Museum Secrets

Rome.

A city of faith and power.

And at its heart, a museum with secrets dark and strange.

Tales of barbarous acts of violence,

clashing egos,

and scandalous censorship.

Here, you can uncover messages from the past,

and reopen dark chapters from history.

Secrets hidden in plain sight,

inside the Vatican museums.

In the middle of Rome, stands the Vatican.

The epicenter of Catholicism.

It is both a fortified city,

and a place the Pope calls home.

It also houses one of the famous museums in the world,

full of timeless treasures.

Each one with a story to tell.

Of all of these, none are more famous

than the Sistine Chapel.

All who enter here gaze up

at the luminous frescoes of Michelangelo.

What few people know is that his masterpiece

was an afterthought.

When the chapel was constructed,

the walls were filled with monumental murals,

but the ceiling was just decorated

with a simple field of stars.

30 years later, Pope Julius II

decided it needed a new paint job.

When he gave the task to Michelangelo,

he took a leap of faith,

because the artist was not then a famous painter,

but an up and coming sculptor of the human form.

His transformation of the ceiling,

an area the size of two basketball courts,

would be completed in just four years.

How did a brilliant but inexperienced painter

complete the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel

in such a short time?

500 years later, when Vatican staff

embarked on a restoration project,

they got the chance to uncover this museum's secrets.

My name is Maurizio de Luca,

and I'm the director of the restoration

in the Vatican Museum.

I worked there from 43 years.

- The restoration team spent nine years

up onto the ceiling in the 1980s.

It took them twice as long to clean the ceiling

as it did Michelangelo to paint it.

The possibility that we put our hand

on the plaster, on the Michelangelo painting,

allowed us to investigate more and more his technique.

Fresco painting includes a series of procedures,

that cannot be seen from a distance.

But since we have gotten close,

so close to the frescoes,

we can clearly see the evidence of those procedures.

- The largest figures on the ceiling

are nearly 20 feet across.

Michelangelo did not attempt to paint them freehand.

Each figure started as a sketch, or cartoon,

followed by a procedure that art experts

like William Wallace refer to as "pouncing".

Pouncing is the means of transferring

the cartoon to the plaster.

So the cartoon has actually been pricked

with little tiny holes,

and the charcoal dust in a bag

is actually pounced or pounded onto the cartoon.

Okay, we see the head, beautifully pounced,

and the hand, beautifully pounced.

- But pouncing was a slow process,

and Michelangelo was under pressure from an aging pope

who wanted to see the ceiling completed

before he died.

So, Michelangelo exchanged the charcoal for a blade,

allowing him to quickly incise the lines of the sketch

directly onto the plaster.

- And these are the kinds of things you can see

all across the ceiling,

when you're looking at it and raking like

Michelangelo's incised marks.

The artist had good reason

to heed the Pope's demand for speed.

Unlike our idea of the papacy today,

Pope Julius II, who was known as the Warrior Pope,

was an extremely active personality,

literally leading the papal armies into war.

- Michelangelo may have respected the Pope,

but he was not the type of man to be intimidated.

The thing you can say

about Pope Julius and Michelangelo,

they're both megalomaniacs.

- There were bound to be some clashes

between these titans.

The Pope wanted constantly to know

when Michelangelo was gonna finish,

and Michelangelo's famous response was,

"When it's done."

At which point, the Pope actually picked up a stick

and started beating Michelangelo.

"When it's done, when it's done?" He says.

To get it done,

Michelangelo would endure far more physical torment

than the occasional beating from an aging pope.

On a scaffold, 18 hours a day, seven days a week,

constantly craning his neck up,

paint dripping into his eyes,

no one can say Michelangelo didn't suffer for art.

In the fourth year of his labor,

he even described it in a poem.

"With my neck puffed out like a pigeon,

"belly hanging like an empty sack,

"beard pointed at the ceiling,

"and my brain fallen backwards in my head."

Michelangelo kept going because he was tough and determined.

But that doesn't explain how he could work

on a scaffold just a few feet from the ceiling

and yet paint figures in perfect perspective

when seen from far below.

The answer may be, because he started his career

as a sculptor.

- When Michelangelo imagines a figure moving,

it's moving inwards, outwards in space,

and therefore it creates this wonderful perspective.

People ask all the time.

"Is that real, is the architecture real,

"are they sticking out of the ceiling, are they 3D?"

- If one removes the frescoes from the ceiling,

Michelangelo's mastery of perspective

becomes even more impressive.

He works magic with his paints,

creating lifelike 3D figures

even when the background tilts the wrong way.

Jonah was painted on a piece of plaster

that tilts towards us,

and yet looking at the figure,

Jonah appears to tilt backwards.

It was something that he knew

would fly in the face of all the people

that had criticized him

at the beginning of the assignment saying,

"But Michelangelo doesn't know

"anything about painting."

Michelangelo denies the laws of physics

through his painting.

It's the same kind of special effect

that people marvel at in something like "Avatar".

So, how did Michelangelo

complete his masterpiece in just four years?

Determination, physical endurance,

and 3D virtuosity are only part of the answer.

The rest is surely quite simply, genius.

Michelangelo's more responsible

than any other artist in the history of the world

for raising the stature of artist.

This is the beginning of an artist

actually establishing his own criteria.

- Every morning, when the gates open,

thousands of visitors head straight to the Sistine Chapel,

to stand for a moment

in a place that combines the power of God

and the genius of man.

These galleries have always hosted

crowds of curious visitors,

but there was a time when they came in violence,

clamoring for the Pope's blood.

At first sight, it's easy to forget

that the Vatican Swiss Guards

are highly trained elite mercenaries,

dedicated for the last 500 years

to defend the life of the Pope.

Never was their duty more tested than in 1527,

during a bloody standoff in Rome.

500 years later, the Vatican museums

still bare the scars.

Here in the former papal apartments,

decorated by one of the masters of the Renaissance, Raphael,

art restorer Paolo Violini spends every day

cleaning the 500 year old frescoes.

- I've been working here in Rafael room for 15 years,

more or less.

Before the cleaning, we didn't know

the color of the eyes.

Now we can see they are blue.

It's really beautiful.

- The discoveries come in all forms.

We restored this fresco

more than 10 years ago,

and we found some damages

on the faces of the popes,

and also many graffiti.

One of them, you can see the name, Luther.

Luther was a German monk,

ex-communicated for challenging

the authority of the Pope.

How did his name end up incised on a fresco

in the papal apartments?

These frescoes were painted