Week 1: Fresco
Introductions
After all the students had arrived, we had an orientation meeting where we met the SGPS faculty and staff. Program directors Max Cardillo and Polly Withers were our main contacts, and I met my professors Sofia and Fabiola then as well. On the first Monday, Max gave us an extensive tour around San Gemini’s historical district, which sits on a hill above where the rest of San Gemini bleeds into the city of Terni. The district is small and ancient, with a population of about 400-500 who live there year-round, leaving empty residences that allow for us to stay in local apartments.
San Gemini was likely a small Umbrian settlement in pre-Roman times, although there is no historical documentation of the town by this name until the 11th century CE. Officially, the town is named for the saint Sato Gemine, a Syrian monk called Yemin that came to Italy and became a popular preacher in the area. An alternative story is that the town, whose name literally means "twin saints," was named for the Saints Cosmas and Damian, twins and doctors, to whom a strong cult was dedicated in the medieval era.
Around 220 BCE, Sensor Gaius Flaminius built the first of the Roman Consular roads, the Via Flaminia, which stretched from the Porta Fontanilia in Rome to Rimini and passes through the historic district. Our meeting place when leaving the town was the entrance to the district, the Porta Romana.
One view across the Terni valley.
Church of Saint Gemine.
General views and finally some Roman mosaics which have endured, and been restored.
I stayed in what I understand to be similar to an AirBnB called Sally’s House – I was prepared to share a room, but there were only two of us in our apartment and we each had a bedroom - one each on the second and third floor. I was on the top but spent most nights sleeping on the futon in the entry due to heat. As accommodations go, I lucked into a good roommate and a good location - we had similar waking-sleeping habits and the apartment was plain but tidy and clean. We even each had our own bathroom - small favors!
Unfortunately, due to jetlag and some issues with my leg, I couldn’t complete the tour after lunch, and I tragically missed the opportunity to see inside the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio. This is the building where we met as a group when necessary and where the Restoration Theory lecture, taught by Max, was given. It’s a beautiful landmark in the town and possibly the hottest building made of stone known to man – at any given time there were at least two standing fans running and 10-40% of the people in the room fanning themselves with folding or pocket fans. Italy experienced a lasting heat wave that endured across three of the four weeks of the program with temperatures hovering around 100 degrees from late morning across the afternoon.
The Palazzo Vecchio, as seen on one of my last days in town.
My general daily schedule was meeting for Restoration Theory lecture from 8:30-10:00am, Painting lecture from 10:30am-12:30pm, a break for lunch and errands, then workshop from 2:00-6:00pm officially, although some nights we ran as late as 7:00. I spent my evenings making dinner, showering off plaster dust, studying, and writing down a personal blog that would later inform this one.
For the flow of things, I’ll talk about Restoration Theory as a whole for each week and then Painting theory and workshop, rather than going day-by-day.
Restoration Ethics
The Restoration Theory course is only required for Program E, but the paper students from Program D were encouraged to attend. I later learned that Program E almost got cancelled because there were only three of us enrolled, but luckily the directors decided to follow through with it and I’m so grateful for that! It resulted in not only the incredible education I signed up for, but also a close bond between us. The director’s teenage son joined us, rounding our class out to four, and he was a welcome addition. Fortunately, several of the paper students regularly joined us in the morning for lecture with Max, leading to more robust conversations than we might otherwise have had. Max started us off with a discussion on time and memory, describing cultural heritage preservers as memory managers. We discussed what time is, what the present is, how memory exists internally (brain, DNA, etc.) and externally (images, audio, recipes, language), and how objects carry inherent memory. That is, we look at an object and use our cultural and historical knowledge to understand it - he used the example of the wooden board we were using on two sawhorses as a desk and we described how it started as a seed, became a tree, was taken to a mill likely and cut into boards which were then glued together and planed; that kind of thing.
Tuesday’s lecture with Max had to do with what's worth preserving and how society determines value - who influences it and what values there are to inform it. There's a lot of conundrums like this in conservation/preservation/restoration. We each filled out a survey where there were about ten objects and then we rated them 1-10 in categories of value such as "aesthetic, scientific, functional..." etc. There was the Mona Lisa, a "chopper" motorcycle, modern glass vase, the oldest Christian tome of some kind, oldest documented human skeleton etc. And everyone had different answers, generally speaking. Max also brought up a law in Italy that was enacted that defaulted places like San Gemini into a status of historic preservation. There are stringent rules about what can be done to/with/in the residences, and that's influenced the ability of people to stay and live here and why less than 10% of San Gemini’s population lives in the historic center.
On Wednesday we talked about types of restoration and conservation. Max’s background is in architecture, so all the examples are architectural. The main takeaways were that ethics in conservation/restoration are focused on a) restoration or completion that makes itself known, that is, it's clear to the viewer what is original and what is restored, and b) that anything that can be distinguished from the original is harmonious, so if you complete a building at a later date, or add to it, the addition must be harmonious and not jarring. Some degree of variety also exists in the field, for example American restorers tend to favor mimetic retouching that disguises any history of damage. The Italian attitude, however, is focused on transparency of restoration and they favor techniques like trattegio where at a distance a painting may look "whole" or restored, but up close the damage is retouched with little slanted marks that distinguish it from the original.
Max's Friday lecture had to do with change and how we approach conservation/restoration. How mutable and subjective the field is and how there's no hard or fast rules, no exact formula for when to conserve/restore and how much. There are examples where buildings were reconstructed at the original site of the ruin and how that prohibits further excavation/research, examples like Michelangelo's David, where a reconstruction is in the public venue and the original in the museum, and because the original was moved from its place on top of the Duomo, which one is even more "real"? Very compelling. That this field is so subjective appeals to me, I like the gray area of these decisions and how you necessarily make assessments case-by-case.
Painting Theory
Traditional Materials, Methods of Painting and Art Restoration Issues, or what I’ll call Painting Theory, is the conceptual lecture half of Program E, taught by Sofia Olivetti and Fabiola Vitali. Sofia is the expert in stone, and we spent the first two weeks under her guidance, although both Sofia and Fabiola direct us in the workshop in the afternoon. They started with an overview of the difference in traditional painting/restoration techniques; addressing the support (wall/wood/canvas), preparatory layers, and pictorial layers + varnish; then got into some of the materials (natural: vegetables such as cotton, linen, jute, etc.; artificial such as viscose; and synthetic: linear crystalline and amorphous polymers, polyamide, polyester) and some history of Mt. Vesuvius's eruption and what discovery/restoration on Herculaneum and Pompeii was like and why it was different between them. Herculaneum was very close to the volcano and the magma that hit the city was dense and adhered to the architecture, so we don't have as much to recover, whereas Pompeii was further away. People died from the heat and were then buried in ash about 24 hours later, so we have more to go on and recover there and the architecture is more intact. These discoveries are what lead to an emerging interest in artwork materials and restoration methods.
The rest of the Painting Theory lectures for the week had to do with pigments and binders - Sofia started with the physical properties and then chemical properties and what we can expect from materials based on humidity, acids/bases, organics/inorganics, etc. With chemistry, I always feel like I'm just flying through by the seat of my pants and I typically have to take my time in processing the information, but Sofia emphasized that she really wanted us to understand the “lifecycle of lime,” as this is integral to properly understanding the fresco technique.
Workshop
In the workshop in San Giovani Battista, our first project was creating a facsimile of a stone wall to practice fresco and sgraffito techniques on. We cut a kind of foam-core board into squares and made one side porous to receive the plaster surface and preparatory layers, then chose existing artworks to replicate for both this project and our second week sgraffito. For the fresco, I chose a detail of Saffron Gatherers, a fresco from 1650 BC. It's a Minoan artwork from the art history surveys that always stuck with me. The image transfer starts with "squaring", a process that involves drawing a grid on the printed image proportional to a grid on the surface you want to apply it to. Once the drawing was prepared, we mixed the mortar for the preparatory layer (arriccio) so it could dry and set over night. This ratio is 3:1 regarding coarse aggregates to binder (slaking lime). On top of that will go the intonaco layer -the ratio changes to 2:1, fine aggregates (marble dust) to binder- and then the pictorial layer. Proper frescoes have an initial rinzaffo layer that is applied to masonry to smooth it, but we used foam blocks as our base which makes the rinzaffo unnecessary.
My classmate cutting the foam board.
Detail of Saffron Gatherers.
Preparing the drawing. Photo taken by WVU representative and former professor, Mark.
My classmate and I collecting the sand aggregate for the arriccio layer. Photo taken by my professor Sofia Olivetti.
Adding aggregates for the plaster mix. Photo by Mark.
For our drawings, we used moisture-resistant paper so that they wouldn’t get too wrinkled when laid on the damp plaster. Ideally, we would use the spolvero method, which involves poking holes in the linework and then using a small cloth bag containing cinnabar powder to rub the pigment into the holes. However, while this worked for two of my classmates, despite waiting a suitable drying time, my plaster was still wet enough that the pigment powder clumped in the holes. Instead, I used the “flip book” method I learned when studying animation, which worked just fine. At this point the fresco was ready to be painted, so we moved onto filling our palettes with pigment and starting the pictorial layer. The emphasis is on learning the process itself and not the painting technique (color matching or proportional accuracy, for example). After a day of painting, we mixed the mortar for our sgraffito block next week, then the plaster to finish our fresco blocks. The first giornato (day's work) is made smooth across the desired section, then tapers abruptly at the temporary edges. The next giornato can then be added with minimal repainting. Once the fresco block was fully plastered, we went back to painting. I'm grateful that I was in the sweet spot where I loved my chosen image, it was stimulating and challenging, and I was able to reasonably finish it by the end of the week- although I could have spent days painting it as I enjoy the process so much.
Attempting the spolvero method - if the plaster had been allowed (time permitting) to dry a little further and if the holes had been poked slightly larger, this would likely have worked. Photo by Mark.
The first giornato applied with preparatory drawing.
In the workshop where the aggregates and pigments were kept - when the class has more students, they will utilize this space as well for other preparation actions and painting.
While we are given weekends off, the Saturday at the end of the first week is dedicated to touring Carsulae, about a ten minute drive out of the historic center. I heard they used to have students walk, and I'm certainly not averse to pounding pavement but it was incredibly hot - as you will likely catch me mention several more times - and with slim options for shade.
Carsulae
Elena Lorenzetti, professor of Archaeological Ceramics in Program B, shared an extensive history of the site, it was fascinating to hear the story of the ruins and to see such an ancient site up close and personal, although I have to admit I didn’t retain as much as I’d like. The heat wave was going strong that day (Elena made a joke about her soul leaving her body through her sweat) and, inundated with so much information as we were, I had to prioritize the working memory of my brain towards the content of my classwork. Still, I’m grateful for the experience. Much of the area smells of the mint that proliferates through the fields, and there’s a particular charm in Italy of seeing the modern and the ancient coexist in close proximity.
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