Bacteria saved Michelangelo's work

Restorers cleaning the famous chapel of Michelangelo's Medici family have found an unexpected ally: bacteria, New York Times.

This week, to mark the 545th anniversary of Michelangelo's birth, restorers in Florence unveiled the newly restored Medici family chapel, designed by a Renaissance master. Their eight-year effort to clean up the tomb was helped by an unusual tool: bacteria.

Since 2019, experts have been quietly injecting various strains of bacteria into the marble sculptures of the New Sacristy, where several members of the Medici dynasty are buried. Microbes immediately began to eat centuries-old dirt, glue and other debris, because of which the sculptures in the tombs were discolored. 

The bacteria were particularly adept at dealing with organic fluids leaking from the long-decomposed corpse of Alessandro de' Medici, the former ruler of Florence, whose body was placed in a sarcophagus without proper evisceration.

According to the New York Times, the Serratia ficaria SH7 strain managed to get rid of the stains caused by the liquid in just a few days.

"SH7 ate Alessandro," Monica Bietti, the former head of the Medici Chapel Museum, who led an all—female team in the restoration project, told the newspaper last year.

Bietti, along with several other restorers of the project, spoke at the opening organized by the Academy of Drawing Arts this week.

"The restoration of one of the most symbolic places of art required knowledge, experience and science combined with sensitivity and intelligence," she said.

"For this reason, the work was tested from the very beginning, and then subjected to constant optical, methodological and scientific checks."

Michelangelo was commissioned to design a new sacristy, located among the Medici chapels in the Church of San Lorenzo in Florence, in 1520. On the frontispieces of the tomb there are sculptures depicting two members of the Medici family — Lorenzo di Piero, Duke of Urbino, and Giuliano di Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino. Nemours, as well as figures symbolizing sunset, dawn, night and day.