More than four centuries after the dome of St. Peter’s basilica was completed, the Vatican announced the discovery of a long-missing Michelangelo sketch for the dome, possibly his last design before his death. Drawn in blood-red chalk for the stone cutters who were working on the basilica, it was done in the spring of 1563, less than a year before his death at age ninety. The sketch was found in the Fabbrica of St. Peter’s, which contains the basilica’s offices.

The newspaper L’Osservatore Romano said most sketches by Michelangelo for the stone cutters were destroyed or lost in the cutters’ workplaces, but this one had survived because a supervisor used the back of the sketch to make notes of problems linked to the stone’s transport through the outskirts of Rome. Michelangelo finished the dome and four columns for its base before he died in February 1564. Three weeks before he died, when he was nearly eighty-nine, he went up the dome to inspect it.

The construction of the basilica, whose cupola defines Rome ’s skyline, spanned several working lifetimes of some of the Renaissance’s most celebrated artists and architects. Vatican historians note that the first architect of the basilica, Donato Bramante, died eight years after the cornerstone was laid. Other architects, including Raphael, followed, until Pope Paul III turned to Michelangelo in 1546, thirty-two years after Michelangelo had put his last brush stroke on the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling.

Also in 2007, the Associated Press reported that a 450-year-old receipt found in the same archive provided proof that Michelangelo had kept a private room in St. Peter’s Basilica while working as the pope’s chief architect. Going through archives for an exhibit on the 500th anniversary of the basilica, researchers from the Fabbrica di San Pietro came across an entry for a key to a chest located “in the room in St. Peter’s where Master Michelangelo retires.”

“We now know that Michelangelo definitely had a private space in the basilica,” said Maria Cristina Carlo-Stella, who runs the Fabbrica, in an interview with the Associated Press. “The next step is to identify it.”

The ink-scripted entry contained in a parchment-covered volume listing the expenditures of the Fabbrica for the years 1556-58, referred to the payment of ten scudos to the blacksmith who forged the key, but offered no details about the chest or the location of the room.

The account of the discovery noted that a frescoed room with a cozy fireplace, part of the area in the left wing of the basilica where the archives are housed, had traditionally been called “la stanza di Michelangelo” (Michelangelo’s room). On an upper floor, overlooking the main altar, it is connected to the ground floor by a small winding marble staircase, suggesting that the room afforded the artist secrecy and an escape route from envious fellow artisans. But research showed the room was part of renovation done after Michelangelo’s death, and that the space did not exist during Michelangelo’s time at the Vatican.

“”The theory is very romantic and conspiratorial, but totally unfounded,” said Federico Bellini, an art historian who worked in the archive department.

Originally the Fabbrica, whose documents date from as far back as 1506, was in the right wing of the basilica, already built at the time of Michelangelo. It was known that artisans had been allotted lodgings there, leading experts to direct their search for Michelangelo’s studio to that area.

The Associated Press article noted, “One detail the expenditure does reveal is that Michelangelo had requested a very expensive key. According to Simona Turriziani, a Fabbrica archivist, ten scudos in the 1550s was more than the monthly salary of many of the artisans working on the basilica.”

CHAPTER 16

The Vatican and the End of the World

In the spring of 1916 in the town of Fatima, Portugal, three shepherd girls, Lucia dos Santos and her cousins Jacinta and Francisca Marto, were visited three times by what they thought was an angel. He “told them he was the guardian angel of Portugal and urged them to pray and prepare themselves. The next spring, eight months after the angel’s final visit, the Virgin Mary began to speak to them. Lucia had just had her tenth birthday, Francisco would turn nine in June, and Jacinta was seven. On May 13, 1917, they took their sheep to a small hollow known as a Cova da Iria (Cove of Irene). And there around noon, a beautiful lady appeared near an oak tree, telling them to say the Rosary every day, ‘to bring peace to the world and an end to the war.’ She promised to visit them again ‘on the thirteenth of each month’ for the next five months.’

“By 1917, a figure who identified herself as the Virgin appeared to them and eventually delivered a message for humankind. The children became a focus of worldwide interest, and in October of that year, the Virgin’s presence seemed to be confirmed for many others when a crowd of 70,000-mostly Catholics and some skeptics-saw the sun appear to zigzag in the sky as the Virgin again addressed the children.

“I looked at the sun and saw it spinning like a disc, rolling on itself,” said a farmer, Antonio de Oliveiro. “I saw people changing color. They were stained with the colors of the rainbow. The sun seemed to fall down from the sky. The people said that the world was going to end. They were afraid and screaming.”

Maria Candida da Silva said, “Suddenly the rain stopped and a great splendor appeared and the children cried, ‘Look at the sun!’ I saw the sun coming down, feeling that it was falling to the ground. At that moment, I collapsed.”

The Reverend Joao Menitra reported, “I looked and saw that the people were in various colors, yellow, white, blue. At the same time, I beheld the sun spinning at great speed and very near me. I at once thought: I am going to die.”

“ Fatima almost immediately became a global pilgrimage site.

“The message delivered there remained a mystery as the children refused to reveal the content of the vision. Two of them died in childhood during an epidemic; but in 1941, Lucia, the survivor by then a nun, released a description of the first two ‘secrets’ from the Virgin that made headlines all over the world. One was a vivid vision of Hell; the other was a prediction that World War I would end, but if people continued to offend God, a worse one would break out during the Pontificate of Pius XI.”

Regarding the first secret’s vision of Hell, Lucia said, “Our Lady showed us a great sea of fire which seemed to be under the earth. Plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form, like transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronze, floating about in the conflagration, now raised into the air by the flames that issued from within themselves together with great clouds of smoke, now falling back on every side like sparks in a huge fire, without weight or equilibrium, and amid shrieks and groans of pain and despair, which horrified us and made us tremble with fear. The demons could be distinguished by their terrifying and repulsive likeness to frightful and unknown animals, all black and transparent.”

This vision lasted but an instant, Lucia said, “Otherwise, I think we would have died of fear and terror.”

“The second secret was a statement that World War I would end and supposedly predicted the coming of World War II, should God continue to be offended and if Russia did not convert. The second half requested that Russia be consecrated to the Immaculate Heart.

In 1941, a document was written by Lucia at the request of Jose da Silva, Bishop of Leiria, to assist with the publication of a new edition of a book on Jacinta. “When asked by the Bishop of Leiria in 1943 to reveal the secret, Lucia struggled for a short period, being ‘not yet convinced that God had clearly authorized her to act. However, in October of 1943 the bishop of Leiria ordered her to put it in writing. Lucia then wrote the secret down and sealed it in an envelope not to be opened until 1960, when ‘it will appear clearer.’…