ABSTRACT
When one references the broad concept of art, many might immediately think of a piece of Renaissance art that they are familiar with; many might also think of Renaissance art of a much more grandiose scale such as the Sistine Chapel. This 530-year-old chapel is considered Michelangelo’s crowning achievement and the apex of high Italian Renaissance. Being both significant for its unremitting influence on Western art and being a site of religious importance to the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, it is little wonder why this chapel is so well known. However, questions regarding who has property interests in this great structure surface regularly. It is our intention to demonstrate in this chapter that the elements of a cultural property policy identified by John Henry Merryman, in his “The Public Interest in Cultural Property” are incongruent in their current order of importance with how the Sistine Chapel has been managed for the past 50 years. We set out to accomplish this by first providing a brief summary of Merryman’s argument. This will be followed by an exploration of legal ownership of the Sistine Chapel. Lastly, we examine the restoration project that began in the 1960s and the preservation of the chapel that continues today. By combining these three elements, we attempt to demonstrate that the various interests in this specific piece of property have been accommodated by a cultural property policy disparate from that which Merryman outlines.
