Making Walls Talk

Italians have been graffiti artists long before the infamous Kilroy was here, or anyone tagged a subway train in the Bronx. Even the term itself is derived from the Italian graffito. The word was first coined in 1851, around the time of the excavation of Pompeii, when inscriptions were found there, carved into the walls.

Despite all of that history, it can be a little off-putting to an American arriving in cities like Naples, Rome and Milan to find more graffiti than you might come across on the Lower East Side of New York. After all, it’s one thing to spray paint a rusty subway train. It’s another thing to express yourself on a wall built in the 1500’s.

I thought of this when I visited the Chiesa Madonna della Misericordia in our little town of Monteleone di Fermo, a place otherwise remarkably free of graffiti and pretty much every other modern urban blight. Behind the altar of the tiny medieval church, which is remarkable for its frescoed interior, there’s a closet-size room that houses the cleaning supplies and a rudimentary PA system. On the wall, it appears that every local kid on a grammar school field trip for the past 200 years has scrawled his or her name, romantic entanglement or calcio preference. It could be the bathroom at CBGBs, which seems a little disrespectful in a 14th century church.  Someone really should stop them, I thought to myself.

Until I realized: we’re standing in a building completely wrapped in frescoes. It’s hard to tell someone that writing on walls is out of bounds. As always, the line between art and vandalism is in the eye of the beholder. And the hand of the practitioner.

By 1530, Michelangelo already had pretty good creds when it came to decorating walls and ceilings, having recently painted the Sistine Chapel. But after siding with a  populist revolt in Florence that overthrew his longtime patrons the Medici, only to see his old bosses return to power a few months later, Michelangelo found himself on a forced sabbatical, with a death sentence from the Pope hanging over his head. Some scholars believe he took cover in a secret room underneath Florence’s Medici Chapels for two months as he waited for things to cool down. If it’s true, he definitely left his mark.

In the mid-1970’s, Michelangelo’s hideout was discovered via a trapdoor underneath a wardrobe. On the hunch of the the Medici Chapels’ museum director Paolo Del Poggetto, the outer layer of the room’s plaster was stripped away to reveal the original walls, which were covered in a frenzy of charcoal and chalk drawings, an improvised collage of nudes, faces, and body parts. While scholars are still arguing over whether the sketches are truly the work of Michelangelo, many bear similarities to some of his best-known works, including his statue of David. Certainly, they appear to be studies. Here is the artist practicing, experimenting, maybe just thinking out loud on the only canvas available.

From the “secret” room at the Medici Chapels

The room was opened for the first time to the public last year and I was hoping to go while on a recent trip to Florence. Unfortunately, the exhibit is closed again for the moment, while art experts analyze what negative effects the presence of visitors might have had on the condition of the drawings. So instead, I decided to check out a site that falls further outside the protection of any authorities, one that fully embraces the public nature of graffiti art.

Out of the thousands of stones that make up the walls of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, there is one that stands out, if you take the time to notice. Carved into the rough and weathered surface is a man’s face, and near it is a note scribbled into the stone that reads: “Who would ever say it is by my hand?”

L’importuno di Michelangelo

Florentine legend attributes the unauthorized defacement of private property to Michelangelo himself, then only 29 but already at work on his statue of David. In fact, the carving looks out directly at the space where the statue would have stood. Scholars have speculated whether it might have been a bit of covert publicity to direct eyes to his sculpture; others claim he may have done it on a dare, as respite from a boring conversation, or even to immortalize a man on his way to the gallows.

I figured the L’importuno di Michelangelo would be easy to locate just by following the crowds. But in a twist to which any street artist could relate, it was entirely ignored. In a packed Piazza della Signoria, not far from where crowds wait in the sun to enter the Uffizi Galleries and see Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo, the chance to be up close to the work of the master seemed no match for the opportunity to shoot one more TikTok video or to fly one of those plastic birds that are this year’s Splat Ball. I doubt the artist would have cared. After all, this wasn’t a commissioned work for a Medici or the Pope. Just a spur of the moment flex from an artist at the top of his game, grabbing a corner stone to show what he could do.

Keith Haring also found it hard to resist a blank space. The iconic New York artist of the 1980’s first emerged in the public consciousness through the drawings he did on empty advertising panels in the subway stations. When one ad would expire and before the next one appeared, the wall would be covered with a black surface— to Haring, it resembled a clean chalkboard. What would you expect an artist to do?

Using just a stick of white chalk, Haring filled the train station panels with his signature figures: angular, twisting, popping cartoons that became emblematic of that particular chaotic, hip-hop inspired moment in New York. Back in those days, I was a songwriter and record producer in the city. Often I worked at a recording studio called Platinum Island in Soho, where the whole entry vestibule and elevator were covered in Haring’s wild, hieroglyphic-like designs. I learned later that his studio was located on the fifth floor of that building at 676 Broadway. He worked there until he died in 1990, a victim of AIDS at age 31.

Computer Head- Keith Haring

Thirty four years after his death, Haring is having another media moment, triggered in part by the release of a new biography, “Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring” by Brad Gooch. I had an opportunity to hear Gooch speak about the book at the New York Society Library the week before I left for Florence. To hear the author recount tales of Haring’s days cavorting at the Mudd Club or the Penn Station subway station in the damask-covered environs of the Upper East Side Reading Room was a juxtaposition that Haring, and certainly his mentor Andy Warhol, would have relished.

It turns out that Haring too found himself occasionally taking refuge underneath a church. In his days as a student at Manhattan’s School of Visual Arts, he and his downtown crew, which included people like Madonna, Ann Magnuson, and RuPaul, congregated at Club 57, a nightclub and art space located below the Holy Cross Polish National Church. Haring would frequently mount art shows there, featuring his own work as well as that of his friends. One of the most popular was an exhibit of erotic art, where the crowds outside eventually prompted a visit from the church’s pastor. Luckily, the East Village reverend was less prone to death sentences than Pope Clement VII.

Clearly, Keith Haring was no Michelangelo. Despite building a commercial empire and doing more than 500 murals around the world (including the Tuscan town of Pisa), he never had a museum show in New York during his lifetime. Art critics often view him as not much more than the creator of the “radiant baby” buttons he sold for 50 cents at his Pop Shop store.

Tuttomondo by Keith Haring at the Sant’Antonio Abate Church, Pisa

Nevertheless—allowing for an age gap of a  couple hundred years and all the cultural, religious and philosophical divides that go with it—I think the Renaissance master and the creator of the “Crack is Wack” handball court in East Harlem might have found quite a lot in common.

Both were poets as well as artists. Both were fascinated by the human form. Each had experience working on a grand scale, often in uncomfortable circumstances. Both lived in times of plague, during which the victims were often blamed for inciting the wrath of God. Both spent a lot of time around Madonnas.

But most of all, Michelangelo and Keith Haring shared an exuberance of creativity, an irrepressible need to do that thing that they did best—all the time, anywhere they could. Even if the space was an underground hideout, a freight elevator, or a subway station. Even if it meant carving a face on one anonymous brick in a vast wall.

“My contribution to the world is my ability to draw. I will draw as much as I can for as many people as I can for as long as I can.” Keith Haring.