ERASED MICHELANGELO - DIGITAL ERASURE : original painting
The project 'Erased Michelanglo' is a side project of the architecture project 'Erased City: Revealing the lost River Walbrook in the Square Mile'.
It is a pictorial analysis of the void within Michelangelo's 'The Virgin and Child with Saint John and Angels, also called 'The Manchester Madonna', which is dating back to approximately 1497.
As one of Michelangelo’s earlier works of art, the painting is left unfinished. Christ is seen indicating a passage in the book held by the Virgin and is contemplated by one pair of angels. The other pair of angels are studying a scroll, perhaps given to them by John the Baptist. It is believed that this book or the scroll may carry prophecies of Christ’s future sacrifice.
The draperies and the rock plinth are very similar to Michelangelo’s earliest sculptures and although the figures are arranged like in a frieze, the central figure does not sit on a richly-decorated altar nor background. This arrangement gives us reason to take a closer look and potentially reunderstand the message (if there ever was any).
The pictorial void of the original painting mainly consists in the blankness of the painting. The density of detail in the finished part contrast with the green underpaint used for flesh tones and the blue sky and colour of the canvas (or primer) which Michelangelo used to sketch out the figures, and which were later meant to be rendered with layers of colour. In the finished part of the painting the black parts in the drapery were supposed to be overpainted with blue pigment (“lapis lazuli”), whereas in the unfinished part of the painting Michelangelo merely indicated the folds of the drapery by incising lines into the primer.
While trying to exaggerate or re-direct the void of the painting, the undoing of the creative act of painting by graphically removing the layers of colour, and thereby turning the painting back into a sketch of void and sky, as exemplified in the image titled 'Erased Michelangelo', reveals the canvas as a ground for new possibilities.
The experiments of building up layers of colour with different painting techniques (glaze, impasto, colour fields, etc) and physically erasing them using turpentine, sandpaper, the technique of de-collage or overpainting lead to a process of abstraction and erasure.
In 1953, Robert Rauschenberg produced the 'Erased de Kooning Drawing' using rubber erasers to literally rub-out a drawing that he had persuaded de Kooning to give him specifically for that purpose. The work apparently took a month and about forty erasers to erase/make (source: Rauschenberg, 1976).
Similar to Robert Rauschenberg’s 'Erased de Kooning Drawing', the five experiments of 'Erased Michelangelo' helped to develop an understanding of the void as a tendency towards a nothingness while simultaneously suggesting the impossibility of removing all traces.
The last image of the 'digital erasure series' titled 'Technical Michelangelo' is perhaps the most architectural outcome of the pictorial analysis.
Here the void is exaggerated by digitally tracing over the layers of paint which render the original materiality of the represented figures. The color contrast as well as the shading, which render depth visible on a two dimensional surface, give rise to a multitude of vector lines, emphasising an incredible density of detail.
The void is now no longer attached to the 'unfinished figures' in the painting's background but to the blank space between the lines.