Gianluigi Colalucci

Gianluigi Colalucci (24 December 1929

Career Colalucci graduated in the restoration of painting on wood, mural, and canvas, from the in 1953, where he was a pupil of Cesare Brandi.

Colalucci began working with the Vatican in 1960, and between 1980 and 1994 led the restoration of the Sistine Chapel frescoes, directing a team of twelve, and removing centuries of smoke, dust, glue, varnishes, and wine which had dulled the frescoes, A year before his death, in an interview with the Vatican Museums he reflected on the risk of the restoration, saying "If these two brushstrokes get ruined while you are cleaning, you are lost. The painting is lost. We are all lost", saying he reflected on it before starting the restoration, "then I faced it", "it did not betray me". In a New York Times obituary, Carmen C. Bambach, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Renaissance scholar is quoted as saying, "It changed art history. All of a sudden there was a new Michelangelo."

For his work restoring the Sistine Chapel frescoes, in 1991 he was awarded the honorary degree Doctor Honoris Causa by New York University,

He retired from the Vatican Museums in 1995, a year after the restoration work had finished. From 2009, he worked as a technical director of restoration with the Camposanto Monumentale di Pisa, including supervising works such as the restoration of The Triumph of Death by Buffalmacco, which was then re-located back to its original location. thumb

Selected works