No Big Discovery in the Pauline Chapel

For years people have thought this painting  was  a self-portrait of Michelangelo.

It was put on the cover of a collection of his writings way back in 1987,  still for sale at Abebooks:

On the back it says: “Cover Illustration: detail of Crucifixion of St. Peter (assumed to be a self-portrait), c. 1550, by Michelangelo”.

So the latest cleaning of the frescoes in the Pauline Chapel did NOT reveal anything, except of course the bright colors.

Yet look at the headlines:

Vatican: Michelangelo self-portrait revealed in chapel fresco‎ – 3 days ago…
Michelangelo’s self-portrait was discovered by head of Vatican restorations…
AKI – Adnkronos International

2 Jul 2009 … of Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Vatican’s Pauline Chapel may have produced a special prize _ a previously unknown self-portrait of the …
www.huffingtonpost.com/…/

‘Michelangelo self-portrait’ discovered in restored Vatican fresco …
2 Jul 2009 … Michelangelo is also said to have included a self-portrait in Last … Michelangelo began work on the Pauline Chapel murals after he had …
entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/

Michelangelo self-portrait said to be found in Vatican fresco …
2 Jul 2009 … The discovery was made in the Vatican’s Pauline Chapel, … left corner of Michelangelo’s “The Crucifixion of St. Peter” is a self-portrait, …
latimesblogs.latimes.com/

Michelangelo self-portrait may have been found – Science – Canoe.ca
2 Jul 2009 … Michelangelo self-portrait may have been found … The Cappella Paolina, or the Pauline Chapel, in the Apostolic Palace is used by the pope …
cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Science/2009/07/02/10003661-ap.html -

Possible Michelangelo self-portrait revealed – Kansas City Star
2 Jul 2009 … The restoration of Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Vatican’s Pauline Chapel may … prize – a previously unknown self-portrait of the artist.
www.kansascity.com/451/story/1302616.html – Cached – Similar

No discovery, no revelation.

Read about Michelangelo’s great frescoes in the Pauline Chapel here.

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The Best Draftsman

Dürer was famous for his drawings.

He drew complex pictures with lines alone. Woodcuts like this Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse made him famous  all over Europe before he was even thirty:

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Albrecht Dürer (1498)

How did he turn everything he saw into lines?  How can that work?  “There are no lines in nature,” says the Swiss art critic Wölfflin. “Any beginner can learn this if he sits down in front of his house with a pencil and tries to reduce what he sees to a series of lines. Everything opposes this task: the foliage on the trees, the waves in the water, the clouds in the sky. And if it seems that a roof clearly exposed against the sky, or dark tree trunk, must surely be able to be rendered in outline, even in these cases it is soon apparent that the line can only be an abstraction, because it is not lines that one sees, but masses, bright and dark masses that contrast with a background of a different color…”

A painter might say that everything is not lines but masses of color.

But Dürer brought it off with lines, all kinds of lines.  “His historical significance as a draftsman lies in his construction of a purely linear style on the foundation of the modern three-dimensional representation of the world.” (Heinrich Wölfflin in his introduction to his 1923 collection of Dürer’s drawings.)

Dürer wasn’t of course the first to draw with lines. Linear abstraction goes back to prehistoric cave scratches. But he discovered new ways to use those lines. His way of rendering some phenomena has never been surpassed.

One thing that makes his work different from that of other great draftsmen is the double function he gave the lines. They had not only to define form and show movement but also to decorate. They were meant to have an ornamental beauty.
Other great draftsmen use lines to build a picture but their lines aren’t important in themselves: they contribute to the general impression, that’s all.  For example, a group of them intended to indicate a shadow will get the artist’s OK even if, taken for themselves, they are an ugly snag.  Dürer wants them clean, clear, and pretty.

At least he did once he had found his own way. When he was starting out he used the lines the way everyone else did. Look at the non-ornamental pen scratches he used to show the shadows on this nude:

Nude study, now in the Musée Bonnat in Bayonne (1493)   Dürer was twenty-two.

Sometimes when he was older he even went too far. The ornamental pattern of lines seems to stand like a screen in front of the picture. You have to stare for a few seconds at the complex configuration until, a group at a time, the lines turn into those things they are meant to represent.

Christ on the Mount of Olives, 1521

Maybe Dürer’s historical significance as a draftsman lies in his line-drawings, as Wölfflin says.  But his best-loved drawings are done with mixed media. The Best Draftsman 2 is about his great watercolors and brush drawings, such as this one:

View of Arco (1495)

Paris, The Louvre

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Who Designed St. Peter’s?

There was a contest and Bramante won it (1506) with this design:

It was  a simple (Greek) cross inside a square.  The arms protruded slightly and were rounded off in apses.
That big circle in the middle was the dome over St. Peter’s tomb. It would be the biggest in the world.
There were four little domes between the arms of the cross.

Bramante died before construction was far along. Over the next forty years other popes ordered other architects to improve Bramante’s design but none did. Finally, Paul III gave the job to Michelangelo.

Michelangelo Takes Over

He studied all the designs and decided to keep Bramante’s. He knew a good thing when he saw it, even if it was the work of an old enemy of his.  The present-day sanctuary or east end of St. Peter’s is essentially Bramante’s with Michelangelo’s alterations.

Michelangelo’s design (1546-1564)

Just what alterations did Michelangelo make?
He decorated.   He added endless moldings and wall decorations, windows and niches. He gave the apses a slightly greater bulge and then put in a bridge wall between them and the corners of the square.  He hid the simple shape of the building by putting a sort of folding screen around it, with lots of panels, tying them all together with a huge “ribbon” (the cornice).

This is what St. Peter’s now looks like from the back, where Michelangelo’s design is best seen.

None of that was built while Michelangelo was alive, however. Construction was only as far as the dome–or rather, the drum for the dome.

Here is Vasari’s painting of its construction, also seen from the back. That’s Pope Paul III giving orders.

The cupola design (the cupola is the roof over a dome) gave Michelangelo a lot of trouble. An assistant helped him with the wooden model.

Michelangelo’s wooden model, altered by Giacomo della Porta

Is his the same as the present-day cupola?

Almost.  Michelangelo’s was hemispherical. A later architect, Giacomo della Porta, stretched it, made it taller.

At Michelangelo’s death only the drum (round base for the dome) was completed.  It was still attached to the old fourth-century basilica.

An engraving showing St. Peter’s from the front six years after Michelangelo’s death

Eventually Old St. Peter’s was torn down to make room for the big naves and facade  that were added by Carlo Maderna. This is his, the final floor-plan.

His facade

was based on the old Roman Pantheon’s:

Bramante had also been thinking of the Pantheon when he came up with the original design for St. Peter’s.

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