By James Beck It took me too many years to arrive at a fundamental realization regarding the modern restoration industry, its various branches, subdivisions, and operatives. Underlying much of the activity is, of course, money, a factor that I had understood from the very start of my own involvement in the issues fifteen years […]
Masaccio, Trinity with the Virgin, Saint John the Evangelist, and Donors, c. 1425-27/28. Church of Santa Maria Novella (Florence). The Direction of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence graciously permitted me to visit the ongoing restoration of Masaccio’s Trinity, in Santa Maria Novella, on Thursday August 31st, 2000. In interviews published in Florentine […]
The business of exhibitions puts masterpieces at risk. In recent months a controversy has re-erupted in the press and among art experts in Italy which is gradually spilling onto the international scene. Its impact upon the habits of displaying art treasures cannot be underestimated. The influential, skillful and politically adept Soprintendente of Fine Arts of […]
Current restoration materials and practices are not as benign as the practitioners would have us believe. Our visual heritage is being tampered with daily while the intellectual community has remained silent over the results. I have difficulty comprehending the reluctance with which philosophers, art scholars, historians, writers, filmmakers, novelists and poets have approached or, better, […]
In an open letter to the Mayor of Florence, ArtWatch is calling for an immediate halt to the restoration of Michelangelo’s statue group known as “Victory”. James Beck June 22, 1998 Dear Honorable Mr. Mayor, On behalf of ArtWatch International, Inc. and its affiliate in Italy, ArtWatch Italia, I am asking at this time for […]
Can we bring our most treasured art objects and buildings back to their original glory by modern restorations? In Italy, which has by some estimates forty percent of the world’s masterpieces, there has been a concerted campaign to do just over the past twenty years. As the Jubilee Year approaches, the urgency to clean every […]
Experts now suspect that the earthquake damage to the Assisi frescoes was caused in part by earlier structural changes in the building, particularly the use of reinforced concrete beams in the roof. Similar reinforcements have been used in old churches and could be threatening masterpieces contained within them. The most dramatic example is in Padua, […]
ArtWatch International has learned that Andrea del Verrocchio’s most famous painting, the Baptism of Christ, a panel created for the church of San Salvi in Florence around 1475, has been removed from the wall of the Uffizi. One of the most prized masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance, it was executed by Andrea Verrocchio in collaboration […]
The elaborate conservation and restoration project for the Scrovegni or Arena Chapel sketched out by the Comune of Padua, who are the owners, reveal the intention is not merely to maintain the frescoes but to ‘improve’ them. It is also clear from the doc umentation distributed on 30 September 1995 by local Paduan officials in […]