Sistine Chapel

Michelangelo was at continuous odds with his employers during his lifetime, he dissected corpses illegally at first, later with tacit approval of some of the church bigwigs in order to improve his skills as an artist. It was a continuous give-and-take to see who got the most out of the arrangement.

In the end I think we, the future dwellers able to see his work no matter what caused them to come into being are the real winners.

Not bad for a man who declared himself unfit to execute the work because he was a sculptor, not a painter...

There is a very good book about him that I forgot the title of (I read it ages ago).

When looking at the chapel I see a large number of religious figures and imagery, so it seems odd to say that art depicting religious subjects, in a religious setting, sponsored by a religious patron was not inspired by Christianity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soli_Deo_gloria

For Michelangelo I'm not so sure, but for Bach there is absolutely no doubt.

Monet struggled with the Académie des Beaux-Arts fot painting the way they thought people should paint.

There is a long history of Ballet dancers in the USSR who struggled because they good communists.

Today character assassination is the norm for for so many people (especially in the arts) who don't strictly adhere to progressive politics.

I attended an art school for time where I was frequently shunned for dressing well, (apparently you can't be an "artist" if you wear slacks and dress shirts,) and adhering to Christian principles.

Look at the movie Moms' night out. Highly panned by critics because because the characters are not "feminist" enough. Yet highly rated by the audience.

> I suppose some people don't know how to turn it off

I would argue that a majority of people either wilfully ignore this instruction or don't know how to do it.

Perhaps that's expecting too much from the average tourist, but still, I found it cool.

Sunlight is about 1 KW/square meter on a non-cloudy day at noon, directly from above.

4% of that is a typical value for the UV component.

So the UV power hitting a 1 square meter surface at noon is about 40 Watts.

Photographic flash is on the order of a millisecond give or take, and power output of a typical flash during that millisecond is 100 Ws, or 100 KW/ms. Depending on how far away you are from the work of art you're putting for every 10 flashes then the equivalent of about of a second of exposure to the sun on the totality of the work (much more than 1 square meter, so you have to divide by the total surface). In the case of the chapel all the light discharged in the chapel will hit the object somewhere so apart from atmospheric effects (likely small) you can assume all of that light would contribute to the fading.

So every 10,000 tourists passing through and making one picture each with flash on is the equivalent of about 1000 second's worth of exposure to direct sunlight (think of a window of one square meter opening for 1000 seconds once per day), all this assuming that the flash contains an equivalent amount of UV as sunlight which likely is not the case. About 20,000 tourists per day pass through during the peak of the season, so on such days that's the equivalent of 2000 such seconds of the open window.

So at a guess, this is probably not too much of a problem, unless the pigments used break down very easily. (Blue is usually the most stable, with other pigments being more susceptible to fading)

What would be a problem is the fact that if all these people are discharging their flashes all the time that this seriously interferes with the ability of others who do not engage in such annoying reproductive behaviour to appreciate what they are looking at.

edit: fixed some of the math

Unfortunately, the guards stationed there like to yell at tourists even if their flashes are off, so I suspect most people don't understand the reasoning.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churches_of_G%C3%B6reme