Page 36 - Studio International - January 1967

The Florentine disaster and the loss to

art history

'The exact degree to which the effects of the flood have damaged historical studies will never be known.
Certainly the damage to archive material and works of art exceeds anything that happened in Tuscany
during the Second World War.'

Robert Hughes

One of the worst aspects of the disaster in Florence was Solomon and Sheba) fell out. All but the last two sustained
summed up by George Orwell in 1984: O'Brien, Winston minor damage—distortion of the edges, a broken foot,
Smith's torturer, says as he tosses the news-clipping into cracks, and so forth. The Andrea Pisano doors on the
the incinerator: 'I do not remember it'. Baptistery, however, seem to have been damaged by the
The flood which gutted the city early in the morning of actual pressure of the water as it mounted against their
November 4 1966, demonstrated that the past has no closed leaves, to a height of nearly eight feet. Under this
absolute existence: that our knowledge of it, which is its stress, the locks sheared and the panels were flung
existence, depends entirely on the preservation of its violently backward against their jambs. The right-hand
records, artifacts and works of art. In the abstract, this leaf of the door was cracked completely across. One of the
fact may be so obvious that it need not even be stated. eight allegorical panels of The Cardinal Virtues, Caritas,
The three weeks I spent in Florence, beginning on fell out but has been recovered. On the left hand leaf,
November 8, made it hideously concrete, and thus, to me, the damage was less, though the extreme top left panel,
new. Art may add to other and earlier art; it cannot The Annunciation to Zacharias, fell out. Long strips of fram-
replace it. Our culture has no values which can substitute ing were sheared away, and a small decorative lion's
for what was destroyed in Florence. And so, because head is missing. Not all the bronze framing has yet been
whole areas of information have been lost—flaked away, found. There are no estimates for the cost of restoration
blurred, corroded, rotted by the waters of the Arno— the of the doors, though the newspaper Corriere della Sera has
total power of human beings to communicate with one given 10,000,000 lire (£6,000) towards the restoration
another on a high and civilized level has been fractionally of the Pisano doors.
reduced for ever. Part of this communication is, of course, The worst damage by water-pressure, however, occurred
the writing of history. The exact degree to which the in the Archaeological Museum, which, rivalled only by
effects of the flood have damaged historical studies of the collection of the Villa Giulia in Rome, is the most
Italian civilization will never be known. There are no important repository of Etruscan antiquities in the world.
stable precedents for it in Italy; certainly the damage to Here, architectural damage was involved. The water
archive material and works of art exceeds anything that filled the basements first, and then rose inside the walls of
happened in Tuscany during the Second World War. the ground floor. When the water level inside the base-
There are no accurate records of the damage to pictures ments reached the ceiling, the pressure of the water
and documents wrought by the previous Arno floods of ruptured the floor above. Then, as more water flowed
1333, 1537 and 1757. on to this floor, it sagged and, in several rooms, collapsed
There were various types of damage. The first category completely back into the basements. The glass cases, con-
was mechanical—water-pressure, turbulence and friction. taining more than nine thousand Etruscan and Graeco-
The flood, it is popularly thought, was caused by the Roman ceramic objects, items of jewelry and bronzes,
opening of a dam some miles upstream. This released an were smashed and their contents fell or were sucked back
immense bore of water, which swept through the city into the basements. Stupefying labours now confront the
and flowed back into the Arno within 24 hours. The restorers, who are obliged to sieve every handful of the
water contained a high concentration of mineral and tons of mud, deposited in the museum, for fragments;
organic particles in suspension, which settled as mud as apart from new breakage, the glue of old restorations has
the liquid drained away. This concentration was so heavy largely dissolved, increasing the problems still further.
that it resembled soup—nearly half a million tons of mud The collection of Etruscan tomb-frescoes, remounted and
were deposited on the city. However, in some streets— transferred from their original sites, has been extensively
especially round Piazza Signoria and the Santa Croce damaged as well.
district—the mud and water rushed through at speeds up Such were typical effects of pressure and vibration.
to 30 m.p.h. It acted like rubbing-compound, stripping But the most general water-damage was due, simply, to
layers of surface from soft stone, brick and exposed fresco. submersion. The worst and most immediate loss here was
In Piazza de Duomo, several streets converge; the meet- the Crucifixion, by Cimabue, which, up to a few months
ing of these streams of floodwater caused violent eddies ago, had been permanently exhibited in the Uffizi; it was
and turbulence. The vibration which this caused was returned to the Museo dell'Opere da Santa Croce just in
responsible for the damage to the bronze doors of the time for the flood, which covered it completely. (Inside
Baptistery by Lorenzo Ghiberti. Five panels ( The Creation, the Museo, the flood level reached five metres, or just
Jacob and Esau, Cain and Abel, The Story of Benjamin, and over sixteen feet.) The water saturated the wood panel