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From The Times
November 27, 2004

Michelangelo's final chapel is a revelation

From Richard Owen in Rome
MICHELANGELO’S last architectural masterpiece is to be unveiled in Rome next week after two years of restoration which reveal it to have been a visionary work which prefigured the Baroque era.

Biographies of Michelangelo suggest that he entrusted his final architectural commission, the Sforza Chapel in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, to an assistant and pupil, Tiberio Calcagni, who constructed it after Michelangelo’s death. In fact the chapel, named after Cardinal Guido Ascanio Sforza, took shape in the two years before Michelangelo’s death in 1564, according to documents recently recovered.

Georg Satzinger, Professor of Art History at the University of Bonn, who is an expert on Michelangelo, said that documents found in the archives — including the contract for the chapel, dated August 1562 — proved not only that the design of was Michelangelo’s own but the great artist had personally supervised “every detail, day by day” until his death. The documents also refer to a scale model of the Sforza chapel made by Michelangelo himself.

Professor Satzinger said the chapel, which is in the left-hand nave of the Basilica and is dedicated to the Virgin Mary of the Assumption, was begun in 1562. After Michelangelo’s death Calcagni and Giacomo Della Porta, another of his pupils, had put the finishing touches to it. But by then Michelangelo had already put the imprint of his genius on it.

Monsignor Michael Jagosz, head of the museum at Santa Maria Maggiore, who supervised the restoration, told La Repubblica that the chapel had been restored to its original splendour. Restorers stripped away ugly accretions such as wooden panelling to reveal the pale travertine marble of the original and “the harmony of ascending lines”.

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