Combination picture of tiny faces that can be found on the 600-year-old Capella Maggiore frescoes at Florence's Santa Croce Basilica, April 7, 2011.
Credit: Reuters/Alessandro BianchiBy Philip PullellaFLORENCE, Italy | Mon Apr 11, 2011 5:07pm EDT
FLORENCE, Italy (Reuters) - 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 after a major restoration, the scaffolding that has shrouded the 850 sq m (9,150 sq ft) of frescoes of the Capella Maggiore in Florence's famed Santa Croce Basilica will not be dismantled immediately.
Instead, for about a year, a small number of visitors will be able to don hard hats and clamber up the clanking steps to admire the 600-year-old frescos of Agnolo Gaddi, the last major "descendant" of the Giotto school, from close up.
"Climbing up the scaffolding and standing in precisely the same spot where the artist stood is a bit like traveling in a time machine," said Alberto Felici, one of the team that spent five years restoring the frescoes.
"You can re-live the emotions and the atmosphere that the painter experienced 600 years ago," he said, speaking some 30 m (90 ft) above the basilica's ground floor.
Since the next restoration may not take place for centuries, it is the chance of a lifetime to get within inches of a masterpiece that helped pave the way for the Renaissance.
In E.M. Forster's novel "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."
The rich harvest that Lucy Honeychurch and millions of real visitors could not see as they craned their necks is the wealth of details, some only a few centimeters (inches) large, that the $3.5 million restoration brought to light.
"There are things here like a fish in a stream or a bird that the artist knew would never be visible from the ground but that he put there anyway either out of a sense of perfection or personal amusement," said Felici.
LAST DESCENDENT OF GIOTTO
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, whose work also adorns the walls of Santa Croce.
Agnolo Gaddi was Giotto's last stylistic descendant.
So it is with awe and reverence that restorers who worked on the project speak of the master, whose spirit seems to be at once before their eyes and looking over their shoulders.
"After 600 hundred years I approach the wall and still see things," said chief restorer Mariarosa Lanfranchi. "I see where he made an incision to make a halo, I see a color that he later corrected, I see a point of light," she said, speaking of Gaddi with the ease with which one talks of a neighbor.
"It still speaks to us and that is truly emotional."
Combination picture of tiny faces that can be found on the 600-year-old Capella Maggiore frescoes at Florence's Santa Croce Basilica, April 7, 2011.
Credit: Reuters/Alessandro BianchiBy Philip PullellaFLORENCE, Italy | Mon Apr 11, 2011 5:07pm EDT
FLORENCE, Italy (Reuters) - 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 after a major restoration, the scaffolding that has shrouded the 850 sq m (9,150 sq ft) of frescoes of the Capella Maggiore in Florence's famed Santa Croce Basilica will not be dismantled immediately.
Instead, for about a year, a small number of visitors will be able to don hard hats and clamber up the clanking steps to admire the 600-year-old frescos of Agnolo Gaddi, the last major "descendant" of the Giotto school, from close up.
"Climbing up the scaffolding and standing in precisely the same spot where the artist stood is a bit like traveling in a time machine," said Alberto Felici, one of the team that spent five years restoring the frescoes.
"You can re-live the emotions and the atmosphere that the painter experienced 600 years ago," he said, speaking some 30 m (90 ft) above the basilica's ground floor.
Since the next restoration may not take place for centuries, it is the chance of a lifetime to get within inches of a masterpiece that helped pave the way for the Renaissance.
In E.M. Forster's novel "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."
The rich harvest that Lucy Honeychurch and millions of real visitors could not see as they craned their necks is the wealth of details, some only a few centimeters (inches) large, that the $3.5 million restoration brought to light.
"There are things here like a fish in a stream or a bird that the artist knew would never be visible from the ground but that he put there anyway either out of a sense of perfection or personal amusement," said Felici.
LAST DESCENDENT OF GIOTTO
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, whose work also adorns the walls of Santa Croce.
Agnolo Gaddi was Giotto's last stylistic descendant.
So it is with awe and reverence that restorers who worked on the project speak of the master, whose spirit seems to be at once before their eyes and looking over their shoulders.
"After 600 hundred years I approach the wall and still see things," said chief restorer Mariarosa Lanfranchi. "I see where he made an incision to make a halo, I see a color that he later corrected, I see a point of light," she said, speaking of Gaddi with the ease with which one talks of a neighbor.
"It still speaks to us and that is truly emotional."
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