Stanza segreta michelangelo biography

Can also be visited from 1 August onwards: bookings open from Tuesday 2 July

It was November 1975, almost 50 years ago, when Paolo Dal Poggetto, then director of the Museo delle Cappelle Medicee - one of themost important museums in Florence - commissioned restorer Sabino Giovannoni to carry out some cleaning tests in a narrow corridor below the apse of the New Sacristy, on the occasion of the construction of a new museum exit.

The small room, 10 metres long by 3 metres wide, 2.50 metres high at the apex of the vault, had been used as a charcoal deposit until 1955 and then left unused, closed and forgotten for decades, under a trapdoor completely covered by furniture.

Removed for the work two layers of plaster, the exceptional discovery: a series of wall drawings of figures, traced with charred wood sticks and sanguine, of various sizes, in many cases overlapping, which dal Poggetto attributed for the most part to Michelangelo.

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