Pietà di Michelangelo - TGR BellItalia del 20112021 Rubriche TGR

An ancient residence of the merchants of Lucca of the 16th century, transformed over the centuries into a museum rich in works of art. Bell'Italia welcomes you from the heart of Lucca, from Palazzo Manzi. Today we will also take you around Italy, let's see where and then we'll be back here. In this issue, Michelangelo and the Torment of Marble, completed the restoration of the Pietà Bandini, the masterpiece in which the artist had portrayed himself in the figure of Nicodemus. A battle between man and nature, between Michelangelo and marble, which he discovered to be defective and impossible to turn into the sculpture he had in mind. Pietà Bandini, kept at the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo in Florence, is the story of a creation left unfinished. When Michelangelo realized that the block of marble was full of micro-fractures, he gave up completing the work. Vasari told him already in the 15th century. The restoration, just finished, confirmed it. Michelangelo, at a certain point in the realization of the sculpture, abandons it. After the collapse of the front part, corresponding to the arm of Christ. The restoration carried out at the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo in Florence and supported by Friends of Florence, thus denies a tradition that saw a disappointed Michelangelo take it with his creation. Through diagnostic inspections, researchers have established that the stone came from a cave owned by the Medici in Seravezza, a site different from the one from which Michelangelo obtained most of the marble he used. No one in 470 had ever laid such a deep gaze on the large marble group sculpted by the artist in Rome in the mid-500s, when he was 80 years old. The restoration was therefore the first punctual rereading of that mercy, or rather deposit, that Michelangelo had thought for his tomb inside a Roman church. In the work, according to the scholars, Michelangelo includes his own self-portrait, the old man who supports the weight of Christ. It represents Nicodemus, but it is the self-portrait of the 80-year-old artist, a work in which Michelangelo Nicodemus returns to the intense religiosity of his youth, a very personal sculpture, but that the artist does not love. He abandoned it and the subsequent story of the work written on the marble is confirmed by the restorers, who cleaned it up and examined it centimetre by centimetre. The mercy ended in the hands of the sculptor Tiberio Calcagni, then the accession to the banker Bandini. Of that passage remains the name and some elements that certainly do not belong to the hand of Michelangelo, such as the polishing of the body of Christ and the figure of the Maddalena, different hands to which the patina of the centuries was added in the cathedral of Florence. In order not to show the various flaws of the marble, continuous veils of incongruous materials were used, starting with wax, so he took an amber tone that was not his, which tended to uniform even parts that were very different. The restoration allowed us to identify a suitable method of intervention and cleaning through the use of localized tampons of slightly heated water and then, to later lighten the very amber waxes, the use of localized impacts based on ammonium carbonate was necessary. The work that Michelangelo abandoned then became very ambitious. The mercy to Bandini was not his last work and he did not even take his place next to his tomb drawn by Vasari in Santa Croce. Cosimo III Medici in 1671 brings it to Florence when Michelangelo was already a legend. The sculpture has returned to new legibility in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo. As for Humanesimo and Medioevo, it is one of the largest museums in the world of sculpture and most of the works preserved here are at the best of their legibility. Among the masterpieces of the museum is therefore the most personal work of Michelangelo, an artist and his torments, a divine genius compared to his own humanity.