The Michelangelo Project
How did it all begin? At first, there were just rumours, whispers, a conversation partially overheard ... The word was out. Nola Farman was on the trail of a missing artist. She called it The Michelangelo Project and was busy organising a line-up to identify the face of Michel Agniolo di Lodovico di Lionardo Buonarroti, commonly known as the divine Michelangelo, arguably the most famous of the great masters. Farman had found an eye-witness description written by Georgia Vasari and was using a computer identikit program to come up with an artist's impression. Not only that, she was getting other artists to do the same; these included Sharyn Sonter, Peter Charuk, Jo Ernsten, Justin Nyker, Michael Siegenthaler, Julie Rrap and Tess Rapa.
Soon, there were writers in the frame too. The first writer was given the image prepared by Nola and asked to describe it. That description was passed to an artist who used it to construct another image using the identikit program which, in turn, was passed to another writer to describe and so on (see The Michelangelo Chain of Evidence). Soon, there was a trail of clues leading from writers to artists and from artists to writers, but no clear picture emerged. Everybody had their own private eye and was busy fabricating information, trying to filter it, censor it, skirt around the bits that didn't fit. It was a full-on facial massage and, all the time, Michelangelo the escape artist continued to elude our grasp. Stripped of his divinity, he was revealed as merely a construction, able to be dismantled and reconfigured at any time.
The writers soon learnt that the artists couldn't be trusted. We... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline