kept what he wanted and sold the rest. All 10 of the panels of the Aeneas frieze remained in place high on the walls until they were bought by Cardinal Scipione Borghese in 1608. The stayed in the Borghese family until they were acquired by a Spanish collector in the early 19th century. At this point they were still intact as a group. The last time they were documented together was in 1856. Sometime later, the series was dispersed. Worst of all, one of Dossi’s Aeneid paintings was cut in half, creating two works out of Aeneas and Achates on the Libyan Coast and The Trojans Building the Temple to Venus at Eryx and Making Offerings at Anchises’s Grave.

Not that the right section of this work has reemerged, it suggests the left scene has been misidentified. Instead of Aeneas and Achates preparing for departure on the Libyan Coast, a scene from Book I of the epic, it is now believed to represent the Aeneas and Achates building ships to carry them to mainland Italy from Sicily in Book V.