{"id":6988,"date":"2023-11-06T08:36:00","date_gmt":"2023-11-06T13:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/?p=6988"},"modified":"2023-11-06T08:36:37","modified_gmt":"2023-11-06T13:36:37","slug":"a-secret-room-in-a-16th-century-italian-chapel-where-michelangelo-hid-and-drew-for-months-opens-to-the-public","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/2023\/11\/06\/a-secret-room-in-a-16th-century-italian-chapel-where-michelangelo-hid-and-drew-for-months-opens-to-the-public\/","title":{"rendered":"A Secret Room in a 16th-Century Italian Chapel, Where Michelangelo Hid\u2014and Drew\u2014for Months, Opens to the Public"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michelangelo is believed to have made the rarely seen drawings while in hiding after the pope sentenced him to death.<\/h4>
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Sarah Cascone for Artnet News –<\/em><\/strong> Guidebooks to the Italian city of Florence have long noted that the\u00a0Basilica of San Lorenzo<\/a>\u00a0is home to a secret room believed to have been decorated by\u00a0Michelangelo<\/a>\u00a0while the famed Renaissance master was in hiding from the pope for two months in 1530. Now, the chamber, which is part of the the\u00a0Museum of the Medici Chapels<\/a>\u00a0(itself one of the fives sites of the city\u2019s\u00a0Bargello Museums<\/a>), will be open to the public for the first time.<\/p>

\u201cThe completion of the works on the new exit and the adaptations to align\u2026 with safety regulations, will allow the opening of Michelangelo\u2019s Secret Room\u2014an extraordinarily fascinating place, but extremely delicate due to\u2026 the narrow space\u2026 and\u2026 the need to protect the charcoal drawings found on the walls,\u201d Massimo Osanna, director general of museums in Italy, said in a statement.<\/p>

The stunning drawings of the Stanza Segreta, or Secret Room, were rediscovered in 1975.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>

The stunning drawings of the Stanza Segreta, or Secret Room, were rediscovered in 1975. That\u2019s when Paolo Dal Poggetto, then director of the Museum of the Medici Chapels, tasked restorer Sabino Giovannoni with trying to clean part of the walls of a narrow chamber beneath the church\u2019s mausoleum, which had been designed by Michelangelo in 1520.<\/p>

The corridor, measuring about 32 feet long, 10 feet wide, and eight feet tall, had been used it to store coal, until it had been sealed shut some 20 years prior. It was accessible only by narrow stairway beneath a trap door that had been concealed beneath a wardrobe amid a pile of unused furniture and decor.<\/p>

The initial plan was to potentially create a new tourist entry and exit point from the museum. But what Giovannoni found changed everything. Hidden under two layers of plaster, he soon realized, the walls were covered in large-scale charcoal and red chalk sanguine drawings executed with the confidence and ease of a master draftsman.<\/p>

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