ITALY: Scaffolding inside Florence's Santa Croce Basilica is being left in place following a five-year restoration in the chapel to allow visitors a more intimate view of the last major descendant of the Giotto school

Record ID: 588974

  • Title: ITALY: Scaffolding inside Florence's Santa Croce Basilica is being left in place following a five-year restoration in the chapel to allow visitors a more intimate view of the last major descendant of the Giotto school
  • Date: 12th April 2011
  • Summary: FLORENCE, ITALY (APRIL 7, 2011) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF SELF PORTRAIT OF PAINTER AGNOLO GADDI IN FRESCO
  • Embargoed: 27th April 2011 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Italy, Italy
  • Country: Italy
  • Topics: Arts / Culture / Entertainment / Showbiz
  • Reuters ID: LVA3IMBQV4FVG3XPWIQFQATJXMNR
  • Story Text: For lovers of Italian art, it's as close as you can come to ascending a stairway to heaven and looking angels in the eye.
    For the first time at the end of a major restoration, the scaffolding that has shrouded the 850 square metres (9,150 square feet) of frescos of the Capella Maggiore in Florence's famed Santa Croce Basilica will not be immediately dismantled.
    Instead, starting soon and for about a year, a small number of visitors will be able to don hard hats and climb the clanking steps of scaffolding to admire the 600-year-old frescos of Agnolo Gaddi, the last major "descendant" of the Giotto school.
    "For me, the most fascinating aspect of my job is that you get very close contact with art works, with the brush strokes, the carvings, the corrections by the painters, the uninted colour spills or inprecisions", said Mariarosa Lanfranchi, one from the team who spent five years restoring the frescos. "They allow a certain intimacy with the painters, sometimes you think you can feel and understand what might have happened during the painting process and visualise that scene from many centuries ago in your mind".
    Since the next restoration will likely not take place for centuries, it is the chance of a lifetime to get within inches of a masterpiece painted on the eve of the Renaissance.
    The church, with its Giotto and Giotto-school frescos, was where, in E.M. Forster's "A Room With a View," the young Lucy Honeychurch "wandered not unpleasantly about Santa Croce, which, though it is like a barn, has harvested many beautiful things inside its walls".
    What Lucy Honeychurch and the millions of visitors to Santa Croce could not see as they craned their necks upwards towards the frescos above is the harvest of details, some only a few inches large, that $3.5 million restoration has brought to light.
    Gaddi, who lived from 1350 to 1396 and painted the Capella Maggiore in the 1380s, had good genes. His father was Taddeo Gaddi, the major pupil of the Florentine master Giotto. Agnolo Gaddi was Giotto's last stylistic descendant.
    The chapel is made up of eight major panels, each about seven metres wide and four metres high, illustrating the "Legend of the True Cross".
    The fresco cycle starts with the death of Adam and includes Biblical characters such as his son Seth, King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and concludes with the legend of how Saint Helen, mother of Roman emperor Constantine, found the true cross and returned it to Jerusalem.
    Interspersed in six 15-metre-high columns are 18 life-size frescoes of saints below three pair of winged angels floating at the top of the nave.
    But, amid the friezes and decorative bands there are also dozens of tiny faces, some as small as a few inches, which restorers believe are those of ordinary people, including artist's assistants, work crews, and neighbourhood characters.
    "We hope that we can keep the scaffolding open (to the public) for about one year. This is a very unique opportunity for people to come here and look at these details, also because this sort of period, artistic period, is very rich in decorative details", said Cecilia Frosinini, an art historian who headed the project.
    "There are a lot of technical details that can be appreciated only from a close distance", she said.
    The restoration, one of the most ambitious of its kind since the Sistine Chapel's Michaelangelo frescoes in the Vatican were cleaned between 1980 and 1994, was partly funded by Japanese businessman Tetsuya Kuroda.
    After seeing a documentary on Italian art, Kuroda gave $1.6 million to the project and the sum was matched by the Opera di Santa Croce, the foundation that runs the church.
    The project was overseen by the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Italy's premiere restoration laboratory, and carried out in collaboration with Japan's Kanazawa University.
    Indeed, it was one of the most high-tech restorations ever. Every single square inch of the frescos and stain glass was photographed and digitized into a computer programme that shows each detail in each phase of the restoration.
    The software allows any part of any scene can be viewed before, during and after the restoration or overlapping phases. It can be viewed under natural light, artificial light and "raking light", which reveals miniscule surface distortions, undulations and imperfections.
    The restoration also included a sort of "Captain's Log" that Captain Kirk of Star Trek fame would have envied. Each day, restorers left detailed notes of what they did, what they discovered, their expert reflections and human feelings.
    The digital rendition will give visitors a unique art experience.
    With just a click the computer version of the chapel walls turns into a maze of red lines that map out "giornate," or days. Since frescos are painted on fresh plaster, restorers can determine the borders of each day of work 600 years ago.
    As unique as the opportunity to get close up to a master will be, only a limited number of small groups will be allowed up on the scaffolding after making reservations. They will be under strict guidance and surveillance.
    "This is a sort a of treasure hunt, people can come on the scaffolding and look for different surprises", Frosinini said.
    In 2012 the scaffolding will come down and the chapel will again be visible from the ground in all its splendour just as Lucy Honeychurch and millions of others have seen it.
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