Farewell to Gianluigi Colalucci, historic restorer of the Sistine Chapel

Restorer Gianluigi Colalucci passed away in Rome on Sunday, March 28, at the age of 92. Born in Rome in 1929 to a family of lawyers who had no artistic traditions, Colalucci was best known for restoring the frescoes that Michelangelo Buonarroti executed on the vault and back wall of the Sistine Chapel. He graduated from theCentral Institute for Restoration, where he studied with Cesare Brandi, and during his career he taught on every continent, from Europe to Japan, from the United States to Australia. As a restorer he worked mainly on artists of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, such as Mantegna, Titian, Dosso Dossi, Raphael, Caravaggio, and Guido Reni. The restoration of Giotto ’s frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua also bears his signature.

The work that made him famous began in 1980, after he was appointed chief restorer of the Vatican Museums ’ Painting and Wooden Materials Restoration Laboratory in 1979 (where he had begun his career, in 1960). Michelangelo’s frescoes were looking dulled and yellowed, mostly due to smoke from candles lit during five centuries of use of the chapel. Colalucci and his team finished the work fourteen years later, in 1994, not without revealing some portions along the way.The controversy was very violent, with many shouting scandal, havoc and disaster, accusing Colalucci of having performed too much cleaning that had ruined the work. In reality, Colalucci had done nothing more than restore Michelangelo’s original colors. “It’s not my problem,” he had replied to those who pointed out that there was a huge difference between Michelangelo’s colors and those in which the frescoes appeared after more than four centuries of degradation.

Colalucci’s last works overseen included a restoration no less monumental and, above all, no less enduring, that of Buonamico Buffalmacco ’s Triumph of Death at the Camposanto in Pisa, a restoration that lasted several decades, which Colalucci has overseen since 2009 as supervisor.

“He left us a great man, a great professional, one of the greatest restorers of the last century,” said Barbara Jatta, director of the Vatican Museums. “Colalucci distinguished himself internationally not only for having the courage, the strength, the ability to tackle the restoration of the century. The then directors of the Painting Galleries and the Vatican Museums, Fabrizio Mancinelli and Carlo Pietrangeli, decided to tackle that restoration because they had Gianluigi Colalucci as a technician, as a reference figure. Gianluigi Colalucci is a key figure who has left us, but who remains within us not only humanly and affectively, but also professionally. A figure still today of reference for those who want to work in the field of conservation, preservation and restoration. That restoration of the Sistine Chapel set the standard.”

Farewell to Gianluigi Colalucci, historic restorer of the Sistine Chapel

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