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Inside the Vatican:
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National Geographic Television Special |
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Airs in the U.S. on the National Geographic Channel |
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Page six of eleven A small army of some of the world's finest art restorers is preserving the Vatican's unrivalled artistic chronicle of the past. Beneath the Vatican museums and galleries, in an area closed to tourists, the artisans toil away in three restoration laboratories: for marble, for tapestries and for painting. With the amount of art, and with so much of it being centuries old, there is always another beautiful problem to solve. The man responsible for the conservation and restoration of the Vatican's vast painting collection is Maestro Maurizio de Luca. "To understand why the pope has such collections, one can't just think of today's pope, one must think about what the church and the pope have meant over the centuries," said Maurizio. "The popes and their court, at the time, were the greatest supporters of culture. This is the place where the popes put some of the greatest artists to work and these have now become collections." Maestro de Luca compares the restoration labs to a peculiar kind of hospital. "Well, there are many kinds of doctors in this hospital. We have to be ready for any artistic emergency that might arise. But we are fortunate. No one else in the world has the opportunity to do what we do, to have so many different works and to take care of them all the time." In one of the oldest wards of this hospital, a series of brilliant tapestries is being restored. Designed for the Sistine Chapel by the renaissance master, Raphael, the tapestries are luminous renderings in silk, wool and gold. But time, and poor restorations, have ravaged these irreplaceable works. For decades, the responsibility for saving the tapestries has been borne by a small group of Franciscan sisters and other artisans. Sister Angela Messina has dedicated her life to restoring them and has worked here for 35 years. She has the unenviable task of taking a pair of scissors and cutting into a priceless masterpiece. "Yes, honestly it is something too precious so we try to be extremely careful," said Sister Angela. "We try to not remove some of the oldest restorations like this part here which is in silk. So it is very important to leave the original. This is why I do it very slowly—stitch by stitch, eliminating this old area so that really none of the original will be taken." In addition to patience and a surgeon's touch, the heart of a tapestry restoration is thread, and the lab can boast a library featuring more than six thousand different shades. They've already spent three years restoring one tapestry and it will take another year to finish, and then Sister Angela and her colleagues will move to the next, for this beautiful work is just one in a series of ten. Inside the Vatican: Front Page St. Peter's Basilica The Swiss Guards The Pope's Day A City-State The World's Most Beautiful Stuff The Holy See Electing a New Pope The Secret Archives The Making of Inside the Vatican Kids Activity Guide Source: Excerpt from Inside the Vatican, a National Geographic Television special that airs in the United States on the National Geographic Channel and is available as a book. |
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