Moving on
Imagine this eBay listing:
For sale: replica of a 15th-century Italian gate. Near mint condition. Design by Michelangelo. Price: thousands of dollars.
Domenic Iacono, director of the Syracuse University Art Galleries, may be adding that item to the eBay come spring.
Starting Tuesday, the Syracuse University Art Galleries will begin packing up the exhibit ‘Michelangelo: The Man and the Myth,’ which closed today.
The exhibit will be sent on to its next stop in New York City, where it will be displayed in the Joseph I. Lubin House, the SU headquarters in New York City, endowed by Louise and Bernard Palitz, who contributed the money for the exhibit.
Everything from the panels on the wall to the stands that hold up the glass cases will be dissembled and carefully packed. The original pieces by Michelangelo will head off separately.
Staff from the Casa Buonarroti, the museum in Florence, Italy, that lent the drawings to the exhibit, will inspect each piece before it gets sent to New York, Iacono said.
The only thing that will be left is the life-size replica of the gate Michelangelo designed for the Porta Pia, a bridge still standing in Rome. Iacono said he is thinking of putting the 16-foot-tall mockup on eBay, because if it doesn’t find a home, it will be taken apart.
‘The Porta Pia has to come down,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately at this point, it looks like it has to be dismantled.’
The exhibit has been a hit for the gallery. Estimates show more than 20,000 people visited the exhibition, Iacono said.
‘We had years where we didn’t have that many people coming to all of the exhibitions over the [entire] year, let alone in two months time,’ Iacono said. ‘This has been extraordinary.’
Despite the fact that the past two months have felt like a marathon, Gary Radke is similarly pleased with the exhibit.
‘It’s been everything I could’ve hoped for,’ said the fine arts professor, who partnered with Iacono to bring the exhibit to campus.
The exhibit was designed in part to offer the Syracuse community a chance to study and look at Michelangelo, Radke said.
Twenty different local schools visited the gallery. Bobbi Petrocci, an art teacher at the Christian Brothers Academy in Syracuse, brought the school’s art club to the exhibit Thursday.
‘They were really interested in coming,’ she said. ‘We would’ve got the guided tour, but they were booked. We came anyways.’
Students in Radke’s undergraduate and graduate seminars have been studying the drawings in depth since classes started. And one of his students made an interesting discovery.
One of the pieces, a sketch of several stone blocks, was originally thought to be one of Michelangelo’s designs for the tomb of Pope Julius II, the same pope who commissioned him to work on the Sistine Chapel.
Darin Stine, a fine arts graduate student at SU, has proven that the sketch wasn’t meant for the tomb of Julius II but for Basilica de San Lorenzo, a church in Florence.
Stine spent countless hours going over the dimensions for the church and comparing them to ones on the sketch. He eventually came to the conclusion that the drawing was meant for San Lorenzo.
Radke agrees with him and called Stine’s theory airtight. Stine plans to publish his findings as a part of his graduate research.
‘It’s nice to realize that contributions can still be made,’ Stine said. ‘I’m still working out the small details.’
Published on October 19, 2008 at 12:00 pm
