The recent cleaning of the Sistine Chapel has been described as the most important art event of the 20th century. Because the uncleaned art had looked so dark and forbidding, we believed Michelangelo’s vision to be dark and forbidding. “And we came to believe that this darkness was synonymous with true creativity. In my mind, there is no doubt that the legend of the Sistine ceiling contributed mightily to the facile fantasy of the tormented genius: to the falsehood that an artist who was not in pain was not a real artist. The profound cost of five centuries of smoke and soot darkening the Sistine surfaces turns out not to have been in damage done to the frescoes themselves – underneath the charcoal haze they were wonderfully well preserved – but in the serious warping of our image of genius.” – The Sunday Times (UK)