Florence, Casa Buonarroti, 24 September 2025 – 7 January 2026
The exhibition, promoted by Fondazione Casa Buonarroti in collaboration with Vatican Museums and Regione Toscana, was strongly supported by the president of the Fondazione, Cristina Acidini, and the director, Alessandro Cecchi, to inaugurate the restored and redesigned exhibition rooms on the ground floor of the museum, thanks to the collaboration of Opera Laboratori, which produced the exhibition together with Fondazione Casa Buonarroti.
The exhibition is curated by Silvestra Bietoletti and Monica Maffioli.
With over 60 works, the exhibition offers a reinterpretation of one of the most monumental and famous pictorial cycles in the history of Renaissance art with an evocative interpretation: the “multimedia iconicity” of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. The media, engraving, photography, illustrated publishing, cinematography, television documentaries and commercial advertising graphics have played a significant role in translating and interpreting the complex pictorial narrative created by Buonarroti in the Vatican, disseminating the visual documentation through dozens of fragments and individual shots, figurative passages that take on new meaning, especially in the contemporary world and in the presence of a social context that is largely indifferent to the exegesis of the pictorial work.
Over the centuries, Michelangelo’s work in the Vatican has been a constant source of inspiration for artists: the copper plates for the etchings by Tommaso Piroli, Conrad Martin Metz and Giovanni Volpato, created between the late 18th and early 19th centuries, translate the great figures of the Volta and the Last Judgement onto paper, making a critical selection that offers new visions and different narrative forms. But it is above all photography, starting with the first systematic documentation campaign carried out between 1868 and 1869 by Adolph Braun’s Alsatian studio, that has increased the repertoire of images essential for the study and historical-artistic knowledge of Michelangelo’s work: the campaigns of the great Italian photographic studios, the Fratelli Alinari, Giacomo Brogi, Domenico Anderson, but also the first publications illustrated with chromolithographic plates, such as those promoted by the London-based Arundel Society, became tools for art historians and the creation of the “myth” of Michelangelo.
The absence of chromatic tones is compensated for by the large size of the negatives and, during printing, by the dosage of the toning shades or by the manual application of aniline colouring, adding further elements of “translation” with respect to the original work. Since the mid-twentieth century, Michelangelo’s colours have been reproduced with relative accuracy by the orthochromatic films used by Frank Lerner for the first colour photo shoot, which appeared in the popular magazine “LIFE” in 1949.
Fifteen years later, Pasquale De Antonis returned to the Sistine Chapel with art historian Roberto Salvini, working together on the first scientific documentation campaign of Michelangelo’s pictorial cycle. That same year, 1964, Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti made a critical film dedicated to Michelangelo:«art documentary in which cinematic language is used critically to provide the viewer with the correct interpretation of a work», as the author himself defined it.
The widespread dissemination of illustrations of Michelangelo’s work led to the artist’s style being reworked by Tano Festa, one of the best-known exponents of Roman pop art, anticipating the process of vulgarisation of the use of certain details, such as the famous detail from the Creation of Adam, which became an icon in the popular imagination and was reproduced so often that it was reworked in advertising, merchandising and souvenirs.
The eclectic and unconventional art historian Leo Steinberg was among the first to consider the figures of the Sistine Chapel without prejudice as images for consumption, material worthy of being collected – as he himself did from the 1960s onwards – and studied in order to understand the profound reception of Michelangelo’s art in 20th-century society, from the perspective of the history of taste. The exhibition features more than forty reproductions taken from prints in Steinberg’s collection of lampoons, in which the iconic detail of the meeting of God’s right hand and Adam’s, an image capable of summarising in itself, in the decades that followed, the meaning, intensity and essence of the entire fresco, even misrepresenting its overall meaning.
The last major documentary photography campaign, begun in 1980 by Japanese photographer Takashi Okamura and completed in 1999 at the end of one of the most sensational and celebrated restoration projects, highlights the “unveiling” of Michelangelo’s original work, where colour becomes the key to understanding his entire pictorial oeuvre, revealing that, beyond the mark, it is the bright colours and bold colour combinations that make this work a challenge even for the contemporary world. This challenge was taken up by Canadian artist Bill Armstrong when, in 2015, invited by the Vatican Museums, he interpreted Michelangelo’s masterpiece by focusing on the individual figures and their gestures, creating a series of nine photographs entitled Gestures.
Finally, the exhibition closes with the “photo-graphic” work Not in my name, created in 2014 by Sudanese artist Khalid Albaih, in which Michelangelo’s icon conveys a universal message, inviting reflection on the tragedy of the many wars that devastate populations, causing them to lose sight of their human essence.
Catalogue published by Sillabe
Edited by Silvestra Bietoletti and Monica Maffioli
Texts by: Silvestra Bietoletti, Maria Francesca Bonetti, Tommaso Casini, Alessandro Cecchi, Monica Maffioli, Pierandrea Villa.