Page 40 - Studio International - January 1967

wood, intonaco, marble, brick, limestone. The heaviest
deposits of oil were in Santa Maria Novella, where the
frescoes in the Chiostro Verde received a thick, tarry coat
up to nine feet from the floor; this has gone deeply into
their surface, and the restoration cost will be immense—a
preliminary estimate is 70 million lire. But very little in
Florence escaped the oil, and one must think in terms of
millions of square feet of marble inlay and hundreds of
statues, sarcophagi, busts and decorative carvings ren-
dered piebald by brown sludge. There is a system of
priorities for the restoration of this material—important
sculptures, for this reason, come first—but for the first
few days it seemed impossible, due to the confusion, to
put the plan into effect. Thus the Donatello Magdalen
remained on her pedestal _in the Baptistery, with oil
soaking into the wood, for five days before it was re-
moved; while a hundred yards away, in the courtyard
of the Museo dell'Opere del Duomo, three workmen were
scrubbing at a large, but unimportant, baroque marble
with heavy solvents. Traces of oil have come out of some
sculptures quite easily—such was the case with the marbles
with polished or close-grained surfaces, such as the
Giovanni Bologna or the Bandinelli Adam and Eve in the
courtyard of the Bargello, or the Bandinelli Pieta in the
crypt of Santa Croce—but more porous or open-textured
stones have not been so lucky. It seems likely, for instance,
that the antique sarcophagi which flank the Pisano doors
of the Baptistery will remain mottled forever. There has
also been some chemical damage through the formation
of crystals within the wet stone; these crystals, in growing,
expand, and so flake the surface off. Such was the case
with two early fifteenth-century marbles on the ground
floor of the Museo dell'Opere del Duomo, but this aspect
of the damage has not yet had time to reveal itself fully
and other losses can, presumably, be expected.
The mud was rich in organic silts, plant humus and
excrement, and these have encouraged the growth of
mould on pictures, frescoes and books. There are heavy
outcrops of mould in the Chiostro Verde, the various
churches which were worst flooded (for instance, Santa
Croce) and, indeed, all over Florence. The books and
documents from the flooded basements of the Archivio
di Stato and the Biblioteca Nazionale have been parti-
cularly vulnerable to this infestation. There is only one
fungicide machine in Italy which could be used for this
delicate work—but it is in Verona, whose council flatly
refused to lend it to Florence. An American fund is now
reported to have sent two such machines.
Such is the general pattern of damage to works of art in
Florence. Obviously, in a report of this length, I cannot
give complete details of every damaged picture; in any
case, these are not yet known, even to the Florentines
themselves. But works of art were not the only losses;
apart from the appalling destruction of property and
personal belongings, accompanied by thirty-three deaths
and the most pathetic human suffering, the archives and
The fresco byTaddeo Gaddi, on the end wall of the Santa Croce Museum (formerly libraries of Florence have been crippled; and it is here
the refectory of Santa Croce) was affected by the water and oil, which rose more than that historians will find their worst setback. Fifteen church
sixteen feet inside the museum. Three days after the water had subsided, a temporary archives were severely damaged or destroyed, and twenty
scaffolding was erected and restorers went to work. Most of the fresco has now been
others were hit by water. The Gabinetto Veisseux,
cleaned—the lower section, The Last Supper, was covered, the Vision of St Buonaventura
in Palazzo Strozzi, was until now the most com-
above was untouched. The effects of rising damp inside the wall are not known yet
and may not show for months. plete library on European romantic art and literature
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