From Library Journal
Any serious art book collection must upgrade its holdings to include recent photographs of the Sistine Chapel after the cleaning, as our understanding of the paintings on the ceiling and walls has since changed radically. Here are three titles complementing one another and various aspects of the images revealed by the restoration. The slender, slipcovered Michelangelo and Raphael is an updated version of the official publication of the Vatican Museum illustrating the Sistine and Pauline chapels and the stanzas and loggias of Raphael. A best seller to tourists in Rome, it records the histories of the chapels with clear, elegant reproductions and descriptive text. There are full-color foldouts of the restored Sistine ceiling and Last Judgment by Michelangelo showing the breadth and scope of these paintings. The wall decorations, life cycles of Moses and Christ by Botticelli, Signorelli, Ghirlandaio, and Roselli, under the direction of Perugino, are explained in terms of their historical and contemporaneous significance. Raphael's great frescoes in the stanzas and his paintings in the picture gallery are fully represented, though restoration is now being done in the Stanza della Signatura. The Sistine Chapel covers this chapel, including Michelangelo's ceiling and Last Judgment and the wall decorations, and is a reprint of an official Vatican publication that has been sold to tourists for many years. This edition, however, is expanded to contain a final chapter on the restoration, describing the method and materials used to reveal the brilliant color scheme. The text is by the curator of the Vatican Museums, and the reproductions are handsome and bright. Part of Braziller's "Great Fresco Cycles of the Renaissance" series, Partridge's book focuses on Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling. Partridge (art history, Univ. of California) also demonstrates the technique employed in creating fresco. Showing an illustration of the scaffolding used by Michelangelo and rebuilt by the restorers, the book includes a comprehensive diagram establishing the order of each panel in the grand design as well as a reconstruction of the exterior of the chapel. While the first part of the book contains black-and-white reproductions, the plates and commentaries in the latter half are in full color but are rather dark compared with the reproductions in the other two titles. Like the rest of the series, Michelangelo contains a glossary of fresco terms Any visitor who has toured these collections will appreciate the chance these books provide for more leisurely study. Scholars and students will benefit from the recent reproductions, which are a major factor in this recommendation of all three titles.?Ellen Bates, New YorkCopyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Editor's Introduction
A bestseller at the Vatican Museums, this book gives the reader insight to the artistic meaning and historical content of the two most important Renaissance artists, Michelangelo Buonarroti and Raphael Sanzio of Urbino. Through the clarity of its text and the thoroughness of its pictorial documentation, the publication is designed to bring the reader and art lover closer to the artists and their works represented in this book, some of which are not on display to the public. Its didactical approach, with newly documented pictures and extensive captions, make it a valuable learning tool as well as a beautifully illustrated book to be studied and enjoyed.

Excerpted from Michelangelo and Raphael in the Vatican by Francesco Rossi, Antonio P. Graziano, Fabrizio Mancinelli. Copyright 1993 (c) by the Vatican Museums. All rights reserved.
The following paragraph is taken from page 13 of Michelangelo and Raphael in the Vatican. The sources and meaning of Michelangelo's masterpiece were the subject of polemical conjectures almost as soon as the fresco was unveiled. Vasare saw in it the culmination of all Italian pictorial art; citing some of its sources, he mentions Dante and Signorelli. Pietro Arentino, on the other hand, malevolently criticized it, finding hints of heresy in it and denouncing the scandal of so many nudes in a sacred place. Unfortunately, his criticism found its mark: Daniele da Volterra, a favorite Michelangelo pupil, was deputed to "put breeches" on the nudes. What was the original like? We can reconstruct it by comparing copies, such as those (now in Naples) which Marcello Venusti sketched immediately before the veilings. The accusations and exaggerations, redolent of the Counter-Reformation spirit, explain some of the polemics the work aroused. But Michelangelo's was a tough, well-tried faith, a spirituality tested and lived in the context of the Renaissance but with profound roots in the Middle Ages. The Pictorial inspiration is clearly from the Italian "Quattrocento" (Giotto, Camposanto di Pisa, Orcagna). In fact Michelangelo emphasized the ideal aspect by uniting time and space in a single vision and traditional divisions into sections. The drama before the viewer is unique and instantaneous and is acted out beyond time and space in the human sense.

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