Long After the Flood

An hour before the wet dawn of Nov. 4, 1966, the swollen Arno River sent cataracts of water sluicing through the narrow streets of Florence and deposited half a million tons of mud, silt, rotting butchers' meat, excrement and sticky black fuel oil on the city's stone and stucco. At that moment, the future of the city and its artistic heritage seemed uncertain. The water was everywhere--soaking into the fragile wood of old carvings and panel paintings, expanding its cells and cracking it, seeping up inside walls and working outward through the surface of their frescoes, causing bloom, mold growth and discoloration, flaking the surface of porous stone like puff pastry.

Florence was confronted with the worst problems in the history of art conservation. But technology, as World War II showed, is stimulated by disaster. Today the art Restoration Laboratories in Florence's 16th century Fortezza da Basso have become the world's proving ground for conservation methods--thanks, in large part, to the collaboration of university laboratories and major chemical firms like Italy's Montedison. The techniques used by the more than 60 restorers and artisans in the Fortezza make most earlier methods look antediluvian. Says Umberto Baldini, 50, the dynamic head of the laboratories: "Once, restorers were like doctors who were trying to operate on a body without having done anatomical research. But the emergency of the flood made it obvious that art and science had to be brought closer together in a long-range program of research."

Baldini's allusion to medicine is more than casual. Even when the floodwaters had receded, hundreds of frescoed walls in Florence remained so damp that the paintings were threatened by a bacterial onslaught of molds and fungi. "If we had not found a solution," says Baldini, "those frescoes would have been devoured by micro-organisms." He and his colleagues ran through dozens of mold-killing antibiotics to test their effect on paint. Finally one was left: Squibb's Nystatin, a stomach medicine, which did not harm the pigments. But it came in the form of pills, which could not be fed to a wall. At last the University of Florence's chemistry department found a way to render powdered Nystatin soluble, and it was sprayed on the frescoes.

One spectacular result of this collaboration between art and science will be seen for the first time in seven years this summer. Like many other frescoes, Fra Angelico's Crucifixion, in the chapter house of the cloisters of San Marco (see color page), was suffering from a chronic problem that predated the flood: a pockmarked rash, resulting from crystallization within the plaster.

Tiny bumps rose and flaked the paint away, speck by speck. Veteran Restorer Dino Dini, 61, called in a chemist from the University of Florence named Enzo Ferroni, who discovered that the crystal growth was caused by lime, or calcium carbonate, turning into calcium sulphate. It took a year to find an ammonia solution that would turn the crystals back into calcium carbonate again. Impregnating a postcard-size sheet of Japanese rice paper with the solution and backing the paper with wood pulp, Dini and an assistant pressed each little rice-paper block for five minutes on the surface of the fresco, then repeated the procedure with a second solution. It took two years to thus cover each square inch of the vast painting.

The thousands of tiny craters were filled in with water-soluble paint--purposely duller in tone than the original hues, so that the restoration would be distinguishable to the trained eye. Exulted Dini last month, after nearly six years' work in San Marco: "Look how Fra Angelico's colors have come forth again. They are so much purer, so much more brilliant!"

Some works are beyond restoration and can only be stabilized. The most famous of these is Cimabue's 13th century Crucifix, which had been moved back to its original home in Santa Croce from the Uffizi shortly before the flood. The water took off more than 75% of its paint surface and, the restorers found, would have stripped more had Cimabue not had the nails countersunk and covered with tiny wooden plugs. Exposed, they would have corroded, ruining more paint. Until 1969, the surviving pigment was too soft to touch; then it was painstakingly removed and cleaned. Soon it will be glued back on Cimabue's original panel.

Baldini's staff has made startling discoveries as successive layers of earlier restoration and overpainting come off. Donatello's wooden carving of Mary Magdalen, which stood in the Baptistry in Florence, was described for years as an almost expressionist work. It had the blind eyeballs of old age and severe monochrome brown skin. These features turn out to be the work of later hands. On cleaning, the Magdalen's lively painted eyes, light skin and polychrome garments were restored. Thus its whole content has changed.

Three Eyes. A curiosity of this process, kept on view in the laboratories as a sort of talisman, is an 18th century Madonna which, on patch cleaning, turned out to have a 17th century version under it. When that in turn was tested, the restorers found a 13th century Madonna by the so-called "Master of the Magdalens" beneath. The final palimpsest, a Virgin with three eyes, two noses and a pair of bambini (see opposite, lower right), was playfully christened "Picasso's Madonna."

The work of Florence's art hospital represents a change in the philosophy of art restoration. "Up to the 1940s," Baldini points out, "restoration consisted primarily of repainting." After the ravages of World War II, the emphasis shifted to removing damaged art works from their environment and repainting them in spots. Now Baldini and a growing number of restorers are wary of removing a fresco from a deteriorating wall. Whenever possible, they instead treat the wall or panel and then do an absolute minimum of repainting. The restoration of Fra Angelico's Crucifixion in San Marco neither altered the work significantly nor added anything to it. Instead, it was a singular act of clarification. Meanwhile, the restorations go on: in the workshop of the Fortezza da Basso, there are still more than 100 panel paintings awaiting treatment. Placed immediately after the flood in a long lemon-storage shed in the Boboli Gardens, where the air was kept at 90% relative humidity, they have been slowly exposed to drier air in order to keep them from warping. In the Fortezza the humidity is now 60%, and the panels are still not fully dry. Says Restorer Vittorio Granchi: "We will still be treating art works damaged by the flood for another ten or even 15 years."

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