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For immigrants, IDs prove to be a barrier to a dose of protection

InternationalApr 11. 2021A volunteer at the Brazilian Worker Center prepares to seat individuals in a waiting room at the mobile vaccination event on April 2, 2021, in Boston. MUST CREDIT: Photo by Sophie Park for The Washington Post

By The Washington Post · Akilah Johnson

BOSTON – The line started outside, on a street usually teeming with people waiting to enter college bars, and snaked up the stairs of an old firehouse to the Brazilian Worker Center, where shots of the coronavirus vaccine were being administered on this cold New England spring morning.

Finally, it was Maria Sousa’s turn. She had been waiting for more than an hour with her husband and daughter when a center volunteer greeted them in Portuguese and guided them to the registration desk, where they presented their identification – Brazilian passports.

Getting vaccinated here was the only option they considered.

Immigrants have been turned away from pharmacies and other places after being asked for driver’s licenses, Social Security numbers or health insurance cards – specific documentation not mandated by states or the federal government but often requested at vaccination sites across the country, including right down the road from here. Often the request comes in English, a language many of the vaccine-seekers don’t fully understand.

Some state agencies and businesses that provide vaccinations have acknowledged the problem and vowed that it will stop.

Sousa’s family wasn’t willing to take the risk.

Here, there was someone to intervene if requests for more information arose – and they did. When the woman behind the desk entered Sousa’s name, a picture popped up on her screen. Since the 43-year-old was wearing a mask, the woman asked for an address to determine whether it was the same person. When the address didn’t match what was in the system, she pressed for more information.

Watching as a volunteer tried to help Sousa, the center’s executive director stepped in. The registrars were to accept whatever ID was presented, using the center’s address if necessary.

The life-or-death race to get as many people vaccinated as possible before the coronavirus spawns more viral mutations, like the one that emerged in Brazil, started slowly but has accelerated as many of those crossing the finish line possess the wherewithal and inclination to navigate a mazelike system. As the nation nears the point where supply soon outpaces demand, the unvaccinated will increasingly be people who are reluctant or who are rebuffed by barriers blocking their way.

“We’ve done a good job of equality in rolling out the vaccine. A lot of states have opened to everyone 16 and over now,” said Jeffrey Hines, medical director for diversity, inclusion and health equity at Wellstar Health System in Atlanta. “But equality is not equity.”

Equality means giving everyone the same resources and opportunities, whereas equity takes into account people’s varying circumstances and allocates resources based on need to reach an equal outcome.

“Equality can get things done quickly,” Hines said. “Equity needs to be done more intentionally.”

The federal government says everyone has a right to the coronavirus vaccine regardless of immigration status, with the Department of Homeland Security calling it “a moral and public health imperative to ensure that all individuals residing in the United States have access to the vaccine.”

But each state’s registration process is different, and vaccination sites often make up their own rules – policies inflaming racial and ethnic divides in coronavirus vaccinations.

Twenty-six states restrict access to people who live and work there, status that can be proved with a utility bill or a work ID. But only about one-quarter of state websites make it clear that undocumented immigrants are eligible for the shot and that getting vaccinated will not negatively affect immigration status, according to recent analyses by the health policy group Kaiser Family Foundation.

Only 10 states and the District of Columbia, which have residency requirements, also allow undocumented immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses or state identification cards.

Massachusetts is not one of them, and the state’s website telling people how to prepare for their vaccine appointment says that although vaccination sites might request an ID or insurance card, “that only applies to people that have them.”

“The idea of having to be ID’d is a major source of stress for immigrants,” said Natalícia Tracy, executive director of Boston’s Brazilian Worker Center, a nonprofit dedicated to defending and advancing labor and immigrant rights. “When people ask for ID, they say Massachusetts ID. They don’t say any ID.”

It is often left up to the very people made vulnerable by these ad hoc rules to push back against them.

Experts and immigration advocates say that while talk about closing the gap in vaccination rates has focused largely on bolstering acceptance of vaccines, access to them must be part of the conversation, too. That’s especially true, they say, in communities still reeling from immigration policies implemented during the Trump administration that were openly hostile to immigrants of color.

“It’s very easy to say vaccine hesitation,” said Frankie Miranda, president of the Hispanic Federation, a New York-based nonprofit and advocacy group.

Instead, he said, a constellation of factors come into play, including the time and technology required to book appointments online, the need for transportation to vaccination sites and translation services – even the language used on promotional fliers.

Take, for instance, a colorful, bilingual bulletin advertising a recent drive-through vaccination event in one North Carolina county. It included images of a diverse cluster of masked essential workers, a group made up disproportionately of people of color and immigrants. Yet in English and Spanish, the flier proclaimed “citizens 65 and older” are eligible for vaccination.

“Already, you’re sending the message: don’t come here,” Miranda said. “This is an example where language can hamper your efforts to reach out to the community you actually want to help.”

Many immigrants won’t risk the consequences of coming forward to be vaccinated at unfamiliar places,advocates and public health experts say – even though their jobs, housing and underlying health conditions place them at higher risk of infection.

“Vulnerable populations are going to go to those places where they have trust,” Hines said. “They may not necessarily go to the mass vax site.”

Administering thousands of shots at big facilities might be a quicker way to get as many people vaccinated as possible, but “you’re going to chip away” at the number of unvaccinated people in marginalized communities by using trusted spaces, he said.

The Brazilian Worker Center administered more than 200 shots on Good Friday. But that was only a small fraction of those seeking protection. The center’s vaccination waiting list: 2,500, and growing.

“If it was not for the center, we wouldn’t take the vaccine,” said Sousa, whose family emigrated 18 months ago from São Paulo.

“There’s a tremendous amount of distress in the immigrant community. Rumors run rampant,” said Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “There needs to be a much more substantial and very targeted investment in outreach – almost on the scale of census outreach after the failed attempt to add a citizenship question. It’s absolutely necessary.”

During the 2020 Census, local, state and federal agencies sought to assuage the fears of immigrants and their families, both legal and undocumented, urging them to “fight the undercount” and participate in the enumeration.

“We have to call out people’s fears and address them directly. It can’t be generic, ‘We should all get vaccinated, and it’s a good thing,’ ” Saenz said. “We need to be very clear about the message: Absolutely no one will face any consequence related to immigration enforcement or any other enforcement. It’s got to be that specific.”

Despite thecoronavirus carving a disproportionate path of death and disease through communities of color, vaccination rates in counties with predominantly Black and Latino populations are lower than those with mostly Native American, White or Asian American residents, federaldata shows.

Covid-19 was the leading cause of death among Latinos and led Black people to have the highest age-adjusted death rate overall last year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There is little to no data on the infection, death or vaccination rates of immigrants specifically.

From nearly two decades of work advocating for immigrants, Juvencio Rocha-Peralta, executive director of the grass-roots Association of Mexicans in North Carolina,said he knew when the pandemic began that “this community was going to be invisible.”

Conversations about public health and marginalized people in the state tended to exclude Latino immigrants, especially on the local level, said Rocha-Peralta, whose organization has recently partnered with health departments to hold vaccination events. “They’re talking about White and Black, and that’s all,” he said, but the needs of the immigrant community are distinct.

“This community doesn’t have documents. Don’t have driver’s licenses like everybody else,” he said. “But we still continue to see information out there requiring identification, which is a big no-no. It’s a fear for the community.”

Tracy, the head of the Brazilian Worker Center, personally confronted the issue when she received her dose at a mass vaccination site in Boston.

A friend accompanying her was offered a vaccination without an appointment or a request for ID. He declined, saying he was there to support Tracy, who is Afro-Brazilian.

“The woman then turned to me and said, ‘What’s your name? Let me see a Massachusetts ID. I want to make sure you’re a Massachusetts resident,’ ” Tracy said.

“I was so upset. I felt she racially profiled me,” Tracy said. “Here she is willing to give a vaccine to someone – a White male without an accent – who didn’t have an appointment without asking for ID. If I was undocumented that would have freaked me out.”

A survivor of labor-trafficking who arrived in the United States as a 19-year-old whospoke no English and with an eighth-grade education, Tracy said she identifies with “being voiceless, being invisible, marginalized.”

“I’m totally obsessed with justice and get pissed about inequality,” she said in her cramped office, her doctorate from Boston University resting in a frame on the wall behind her desk.

The Brazilian Worker Center advocates for the nearly 100,000 Brazilians in Massachusetts. It fought to reunite children separated from their families by the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policies, ensured members were counted by the census, and established a food program when the pandemic forced people out of work and into hunger.

Tracy said the center’s vaccination clinics were partly inspired by the health activism of the Black Panther party, which deemed inadequate social services a form of oppression. The Panthers opened free health clinics across the country, including one in Boston, that offered checkups, immunizations, blood tests and health education.

She said she encountered resistance to the idea of administering vaccines at first, saying local officials wanted the center to focus on vaccine education. Tracy persisted, saying she made “noise everywhere I went” by insisting that access was necessary to eliminate disparities.

Then the center’s first vaccination clinic was scheduled, with the help of Lawyers for Civil Rights, a nonprofit that promotes equal opportunity and fights discrimination on behalf of people of color and immigrants,and the Whittier Street Health Center, which provides primary care and support services to primarily low-income and racially and ethnically diverse populations. Excited, she hopped online and made a quick video to let Facebook followers know.

Immediately, the center was enveloped by demand, and the phones haven’t stopped ringing since.

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South Korean battery makers reach last-minute settlement

InternationalApr 11. 2021

By The Washington Post · Steven Mufson

Two South Korean industrial giants have reached a last-minute global settlement that will allow a pair of new plants in Commerce, Ga., to move ahead with plans to supply batteries for Ford and VW electric vehicles, according to people familiar with the negotiations.

The deal will be a victory for President Joe Biden, who has been eager to create jobs, build a U.S.-based supply chain for electric vehicles and move toward slowing climate change – all without taking sides in a dispute between the firms over intellectual property.

SK Innovationcan now complete construction of its $2.6 billion manufacturing facilities, which will employ 1,000 workers by the end of this year. By 2024, the plants will have 2,600 workers and churn out lithium ion batteries for more than 300,000 electric vehicles, mostly for Ford and VW brands.

The settlement will cover not only a ruling by the U.S. International Trade Commission but also litigation in federal court.

LG Energy Solution had accused SK of stealing trade secrets and destroying documents. In April 2019, it sought to limit SK’s battery output in the United States and said there was no battery shortage in the United States.

Lawyers for both companies declined to comment Saturday.

The trade commission sided with LG and restricted SK’s ability to operate its plants in this country. SK would have been barred from importing crucial battery components for 10 years. Butthe company still could have imported enough to supply batteries to certain VW brands for two years and for certain Ford brands for four years, including Ford’s best-selling F-150 pickup truck. During that period, VW and Ford were supposed to line up new suppliers.

The Biden administration, which had until Sunday to overturn the ITC ruling, feared that finding new suppliers could prove difficult if the automobile industry rushes to expand its offerings of electric vehicles. The administration has cited the need to overhaul the American car and truck fleets and make them all electric. The settlement gives the president a boost on the jobs front and among climate activists and those worried about climate change.

The SK battery plants, located 70 miles northeast of Atlanta, have drawn support from Georgia Republicans and Democrats, including Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Democratic former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young. Kemp said in a statement in February that Biden and his administration “have the opportunity to support thousands of hardworking Georgians – and their communities – who would benefit from SK Innovation’s continued success in our state.”

The state of Georgia has provided $300 million in grants, free land and other incentives to the South Korean company.

The settlement, which is expected to be announced this weekend, allows Biden to sidestep a conflict with the ITC. The president has the authority to overturn commission rulings within 60 days, a power generally delegated to the U.S. trade representative. But a president has done so only once. In August 2013, President Barack Obama reversed an ITC ruling that would have imposed a ban on the sale of some older Apple iPhones and iPads, dealing a blow to Samsung Electronics Co. in a long-running patent battle between those two companies.

SK, South Korea’s third largest conglomerate, had lined up prominent advocates to press its case, including former Obama administration officials. Former deputy attorney general Sally Yates, a Georgia native, said its factory should stay open to avoid disrupting the U.S. economy and efforts to fight climate change. She said the two South Korean firms should argue their positions in U.S. District Court, where LG is already suing SK.

“We have a severe shortage of EV batteries in the U.S. with insufficient domestic production, and the SK plant in Georgia is necessary to address this supply chain threat,” she wrote.

LG, however, had contended that the Biden administration should let the ITC process work. David K. Callahan, a partner at Latham & Watkins, last week disputed the idea that the United States is heading toward a shortage of EV batteries. He said LG Chem has a plant in Holland, Mich., that has been making batteries for about eight years and a joint venture with General Motors in Lordstown, Ohio. Last month, he said, LG announced $4.5 billion in commitments for two additional battery plants.

Separately, Samsung announced last month it would build a plant to make battery cells, which Samsung already imports and then assembles.

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Kerry expected to travel to China in first visit by top Biden official

InternationalApr 11. 2021

U.S. climate envoy John Kerry

By The Washington Post · Lily Kuo, John Hudson

U.S. climate envoy John Kerry is expected to travel to China next week in an attempt to carve out climate change as an area of closer collaboration amid deepening tensions between the two countries.

The former secretary of state is expected to travel to Shanghai for meetings with Chinese officials, according to people familiar with the situation. The trip, less than a month after a face-to-face meeting between senior Chinese and U.S. diplomats in Alaska ended in traded diatribes and insults, would be the first official visit to China by a top Biden administration official.

A State Department spokesman said the department does not have any “travel to announce at this time.” China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to questions about the potential visit.

Kerry planned to meet with his Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua, China’s special climate envoy, according to one U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive visit, which could still be called off. Kerry and Xie have already started discussions, according to the State Department.

The trip underlines the Biden administration’s efforts to collaborate with – as well as compete against – China as the two sides clash over human rights, trade practices and security while competing for global influence.

Kerry has repeatedly said the global climate crisis should be treated separately, describing it as a “critical stand-alone issue” that requires the world’s two largest emitters of greenhouse gases to work together.

The trip would be part of Kerry’s tour in Asia through India, the United Arab Emirates and Bangladesh, ahead of a two-day virtual Earth Day summit hosted by the United States on April 22 and 23. In India last week, Kerry said he was “hopeful” but “not confident” that he could count on China’s cooperation.

“We want to work with China in doing this. What President Biden has said is, we will have our differences on some issues,” he told India Today. “We can’t be the prisoners of all of these differences. We must cooperate on climate.”

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said earlier this month that Beijing had “received the invitation” to the Earth Day summit “and is looking at it.” Without mentioning the United States, Hua said Beijing would “continue to enhance communication and cooperation with the international community.”

Observers say climate change is one of few areas where U.S. and Chinese interests could overlap, raising the possibility of restarting talks halted during the Trump administration, which withdrew the United States from the Paris climate accord, a move now reversed by Biden as he tries to position the United States as a leader in limiting climate change. In September, China announced that it aimed to become carbon neutral by 2060.

Following the contentious meeting between U.S. and Chinese officials in Anchorage in March, China’s official Xinhua News Agency reported that the two sides had decided to set up a working group on climate change among other modest but specific joint initiatives. But U.S. officials told The Post that no such agreements were made – a point analysts said reflected the Biden administration’s aversion to get trapped into Beijing’s style of formalized meetings that may or may not produce results.

“These are all things that were without appeal to the U.S. side because it’s all process and no substance, and the Chinese have used process as a kind of straitjacket to bind the United States and create the impression that there’s more amity in the relationship than there really is,” said Danny Russel, a former senior diplomat in the Obama administration and vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute.

Kerry, an advocate of personal diplomacy in his years as secretary of state and a former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has long valued face-to-face meetings with foreign officials in pursuit of consensus-building.

In February, China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment said Xie’s office had been renamed as the country’s special climate envoy, a move seen as a response to Kerry’s appointment. Xie had headed his country’s climate delegation from 2007 to 2018, a time when he would have worked with Kerry, who was serving as secretary of state under the Obama administration.

“China and the United States are two largest emitters in the world. It is not like they have a choice on whether to work together or not,” said Li Shuo, senior climate and energy policy officer for Greenpeace East Asia.

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Autopsy of ex-NFL player who fatally shot five people and himself to include CTE study

InternationalApr 11. 2021Phillip Adams, the former NFL player identified.

By The Washington Post · Glynn A. Hill

The brain of Phillip Adams, the former NFL player identified as the gunman who killed five people Wednesday in Rock Hill, S.C., will be examined for chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a brain disease found in dozens of former players.

Forensic autopsies typically do not identify CTE, but York County Coroner Sabrina Gast said her office will work with Boston University, whose CTE center has studied the disease for more than a decade, to determine if Adams had the disease, she said in a statement.

“The autopsy of Mr. Adams is scheduled to be conducted at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. Routine forensic autopsies do not identify chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). We have contacted Boston University and they will be working with us to conduct a brain study to identify if Mr. Adams had CTE. We are unsure of the time frame for results at this time,” she said in the statement.

Adams fatally shot five people and wounded a sixth, according to police in York County, S.C. He took his own life and was found dead inside his father’s home after a standoff with police Thursday, according to WCNC, an NBC affiliate in Charlotte, N.C.

A prominent local doctor, his wife and their two young grandchildren are among the five victims of Wednesday’s shooting. The fifth victim was working at the family’s home at the time of the shooting, and a sixth person was wounded and taken to a hospital.

CTE is a degenerative disease caused by repetitive hits to the head and commonly associated with contact sports, including football. It has affected professional and amateur athletes and has been shown to cause violent mood swings and other cognitive disorders.

Adams’s family members have alluded to the potential impact of football on his behavior and mental health in the days since the shooting.

His father, Alonzo, told WCNC on Thursday that his son had been “a good kid. I think the football messed him up.”

His sister, Lauren, told USA Today that his behavior abruptly changed and that his “mental health degraded fast and terribly bad,” adding that he had been seeing doctors and was pursuing a disability claim through the NFL.

“I know he had been applying for disability and he said they were making it hard for him. And toward the end he felt like they were trying to basically stiff him on money,” Lauren Adams said. “I think he got upset about that and that’s kind of where it started, with him kind of feeling like the whole world was against him.”

Scott Casterline, Adams’s agent, told the Associated Press that his former client did not participate in the physical and mental health programs that the NFL offers for ex-players. He described Adams as being “lost without football, somewhat depressed.”

Adams was drafted by the San Francisco 49ers in 2010 and played cornerback for six seasons. He last played for the Atlanta Falcons in 2015. He had no previous criminal record.

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Gianluigi Colalucci, who gave fresh color to Michelangelo’s frescoes, dies at 91

InternationalApr 10. 2021Gianluigi Colalucci

By The Washington Post · Emily Langer

“Until you have seen the Sistine Chapel,” the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote in “Italian Journey,” an account of his travels across Italy in the 1780s, “you can have no adequate conception of what man is capable of accomplishing.”

“One hears and reads of so many great and worthy people, but here,” Goethe continued, marveling at the frescoes adorning the ceiling of the chapel at the heart of the Vatican, “above one’s head and before one’s eyes, is living evidence of what one man has done.”

That man was Michelangelo Buonarroti, the Italian artist who in 1508, at age 33, began painting the Sistine ceiling on the commission of Pope Julius II. Along with the depiction of the Last Judgment, which Michelangelo added to the chapel’s altar wall nearly three decades later, the ceiling is a masterpiece of Renaissance art.

But for generations – until the restoration effort undertaken in 1980 by Gianluigi Colalucci, chief conservator of the Vatican Museums – visitors who entered the Sistine Chapel saw not only the living evidence of what Michelangelo had achieved, but also living evidence of the ravages that time had wreaked on his art.

A dusky hue had come to hang over the chapel, darkening Michelangelo’s representations of God giving life to Adam and Christ dispatching the saved and the condemned to their fates. The darkness, scholars determined, was the result of the accretion of dust and dirt, fungi, varnishes and wine used in primitive restorations, and soot from candles lit during papal conclaves and other religious observances.

Even Goethe had noted the mix of smoke and incense released into the chapel and that “with sacred insolence, not only wraps the sun of art in clouds, but also makes it grow dimmer every year and in the end will totally eclipse it.”

To paint the Sistine ceiling, Michelangelo labored atop a towering scaffolding, his neck craned skyward and paint dripping onto his face. In an enterprise that captivated the international art world, Colalucci assumed the same position for the delicate task of cleansing the chapel of the layers of filth that had accumulated during the intervening centuries.

It took Michelangelo four years to paint the Sistine ceiling and 10 for Colalucci and his small team of restorers to clean it, not including the four years they then spent on “The Last Judgment.”

The restoration, although deeply controversial at the time, is regarded today as one of the most consequential undertakings in art history – an artistic resurrection that liberated Michelangelo’s work from a shroud of grime and allowed millions of visitors to experience the full palette of his colors as they had not been seen since the 16th century.

“The cleaning basically gave us a new Michelangelo,” Carmen C. Bambach, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art who witnessed the restoration process, said in an interview, describing Colalucci’s work as “a gift that is of lasting, monumental contribution.”

Colalucci died March 29 at a clinic in Rome, according to his wife, Daniela Bartoletti Colalucci, who said that he had heart ailments. He was 91.

One of the most experienced art conservators in Italy, Colalucci was hired by the Vatican in 1960. He became chief restorer in 1979, the year before the work on the Sistine Chapel began, and retired from the Vatican Museums in 1995, the year after it was concluded.

A New York Times reporter once noted that by the end of his efforts in the chapel, Colalucci’s brown hair had turned white.

Some artists and art historians feared that any hand laid to Michelangelo’s frescoes could subject the Sistine Chapel to ruinous harm. In 1987, a group of artists including Robert Motherwell, George Segal, Robert Rauschenberg, Christo and Andy Warhol petitioned Pope John Paul II to order a “precautionary” pause in the restoration.

James Beck of Columbia University, the most prominent art historian to oppose the restoration, denounced it as an “artistic Chernobyl,” while another preservationist accused Colalucci of “cleaning Michelangelo like a rug.” But by the end of the process, any fears had been allayed.

Colalucci, who displayed a seemingly constant equanimity under international scrutiny, once commented that “you don’t do this kind of work if you’re the nervous sort.” Acknowledging his critics’ reservations, he observed that dirt had befouled the frescoes for so long, even experts struggled to imagine the chapel, or Michelangelo’s capabilities as a colorist, in a different light.

Generations of art scholars “preferred a brooding Michelangelo, the painter of mysterious figures hidden in the shadows, and concealed from us in their secrets,” Colalucci told the Wall Street Journal. Because of the restoration, he added, “there’s a younger generation of art historians just waiting to interpret him differently.”

Through the painstaking application of a mild solvent, inch by inch across the chapel’s vault, Colalucci and his colleagues revealed the blazing greens and oranges and pinks and blues that lived beneath the accumulated grime.

“The Last Judgment” was even dirtier than the Sistine ceiling. At one point in its history, Colalucci said, the wall had been coated in a glue concocted from horses’ hoofs. The heavens had come to resemble a “polluted lake,” in the description of a Reuters wire-service reporter. With Colalucci’s restoration, the azure shades Michelangelo had rendered from lapis lazuli reappeared.

Throughout the work, Colalucci and his collaborators allowed art historians from around the world to ascend the scaffolding and observe their technique. The effort was filmed by Japan’s Nippon Television, which financed the project with a grant of more than $4 million in exchange for exclusive photographic rights.

The final result, which included the removal of some of the loincloths and other coverings added over the centuries to conceal the nudity in Michelangelo’s original work, was met with “universal admiration,” said William Wallace, an art historian at Washington University in St. Louis who, like Bambach, observed the restoration process.

“The newly revealed ceiling looks overwhelmingly beautiful,” critic Michael Kimmelman wrote in the Times in 1990, when it was unveiled, adding, “If it is too much to say that there was a history of Renaissance art before the project and another history that must now be written, it is true that Michelangelo will no longer be perceived as he has been since the third quarter of the 16th century.”

Colalucci reflected in a commentary published in National Geographic that “there comes a day for each of us when nothing will ever be the same again.” For him, that day was when John Paul II celebrated a Mass in the newly restored Sistine Chapel.

The chapel “became transfigured by the sacredness of the Mass, a sacredness that emanated not only from the pope, but from the very frescoes that the day before I’d considered simply works of art,” Colalucci wrote. “. . . I felt like I had been struck by a bolt of lightning, and suddenly understood two important things: the transcendent spirituality of Michelangelo’s paintings and the true meaning of working inside the Vatican.”

Gianluigi Colalucci was born in Rome on Dec. 24, 1929. His father was a lawyer, and his mother was a homemaker. Accompanied by an aunt, Colalucci visited the Sistine Chapel for the first time at age 14, his wife said, and was immediately struck by its splendor.

After high school, Colalucci attended the Institute for Restoration in Rome, graduating in 1953. He spent the early years of his career working in private and public art collections in Sicily. He restored celebrated frescoes of Raphael, among many other works at the Vatican, and also participated in the restoration of Giotto’s 14th-century frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel of Padua, Italy.

A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.

In a book, “Michelangelo and I,” Colalucci reflected on the emotions that washed over him as he stared up at the Sistine Chapel, “face to face with those eternal giants.” The most daunting figure of all was the image of Christ in “The Last Judgment,” whose eye Michelangelo had painted in several determined strokes.

“The whole Judgment revolves around this gaze of Christ, the Judge,” Colalucci said in an interview last year with the Vatican Museums. “If these two brushstrokes get ruined while you are cleaning, you are lost. The painting is lost. We are all lost. I thought about this and reflected on it a lot before confronting it.”

“Then I faced it,” he continued. “It did not betray me. The result is what you see today.”