The Vatican said on Thursday it had discovered a lost drawing by Renaissance master Michelangelo of a design for the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica.
Holy Cow folks. Misfile some bills? Ok. Misplace some indulgences? Sure. Misfile a Michelangelo? Come on guys.
The Vatican newspaper l’Osservatore Romano said the small drawing, done in the spring of 1563 when Michelangelo was 88, was believed to be his last known sketch before he died the next year.
The drawing, a section of the dome, contains some measurements and is thus believed to have been done to give stone cutters guidance after the master deemed work on an earlier batch of stone inadequate.
Michelangelo worked as the architect of the basilica from 1547 until shortly before his death in 1564. The newspaper said Michelangelo, who destroyed many of his sketches for the basilica, probably drew it on the construction site, giving it directly to workmen with his instructions. Drawn with blood-colored chalk on paper, it apparently survived because part of the paper had been used again for calculations, perhaps by workmen. It wound up by accident in files concerning the costs of the basilica’s construction.
I hope somebody is losing their job over this. And if they’re dead, berate their great great great great grandchildren. Heads must roll.
The newspaper said the drawing would be presented to the media on Monday.
December 7, 2007 at 11:27 am
I predict that there will soon be a book out called the ‘Michelangelo Code’.
December 7, 2007 at 4:32 pm
This overhaul of the Vatican archives is producing some AWESOME stuff!
First the Templar Documents, and now this.
What’s next? A lost work of Aquinas??
As for the improbability of losing this stuff… I used to work in the University of Chicago Libraries. One of my Jobs was going down in the storage area– where books were organized by size, not call #. There was an archaic code system to find books. And if a book was misplaced, especially if it was small, it could go missing for decades.
I imagine the problem is MUCH worse in the Vatican’s collection…. After all, when it started, there was no LC or Dewey Decimal!
December 7, 2007 at 6:11 pm
I wrote a story a few years ago about Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue which had been considered a lost piece turning up at Palmer Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. The seminary was about to go belly up when it found the piece in the library. Beethoven quite literally saved the school. I’m unsure how Beethoven would’ve felt about that.