Madonarro is Italian for street painting or rather one who paints Madonnas for alms on the street. This art form was practiced in Italy from the fifteenth century. As a young artist, I traveled to Italy to learn how to draw from classical statuary. Instead, I learned to draw art on the street.

In Florence, I awoke each morning and hung out by the Uffizi, where I would draw portraits of the tourists for money. That freed up my afternoons to visit the many museums and do drawings after masterpieces in the Pitti Palace, the Academia, and the Uffizi. Six months of this, and I was sick of the tourists and the crowded museums. So I packed up my few belongings and headed for Rome.

Madonarro is Italian for street painting or rather one who paints Madonnas for alms on the street. This art form was practiced in Italy from the fifteenth century. As a young artist, I traveled to Italy to learn how to draw from classical statuary. Instead, I learned to draw art on the street.

In Florence, I awoke each morning and hung out by the Uffizi, where I would draw portraits of the tourists for money. That freed up my afternoons to visit the many museums and do drawings after masterpieces in the Pitti Palace, the Academia, and the Uffizi. Six months of this, and I was sick of the tourists and the crowded museums. So I packed up my few belongings and headed for Rome.

After touring the splendors of the Eternal City, I set about making drawings in the sculpture galleries at the Vatican, the Borghese Gallery—wherever I found inspiration. I could have spent a lifetime in Rome. But upon hearing that the Neapolitans cannibalized their tourists, I left for Naples, figuring I would be rid of the masses of tourists once and for all.

For the next two years, I copied Greek classical statuary of the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, famous for the Farnese Hercules and Bull. I also learned from the paintings of the museum at Capodimonte, one of the first museums in Europe, created to house the Farnese Collection of Rome. This led me to Greece, the Hermes of Praxiteles at Olympia, Corinth, and Delphi, and the archaeological museums of Athens and Piraeus. I spent hour upon hour perusing Hellenistic statuary.

One cold day, while wandering the streets of Rome, I happened on a stretch of pavement where a thin layer of ice covered the sidewalk. I was about to step through, shattering the fragile pane of ice, when I looked down and saw people, life-size painted figures, being dragged down into the very earth by dragon-like creatures, falling before my very eyes.

My mind raced, as I tried to understand what was before me. Then I realized: What I was looking at was a life-size chalk drawing on the pavement.

I thought to myself, “I can do this.” It was an intriguing idea and possibly a lucrative alternative to the tourist portraits. At the time, the record take for a street painter was $800 in one day. The money was given by appreciative passersby, who threw the donations into pots set out on the sidewalk.

The next thing I knew, I was on the sidewalk with some chalks. I chose Raphael’s The Liberation of St. Peter, where St. Peter is behind bars. At the beginning, I was terrified, I felt so exposed. What was I doing out there?

Thank Fra Angelico (patron saint of artists), the Italians have a special appreciation of art. Not hesitant to express their approval, they’re also generous. After spending a week on the drawing, I was able to pay the bill at my pensione, to buy a leather jacket, and to secure a plane ticket back to the States.

By painting life-size figures on the street, I rapidly developed an internal sense of measurement and proportion that became part of the natural movements of my hand. The mere scale of the figures makes it impossible to draw the whole figure at once, forcing the street painter to use a Mannerist approach. You have to finish as you go, piece by piece—foot, ankle, shin, and so on.

There was a great advantage on the street to getting something recognizable down fast for the onlookers to see. Without this innate sense of proportion, however, the figure could get away from you, an unfortunate result that can be seen in many Mannerist paintings where the limbs appear disproportionately stretched out.

I would start by taking the core shadow, dividing the light from dark, and filling in with local color, then outlining the image as quickly as possible. In a way, chalk drawing or pastel is progressive, like doing scales on the piano. You simply increase or decrease the next hue by one step, climbing or descending, trying never to break the order. White and black, on opposite ends, serve as the accents.

There also was a strong Baroque element running through these large Renaissance compositions, calling into play the classic forms of the figure eight and serpentine S curve. Typically, street painters copied such works as the Mona Lisa or Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.

When I returned to the United States, I began to look for the perfect pavement. Where better to find it than in the streets of New York City? Boston had Sidewalk Sam, but no one had street painted in the Big Apple. Here, the process of finding the right surface would be by trial and error.

It was the spring of 1984, when I began to work my art at 42nd Street in front of the New York Public Library. Right below Daniel Chester French’s statues of lions, there was an expanse of sidewalk that seemed just right. I knew it was time to move on, however, when an onlooker, observing my depiction of David, asked me if what I was painting was inside the library. Talk about a culture barrier. I tried to work my craft again in front of the Plaza Hotel, but the traffic pattern was not quite right. Instead, I decided to find a good location near the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Surely there, I would find a cultured elite who would appreciate art. I had just completed the head of Adam on the lower sidewalk, when two linebackers in uniform picked me up by the elbows. They informed me that I was on my way downtown if I didn’t stop and announced, “You can’t do graffiti on the street!” I couldn’t convince them that what I was doing wasn’t graffiti, it was fine art. So much for the Metropolitan elite.

Wandering again, I headed for St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue. But I found the pavement to be too rough, with too many different-colored aggregate stones mixed into the surface. Only blocks away, across the street at St. Thomas Church on 53rd Street, I finally found what I was looking for. Giant, 10-foot slates had been used for the sidewalk, perfect chalkboards on the street, an artist’s dream.

I later found out that these slates had originally been shipped down the Hudson River from Kingston to form the sidewalk. I also learned that the sidewalk is considered under the jurisdiction of the Roads and Parks Department of New York City. The city owns the sidewalks, yet it is the responsibility of the building owner to maintain the sidewalk in front of his building.

Having found the perfect surface in the middle of New York City, I set up and began drawing a scene from the Sistine Chapel. I expected to be accosted or otherwise interrupted, but no one bothered me at all that day.

When it was time to leave, I pulled out a roll of clear plastic. I taped a piece down over my drawing, in the middle of the sidewalk on Fifth Avenue, in the middle of New York City. Yes, I know it sounds insane, but that’s what we did in Rome.

When I returned the next day to continue on the drawing, the plastic was gone, the drawing pretty much trampled to death. I began to pick out the ghost and pull it together, when out came the vicar of St. Thomas’s Church. I encountered Vicar Andrews only twice—that first time and two years later, when he evicted me from the sidewalk.

That morning, the vicar came up to me and asked me if I had put the plastic down on the sidewalk. I replied that I had. He then proceeded to chew me out in no uncertain terms. It seems that there had been some rain the previous evening, and a little old lady had slipped on the plastic, while trying to get on the bus on Fifth Avenue. With holy wrath, he started in on me and said, “If that little old lady sues, I’m going to have your ass!” And that was the beginning of a tumultuous two years on the sidewalk in front of St. Thomas Church.

I chalked almost half of the Sistine Chapel on that pavement. I chose the Sistina in protest of the controversial cleaning of the chapel by Italian restorers, which was happening at the time. Gianluigi Colalucci, the head restorer of the Vatican team, who had experimented with a solvent Ab57, a soda reactant, and had great success cleaning one fresco The Coronation of Charlemagne by Raphael, had convinced the Vatican that he could effectively restore the Sistina. In fact, what he ended up doing was over cleaning and removing vital layers of Michelangelo’s work. I was livid this devastation and took my protest to the streets of New York.

Within a surprisingly short time, I had several thousand people a day looking at my drawings, especially when the crowds from MOMA rounded the block onto Fifth Avenue in front of me. I met more people and received countless solicitations, absurd offers, and bizarre comments.

People would hand me notes and ask me to paint their ceilings. A biker rode his motorcycle right up onto the sidewalk and asked me to paint his gas tank. I had a box where I kept all the cards I received. When a friend asked me why I didn’t take people up on their offers, I showed him the brimming box.

Another passerby in a fine Italian suit and expensive shoes (I got used to reading shoes from working on the ground), asked me to come up to his Trump Tower apartment to do a mural on his wall. He said he had a view of my drawing from the 55th floor, and it looked just like a postage stamp.

The steps of the church had become my New York office. Anything goes. One day, a girl who was a body builder came up to me and said, “Look how you can model the human body. Can you model my body?”

I met friends from all over, who would come and hang out. It also was during this time that I met my lovely wife, Mary. The New York Times wrote an article on me. Andy Warhol frequented the drawings.

One day, I saw these giant shoes while I was drawing; they must have been size 13. It was Cardinal O’Connor from St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and he asked me why I wasn’t doing these drawings in front of his church. I shrugged and told him that his pavement was no good.

One guy who spoke heavily accented English handed me a postcard saying, “You must come here, draw.” It was a postcard of Red Square. I did accept one offer for the winter holidays to decorate the Eden Prairie Mall outside of St. Paul, Minnesota, with chalk drawings, all expenses paid.

Half a year later, on a particularly hot summer day, it came, the beginning of the end. A big crowd was gathering around my work, when this guy came flying down the sidewalk on his bicycle from the direction of Central Park. He rode right onto the drawing and did a sliding donut on the Erythrean Sibyl.

Stupefied, I watched this wild stunt and was ready to bash the guy, when he became hysterical. He whipped off his shirt, threw it on the ground, and started pounding his chest yelling, “Heresy! Heresy! This is Heresy!” A few of the onlookers grabbed the guy and threw him onto the avenue with less than kind words.

My days of street painting ended the second year on Easter Sunday, when I was doing Michelangelo’s Creation, with Adam and God touching hands. An assistant from the church came out and threw a bucket of water on the head of God. Just like that. I careened over, and there was Vicar Andrews standing above me on the steps, saying, “You’ve got to go.”

Dumbfounded, I asked “Why today? I’ve been doing this for two years now?” He sternly replied, “I’ve put up with this until now. Look around. You’ve brought all these vagrants here, and I can’t have this anymore. It’s too much, you’ve got to go.”

I looked around. He had a point. To one side, there were a bunch of black guys doing some break dancing with a crowd of onlookers gathered round. And the whole wall along the church was occupied by vendors selling books, photos, paintings, and food. In fact, every inch to the corner was packed with people. It was a real scene.

So, I packed up tray of colors and moved on, to a lifetime of art and adventure. To this day, I still meet people who saw my drawings in front of St. Thomas Church.

I met Gianluigi Colalucci on the scaffolding at the Sistine Chapel. At the same time, I beheld the magnificence of Michelangelo from only inches away. My first impression was of the Master’s uniform brushstrokes, turning the form of these heroic figures. Then, I observed the abrasive, sandy texture of the newly restored area as opposed to the shiny, almost murky areas that had yet to be cleaned. Brash colors popped out of the cleaned parts. (I would render these same drawings later on the streets.)

Colalucci’s assumption was that Michelangelo painted in bon fresco (fresco applied to wet plaster). As a result, Colalucci deducted that by starting at one end of the ceiling and using the Ab57 solvent (which is used to clean ovens!) for three seconds and wiping it off with distilled water, he would strip away everything that wasn’t bon fresco, and his job would be done. Unfortunately, he also removed every correction, the color glaze, and the tonality that was put on a seco (paint added over the dry plaster).

Colalucci was unaware that, at the time of the original painting, Michelangelo was reinventing and pushing fresco technique to adapt to the size of the opera. Where Raphael, his great rival, was painting one square foot a day in bon fresco with a team of assistants, Michelangelo was painting two square meters a day by himself. He even fired all his assistants for fear they might divulge his new methods. Only Pope Julius II was given a premature viewing of the ceiling by Papal command.

It was well known that Michelangelo painted in record speed, finishing each lunette in a journata, eighteen times faster than the most-renowned artist in Christendom. In turn, Raphael, tried to embarrass the sculptor by insisting to the Pope that if the Master from Florence was so great, let him tackle the centuries-old, neglected chapel. So why should all this romantic hoopla of jealousy and rivalry by numero uno and trade secrets concern anyone, especially the restorers?

The inherent mistake came from the analysis of the paint layer by the modern-day Italian team. The gas chronometer read the composition of the final paint layer to be composed of carbon black impregnated in a glue size or animal protein. This scientific discovery led Colalucci to believe that the ceiling was dirtied by soot from years of burning torches to light the chapel. Yet subsequent studies of the atmospheric currents inside the chapel revealed that the hot air could only carry the soot three quarters of the way up and that the soot never reached the surface of the painting above. It is ironic that this soot from the torches didn't dirty the white marble tomb stones which stood out as white in past photos of the ceiling.

The unsolved mystery is that Michelangelo used a stylistic technique to hasten his work, at the same time unifying his masterpiece in a focused effect, by doing the reverse of oil painting. His system was simple but revolutionary.

In oil painting, the artist lays out an ink drawing, where in fresco, he pounces the cartoon onto the wet plaster. The difference is, in oil painting, you reinforce the darks and the lights developing the form in black and white to create the image. When the form is realized and dry, the artist then glazes the local color on the corresponding forms and houns the painting to unify the effect to his pleasing. The color comes last.

In Michelangelo’s case, however, he shortcut this rule because in bon fresco, there is only six to eight hours’ working time before the lime sets up. What he achieved that was so remarkable was that he pounced the cartoon, painted in the drawing over a large area, six times greater than what was a normal days work, and then colored in the shapes using bright color in bon fresco within the allotted drying time. By juxtaposing a light hue of brilliant color next to its complementary darker hue in the shadow plane, he anticipated that when the fresco was dry, he would glaze over it with a lampblack glaze suspended in hide glue to turn the form and unify the effect. In this case, the black and white was applied last, unlike oil painting, where the black and white is at the beging and the colors are glazed on top. The final irony is that the process for making lampblack pigment is to take the soot from a lamp, wash it, and dry it to make the pigment, which is what was interpreted as dirt.

Michelangelo cut short the age-old process for frescoes in order to paint more swiftly and not have to shade and color every individual form in the traditional method laid out by his friend and first biographer, Giorgio Vasari. (At that time bon fresco followed the Florentine standard to which Raphael’s workshop strictly adhered.)

Now that Colalucci and his team have removed the unifying lampblack glaze, the work has lost much of the mysteriousness and subtly of the master’s original work. For instance, if you examine the depiction of marble architecture in the cleaned paintings, you will notice that the remaining tone is now a pale gray-violet, devoid of the sanguine qualities of life. In the clothing and drapery, what is left is a garish under painting of cool lime greens in the shadows, juxtaposed to the brilliant yellows in the light areas, with light pinks set alongside violets in the same form. The entire ceiling looks like a day-glo cartoon.

When this cleaning first began, I remember reading the headlines in the Italian newspapers, “Michelangelo, a fauvist painter.” How differently things can be interpreted when seen through lens of technology. How unfortunate a trick of nature that this lampblack glaze suspended in hide glue, which Michelangelo used to unify his ceiling and give it its mystical quality, became the sugject of this mistaken modern analysis and the tragic removal of the Master’s final touch.