The platform was positioned on rails resting on an architrave above the pilasters that flank the sides of the chapel. This was the same architrave that Bramante had used when he designed the platform on which Michelangelo would spend four long, painful and ecstatic years. The frescos were above our heads by mere centimetres, every brushstroke and nuance visible to us. In true conservator fashion we kept our hands at our sides, not daring to touch and using just our eyes. “Touch! Touch!” cried the restorer, so we raised our hands and felt tentatively over the surface. I was touching that electric gap between two giant fingers where the spark of life flowed from God to his creation! I was touching it! There is much talk about that gap: too wide and the impact of life’s first lightning bolt would be muted, actually touching and the act would already have taken place. The gap had to be just so.
Now here was revelation. When Michelangelo had held his paper cartoons up to the newly applied plaster, he had followed the standard practice of pricking through the paper with an awl, thus leaving an outline of the figures set out in tiny marks. Then, following these outlines he would apply his colours to the still-wet plaster. The figures of God and Adam showed the prick marks clearly, but not one of the other features of the fresco – the host of cherubs, the clouds, the earthy scene upon which Adam reclined – showed any prick marks at all. He had done them freehand! At that point I knew that I was in the presence of something superhuman. I was about as close to God then as Michelangelo must have been, and the spark between those two fingers flew also from me, back to the early 16th century. It was that thrilling connection between the here-and-now and the past-and-done-with that all of us seek, but are rarely privileged to experience.
Gaël and I descended after our half-hour, went in a daze straight to the closest trattoria we could find, ordered a carafe of wine, and just looked into each other’s eyes in silence. There were no words. So was this coincidence of time and place merely a coincidence, or was there something higher, greater and ineffable working on us?
