Reimagining Lost Antiquities in Michelangelo’s Red Chalk StyleReimagining Lost Antiquities in Michelangelo’s Red Chalk Style
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Restored: what the ruins lost, drawn back in Michelangelo's red chalk. Everyone knows the Venus de Milo has no arms. Almost nobody has seen her with them. In 1506 Michelangelo was in a Roman vineyard when the Laocoön came out of the ground with its right arm missing. The story goes that the pope also asked him to complete the Belvedere Torso, and he said no. So I asked again, 500 years later. I built a Recraft Style from seven of his own red chalk studies, most of them for the Sistine ceiling (public-domain scans, links below), and used it to draw the missing parts back: Venus's arms, the head of the Victory of Samothrace, the Sphinx's nose, Nefertiti's left eye, and two Wonders that are gone entirely, the Colossus of Rhodes and Zeus at Olympia. The style even writes notes in Italian in the margins, the way his sheets do. I left them in. What lost thing would you ask him to draw next?
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