After the exhibit closed in February, the reproduction was carefully taken down and packed away. In November, it was given a new home in Fordham’s Butler Commons on the Rose Hill campus.

Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, called the gift a welcome addition to the University’s collection, one that will “touch our hearts, engage our minds, and lift our spirits.”

“It is an honor to once again partner with the Met, one of New York City’s preeminent cultural institutions, and to provide a permanent home to a reproduction of Michelangelo’s most ambitious and stirring masterpiece,” he said.

“Such a work embodies the divine grace of God. Its presence will remind us of our own Catholic heritage.”

The fresco, which Michelangelo painted between 1508 and 1512 at the behest of Pope Julius II, is one of the most famous pieces of art in the world. Among its features are narrative scenes from the Book of Genesis, the Book of Maccabees, and the Gospel of Matthew. One of its most iconic images is the artist’s rendition of The Creation of Adam.

The gift is emblematic of both the Met’s and Fordham’s extensive roots in New York City. Father McShane first saw the fresco during an early morning tour of the exhibit arranged by Fordham Trustee Fellow Edward M. Stroz, GABELLI ’79, and his wife Sally Spooner. They were joined by Erin Pick, then a senior administrator at the Met, and Maria Ruvoldt, Ph.D., chair of the department of art history at Fordham.

He said he knew from the moment he entered the room that it would be a magnificent addition to Fordham’s campus. As chance would have it, the group crossed paths with Carmen Bambach, Ph.D., a curator at the Met who specializes in Italian Renaissance art. From 1989 to 1995, Bambach was also an assistant professor of art and music history at Fordham when Father McShane was dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill.

 “She looked at me and said, ‘You hired me at Fordham.’ I smiled and said that I had indeed hired her,” Father McShane said.

“After the tour was over, Erin, Carmen, and Maria worked on a proposal that we could place before the Met leadership to see if we could secure the piece for Fordham. Much to my surprise, we were informed a few weeks later that the Met approved our proposal.”

Quincy Houghton, deputy director for exhibitions at the Met, echoed the bond between the museum and Fordham.

“We are pleased that this painting will have a future life at Fordham, as another manifestation of the many scholarly connections between our two institutions, and that it will be widely used as a teaching tool,” he said.

“We look forward to seeing it in its new home.”

Ruvoldt said that although the fresco is among the most famous paintings in the world, it’s often seen in piecemeal fashion, such as the well-known section featuring the nearly touching hands in The Creation of Adam.

“Typically, when students learn about this in an art history classroom, they’re seeing a projection on the wall. They don’t have the experience of the entirety of the composition, and the experience, frankly, of just looking up at it, which sounds a little simple, but was key to the way the painting was meant to be understood,” she said.

“Michelangelo really got that the people who would be looking at it would be looking at it from below. So, it’s a unique experience for students to see it.”

Among the details one can observe in the full reproduction is evidence that Michelangelo actually realized, halfway through the production, that he’d have to rethink his approach. Ruvoldt said the latter sections feature visible changes in the scale of the figures, and compositions become simpler, so they’re more discernible from below.

Watch Ruvoldt give a guided explanation of the fresco reproduction.

Butler Commons, which is named for the founder of Marymount College and is just one floor above the University’s theology department, is an ideal location for it, she said, because it’s open to all. The University will open it to members of the campus community in January, and members of the public can arrange visits in the same manner they currently use to visit the University’s Museum of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Art.

“I picture it as something that not only art history professors can bring students in to look at it, but the theology department as well. The subject matter is the entire story of Genesis, the prophets, and the ancestors of Christ—it could be interesting as well for interdisciplinary investigation.”

The gift is only the latest collaboration between the two institutions. Last year, Fordham lent the Met Cristóbal de Villalpando’s Adoration of the Magi; the museum restored it and included its July exhibition Cristóbal de Villalpando: Mexican Painter of the Baroque.

Update: While Butler Commons will remain secured, any member of the Fordham community who wishes to view the reproduction can contact the reception desk at Tognino Hall during business hours to have them open the room. During the weekends and after business hours, Public Safety will respond and open the room for any requested viewing. Members of the public can also make arrangements to view the artwork during business hours. No food or beverages are permitted in Butler Commons.

But Michelangelo’s many drawings, and certain derivative works they inspired, also tell a compelling story about his life and the way art and artists were viewed in the 16^th century, says Maria Ruvoldt, PhD, associate professor of art history and a scholar of Italian Renaissance art.

For instance, there was an almost revolutionary idea afoot: that drawings were valuable works of art in themselves, she said. When others created art based on Michelangelo’s drawings, it was treated as if it had been produced by the master himself.

“Any design Michelangelo made, even if it was then executed by another artist, was considered a Michelangelo. It doesn’t matter that it’s not by his hand, because the idea has been reproduced,” Ruvoldt said. “In the 16^th century, value was created in a very different way.”

Michelangelo in Multiple

In the book she’s writing, Michelangelo in Multiple, Ruvoldt views these different conceptions through the lens of drawings that Michelangelo produced as gifts for Tommaso de’Cavalieri, a young nobleman he was infatuated with, as well as other works based on the drawings.

The drawings, ostensibly private, didn’t stay private for long, since they were passed around among Michelangelo’s immediate friends and in fact helped bind that group together. They

wound up generating additional art works that were highly sought-after themselves.

“They circulate within a relatively small circle of people, but almost immediately people outside of that circle are aware of them and want to get their hands on them, and they’re copied at an astonishing rate,” Ruvoldt said. Copies ranged from re-drawings to prints and ceramics to sculptures and paintings for elite patrons.

Michelangelo probably wasn’t surprised that this happened, Ruvoldt said. He was at the height of his fame, and the status of the artist in society was in flux.

“Michelangelo is asserting his autonomy, his ability to make things outside of the traditional client-patron relationship, at a time when people are starting to value the artist as a creative individual and not just as a workman,” she said.

Also in flux was the value of drawings themselves, which were starting to become prized as “residue” of the creative process.

“In a drawing, you can see the artist’s mind at work,” she said. “It’s a transitional moment, really, in the history of the medium of drawings. They start to get collected in this period for the first time.”

The drawings also offered a window into Michelangelo’s personal relationships. With their mythological subjects, they signified different things for different people, depending on how close they were to Michelangelo’s circle of intimates.

“The farther away you get from the immediate relationship, the farther away the images get from their very personal meaning, their very private meaning,” said Ruvoldt. “And they start to be applicable to a broader audience.”

One drawing dwells on the myth of Ganymede, a beautiful prince whom Zeus brings up to Mount Olympus to be his cup bearer, or lover. But the story’s other meaning, as an allegory for the elevation of the soul into heaven, provides cover for a racier interpretation that might prompt speculation about Michelangelo’s relationship with Cavalieri.

“Their meaning is debatable, and mutable,” Ruvoldt said. “If you say, ‘Well, they’re obviously about sex,’ I can say, ‘No, no, it’s an allegorization of the soul.’”

Lack of Copyright

The value created by the drawings was basically up for grabs, given the inchoate state of copyright protections at the time. After Cavalieri surrendered one of Michelangelo’s drawings to the Cardinal Ippolito de’Medici, the cardinal turned around and hired the gem engraver Giovanni Bernardi to make a series of rock-crystal intaglios based on it. “Nobody asks Michelangelo if it’s okay,” Ruvoldt said.

Bernardi then made bronze and lead copies to sell on his own, with his own signature on them. “Now they’re not just Michelangelo’s works, they’re now Michelangelo’s and Bernardi’s, and so they’re doubly valuable,” she said. “Michelangelo doesn’t have any ability to say, ‘Stop doing that.’ And that’s the thing that’s in flux, that idea of what constitutes authorship and what constitutes ownership of the design.”

“Those ideas that, for us, seem kind of settled were not at all settled,” she said.

During the 2014-2015 school year, while conducting research for Michelangelo in Multiple at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art on a Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellowship, Ruvoldt decided to pursue a longstanding idea of hers: teaching a class entirely on-site, at the museum. She taught it for the first time last fall and will be teaching it again this year.

Spending so much time around the objects during the fellowship sharpened her appreciation for being in their presence. She sees this appreciation in her students as well, when they view ancient objects like a Krater—or Greek pot—in person rather than seeing them in a classroom slide presentation or in a textbook.

“They’re just kind of blown away,” she said. “They didn’t know it was so big, they didn’t know they could see the cracks in it and the places where it’s been repaired. That moment, I think, is a kind of ‘aha’ moment for them.”