With the help of Prada, a late-Renaissance treasure is restored 50 years after the deluge that almost destroyed it

Text by Stephen Wallis

Posted August 18, 2016·Magazine

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/prada-restores-16th-century-renaissance-masterpiece-painting

On November 4, 1966, Tuscany’s Arno River, swollen by days of rain, inundated Florence with the worst flood the city had seen in centuries. The raging waters caused catastrophic damage to cultural treasures—including priceless works of art—and efforts to save them have continued to this day. Now, thanks to a partnership between Italy’s National Trust and the fashion house Prada (a major arts patron in the country), one of the most challenging of these rescue missions is nearly finished. This October Giorgio Vasari’s late-Renaissance painting The Last Supper will return to view 50 years after the flood that almost destroyed it.

“This is really a new page in the history of conservation,” says Marco Ciatti, head of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure (OPD), the Florence lab responsible for the groundbreaking restoration. “When we began to study the problems, we were not sure what the result would be.”

Around eight feet high and 21 feet across, the work was created in 1546 by Vasari—a Mannerist painter, architect, and writer who is widely considered to be the first art historian—for Florence’s Murate convent. After being moved several times over the centuries, it was installed at the Opera di Santa Croce museum, where it was submerged for some 12 hours during the flood. While layers of varnish helped minimize paint loss, the work’s five wood panels expanded in the water, stressing the painting’s surface. Its gesso ground, meanwhile, began to dissolve, causing the biblical scene to detach. Desperate museum staff separated the panels and covered them with layers of protective paper to keep the paint from sloughing off. The Last Supper was in such precarious condition that conservators didn’t dare touch it for four decades.

Several years ago, however, innovations and funding encouraged the OPD to attempt work once thought impossible. With support from the Getty Foundation, the team embarked on a four-year project to restore the wood panels and stabilize the painting. Using synthetic resins, they were able to re-adhere the paint layer to the wood, and they replaced crosspieces that had held the panels together. But there was still a tremendous amount of work to be done on the painting’s surface, and in 2014 Prada stepped in with a grant to carry out intensive cleaning and retouching. For more than two years a handful of conservators and students in the OPD workshop have labored with surgical precision—appropriately dressed in white lab coats, no less—to repair distortions and fill in cracks and losses of color, which were particularly pronounced across the work’s bottom edge. Fascinatingly, along the way they found evidence that The Last Supper had been damaged by two earlier floods and had undergone at least three earlier restorations—only adding to its improbable story of survival.

The painting, still extremely fragile, will be displayed at the Opera di Santa Croce in a gilded climate-controlled frame. Otherwise, it will look much as it did before the 1966 flood. “We’ve devoted our lives to this kind of result,” Ciatti says. “For us it is a dream that has become reality.” And rest assured: Should the Arno burst its banks again, The Last Supper can be mechanically hoisted to a safe height. It may have taken a half-century, but for the city of Florence, Vasari’s painting is now a symbol of triumph over tragedy.