Michelangelo's Secret Room

Cave Painting, my short story based on this place On Sunday morning, I woke up early and rode my bike down to our local market to pick up flowers and coffee (yuppie version) for my wife. Our daughter woke up a couple hours later and drove to the local market to pick up flowers and coffee for my wife. She didn’t realize that I’d already done it. This sort of thing naturally makes my wife very happy albeit a bit more caffeinated than usual.

I also spent much of the weekend surfing the internet for information about a secret room at the Basilica Di San Lorenzo. My only visit to Italy took place in 1980. I had met the wrong woman on a train in Southern France and we’d agreed to travel together into Italy as friends anyway. We wound up in Florence with yet another guy we met on the train. While I liked all that Renaissance art, several hours a day of it might have been a bit much. Anyway, we wound up amongst all these tombs of various dead Medici, about whom I kept making Borgia poisoning jokes (I had the two confused in my head). There was an English art student sketching one of the statutes. Actually there were two. On one side, an attractive young woman was doing a pen and ink of two opposed figures (something like light and darkness) on one of the tombs at the Basilica di San Lorenzo. Her sketches were tidy, precise, and accomplished. My friend, guy from the train, complimented her drawing. She thanked him politely, talked for a minute, mentioned the Royal Academy of Art, then went back to what she was doing. I look back and realize that was one of many moments in my life when I had to face the fact that I just had no idea how to approach attractive young women. Anyway, that’s why I watch the Bachelor.

On the other side of room, a guy in a t-shirt with unruly hair, was sketching the same tomb. He had more of a working class British accent that made him sound like one of the Beatles. His drawings were loose, primitive, and covered with signs of dozens of do overs. After asking to peek at his work, we didn’t exactly know what to say but this guy kept chatting anyway. We didn’t ask if he’d made a run at his compatriot on the other side of the room. He then went into a monologue about homo-eroticism in Michelangelo’s art, though he used less socially acceptable terms. He then pointed us towards a doorway and told us to knock to see something really interesting.

Now, this was exciting! I was going to see something that wasn’t part of the standard Florence tourist menu. We then found ourselves in a small windowless room whose walls were covered with “doodles”. There were bits of the Sistine Chapel, a drawing of a resurrected Christ, and several male forms and various body parts. Friend from the train who happened to be an avid photographer tried to take pictures, but they stopped him from using his flash in there. The charcoal drawings were really delicate. I didn’t see any writing on the walls, but they were in the tradition of all good graffiti. It was all basically a varation of “Michelangelo was here!”

Somewhere mid-awestruck, it occurred to us that this was an interior room with no windows. How the heck did the guy see well enough to draw on the walls? Second, what was Michelangelo who was a famous enough artist at the time doing shut away in this room in the first place? If it were a sanctuary, it seemed like he’d pick a spot more conducive to his art. We tried to ask, but the person who let us into room spoke limited English and I was the sort of person who confused the Borgias with the Medicis anyway.
Nonetheless, it was maybe the most fascinating thing I’d ever seen in a museum setting. It was literally like being inside Michelangelo’s head.

It’s been argued that Michelangelo anticipated modern art in many ways. The effect of this room was almost disturbingly modern. With all the stray body parts decontextualized on the wall, the image of the Christ, and then bits of the Sistine Chapel, it was kind of a Renaissance version of Picasso’s Guernica. Hieronymous Bosch was a near contemporary of Michelangelo and his Garden of Earthly Delights in some ways can be seen as a darker take on themes from the Sistine Chapel. I doubt that the two artists knew much of anything about one another, but I suppose one could argue that Bosch had already managed to paint “outside his time”. I had just never thought of Michelangelo as ever having done the same. Fwiw at the time, I thought these were pre-sketches for the Sistine Chapel. In fact, he’d finished the Sistine Chapel twenty years earlier. The doodles are even more fascinating given that perspective.

Anyway, friend from the train and I came out of there really excited. We’d seen something amazing and wanted to tell other people to check it out yet the drawings were so delicate it struck me that it never could be a standard exhibit seen by thousands of people from behind a set of velvet ropes. I eventually lost touch with friend from the train though I did use him as the photographer for my first wedding a few years later. I never again spoke to wrong woman after she left Florence a day earlier than I did. Still for several years when I heard someone else was going to Florence I’d try to tell them about this secret Michelangelo room, but I’m not sure that anyone else found it or thought it was anything about which they’d care to remark.

Generally once you stop talking about something, you forget it. I didn’t know exactly what the place was called. Over time, it became this sort of indistinct memory of having seen the lightning moment of creation from hundreds of years ago (something Michelangelo depicted in Rome) of a great artist. I have no idea what to make of the modern feel of that room. He obviously never formalized what he did there and who knows if he ever thought of it as anything more than random doodles while he stuck in some dank room.

For some reason, the memory of that room came up for me once again a few days ago. I think I was involved in some online discussion of whether or not unfinished works by writers should be published posthumously. There’s a thing now with Nabokov’s son having been told to destroy his father’s draft of “Laura” and now a full generation after the man’s death the son is publishing it anyway. I went “Damn, I remember this thing with Michelangelo” and tried to google the secret room. Ultimately, this is pretty much all I found, but it does explain why no one else ever came back from Florence raving about secret drawings in some sort of dungeon.

Oddly, I can still remember the smell of the mold and wonder if it was the same mold that Michelangelo might have sniffed in his six weeks in that room.

My story based on the secret room
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