A small room hidden in the basement of the chapel that Michelangelo built in Florence for the Medici family could reveal a huge secret. Decorated with splendid doodles of human figures, some scholars believe that the traces in charcoal and blood are attributable to the same Renaissance genius that decorated the masterful tombs of Lorenzo the Magnificent and Giuliano de' Medici, the Florentine lords who rest in the New Sacristy of the Basilica of San Lorenzo, the funerary chapel that Pope Leo X commissioned from Michelangelo Buonarroti.
Florence will open to the public for the first time, from November 15, this room that could be the place where Michelangelo hid for a few months in 1530, when the prior of San Lorenzo, Giovan Battista Figiovanni, saved him from anger of Pope Clement VII – also a Medici, who could not bear the artist's role as supervisor of the fortifications during the brief period of republican government, between 1527 and 1530, in which the Medici were expelled from Florence.
Some scholars claim that, between the end of June and the end of October 1530, when the Medici pardoned Michelangelo and he returned to his Florentine assignments, the genius hid in this refuge and filled it with drawings of sketches of some of his projects, among which, predictably, the legs of Giuliano de' Medici for his portrait in the same chapel in Florence, or the head of Laocoon, the Hellenic sculpture that surprised him so much.
The secret room, ten meters long by three wide and 2.50 meters high, succumbed to oblivion for centuries. It was used as a coal warehouse until 1955, after which it was left unused and closed, under a hatch completely covered with cupboards, furniture and other decorative elements. Until, in 1975, the then director of the Museum of the Medici Chapels, Paolo Dal Poggetto, commissioned the restorer Sabino Giovannoni to clean the narrow corridor under the apse of the New Sacristy, with the aim of finding a space for build a new exit for the museum, which was experiencing a boom in visitors.
So, by chance, the formidable mural sketches were found, hidden under two layers of plaster, which Dal Poggetto mainly attributed to Michelangelo. The director was the one who, based on the testimonies left by Ascanio Condivi, a disciple of Buonarroti, and the Renaissance biographer Giorgio Vasari, considered that the room was actually the enigmatic hiding place. Since then, multiple experts in Renaissance genius have studied the works and some share this theory, while others consider them to have been done by later artists.
After decades when only experts and a few privileged few could descend the stairs leading to the refuge – including the King of the United Kingdom, Charles III, or the actor Leonardo DiCaprio –, now the Bargello Museums, to which it belongs the chapel, they are opening it to the general public for the first time, with the hope that the impact it will generate will attract more experts on the Renaissance who have just determined whether the sketches are, indeed, the work of Michelangelo.
"It could be, because it's a unique atmosphere that allows you to see the street - from a small window - without being seen, so it was perfect for him to hide in," ventured the director of the Bargello Museums, Paola D 'Agostino, Tuesday during the presentation to the press. According to D'Agostino, among the sketches in the secret room, a woman can be seen reminiscent of Leda and the Swan, a lost canvas by Michelangelo but known for copies and studies. Nevertheless, the director asks that science be the one to have the last word, despite the fact that she bets that the strokes "combine the hand of the teacher and others".
"Not all the drawings show the same sustained qualitative tension of Michelangelo's graphics," agrees the curator of the Medici Chapels, Francesca de Luca. But, despite this, "this place allows today's visitors to have the unique experience of being able to come into direct contact not only with the creative process of the master, but also with the perception of the formation of the myth of the divine artist" .
A space so narrow and delicate, of course, that visits will have to be dosed in groups of four people each time and where disabled people and children under the age of ten cannot enter.
