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Period of the monument: XVI Century
Supervision: Superintendence of Florence
Place: Historical center of Florence
Year of restoration: 2019
Category of works: OS2-A
Client: Private
Works performed: Cleaning, consolidation and restoration of wooden ceilings and fresco paintings
The restoration work was aimed at consolidating, cleaning and integrating the plaster of the frescoes on the walls, window frames and ceilings, and bringing to light the decorations hidden by the whitewash using a technique that would best preserve the original color. The restoration also involved the wooden coffered ceilings which were brought back to their natural state and treated with patina and final wax.
The wooden coffered ceilings, painted on the surface with dark semi-transparent colors or white paints or decorated with tempera with repeated floral and geometric elements, showed lifting of the pictorial film. There were numerous cracks in the wood and the color decoration was obscured by a thick deposit of dirt. Humidity infiltration from the upper floor had dissolved and/or detached the tempera film of the decoration from the wooden support and effected the tannin substances of the wood with dark spotting effects.
The decorations visible on the walls of the rooms were made on fresh or semi-fresh plaster with colors diluted with white lime and mineral pigments. The drawing, which was made on the fresh plaster with the point on cardboard technique, could be detected by the traces of which were impressed on the surface of the plaster.
Even if concealed by the whitewash, traces of a drawing were visible on some of the window frames on the main facade. The pictorial surface already visible presented a consistent deposit of dirt and black smoke that had hidden the chromatics. Part of the decorated plasters above the doors presented evident detachments from the underlying masonry, with effects of cracks and presence of “pockets” a few millimeters wide. There were numerous traces of repainting, roughly executed during a previous restoration.
The surface of the frescoes was initially cleaned dry: where the plaster was unstable and lifted, a pre-consolidation with Japanese paper was carried out before cleaning.
The whitewash that concealed the geometric decorations in the window frames was composed of white of lime, which had tenaciously anchored (mineralized) to the rough surface of the plaster on which the fresco decorations were executed. In order to remove the whitewash during the investigation phase, it was necessary to soften the material and remove it before moving on to further mechanical cleaning with a scalpel.
