Flood in Florence, 1966: A Fifty-Year Retrospective

The Florence Flood: An Art Historical Perspective

When I set off for Florence in 1989 to conduct my doctoral research on the Florentine Renaissance painter Fra Filippo Lippi, I was of a generation of American graduate students who had had limited exposure to the 1966 flood. I had only vague childhood memories of seeing the Life and National Geographic magazine features on the flood. The Florence with which I was acquainted and my art historical orientation were at a remove from the heroic international effort to save invaluable artistic patrimony in the aftermath of the Florentine flood. I was riding the wave of the “new art history” movement, where 1968 was a more resonant date than 1966. We were a determined cohort of American graduate students based in Florence, positioning ourselves against “traditional” connoisseurial valuations of “great masters,” pressing for more historical, social contextual approaches that were grounded in period discourses, critical theory, and interdisciplinary methodologies. I had no inkling (and it probably would not have interested me to know) that a key altarpiece that I intended to feature in one of my dissertation chapters, the Coronation of the Virgin by Filippo Lippi, had narrowly escaped being damaged by the flood: it was removed from the ground floor of the Uffizi early in the morning of November 4, 1966, as the floodwaters rapidly rose.

Conservation issues, on the other hand, were center stage in my field at this time, during the ongoing, controversial restoration of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling (1980–90), with James Beck, the Columbia University art historian, one of its most vocal critics.[1] In response to the negative coverage in the media, the Vatican conservators extended themselves to the scholarly community in an effort to explain and defend their methods. One of the highlights of my first year in Italy was an hour spent up on the scaffolding with my advisor and a fellow graduate student, talking with the conservators, directly beneath Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam.

The flood did surface on occasion in “my Florence”—the city where I ended up living for more than ten years. I marveled at the extreme height of the high-water markers posted throughout the central urban area. In the Archivio di Stato, where I conducted research, the request forms that I submitted for fifteenth-century ledgers would, on occasion, come back with the word alluvionato written across them—indicating that these volumes had either been irreparably damaged by the flood or were still awaiting restoration. Later in my career, working on a book on miraculous images in Florence, I became more attentive to the earlier flooding of the Arno, since a number of the miraculous images in Florentine nunneries that I was studying were initially activated during the 1557 flood, when they were considered to have performed miracles or saved communities.[2]

While I am of a generation of historians of Florentine Renaissance art at a remove from the flood, my predecessor at the University of Michigan, Marvin Eisenberg, was not. Marvin died recently, on May 18, 2016, and while I missed the opportunity to speak with him about the flood, among the materials that I consulted in preparing this essay are critical early publications related to the flood that Marvin gave to me when he broke up his personal library.[3] Marvin, like so many scholars of Italian Renaissance art of his generation, was active in the aftermath of the flood. He was the Ann Arbor regional representative of the American Committee to Rescue Italian Art (CRIA). In this role, and as chair of the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan, he sent out an “urgent call for help” through the University newspaper, soliciting donations and keeping people informed.[4] As a specialist in early Italian gold-ground panel painting, he followed the art recovery and conservation efforts attentively.

My own scholarship, over time, has evolved to embrace the kind of intimate engagement with Italian panel painting characteristic of Marvin. I also have come to share his interest in the conservation history of the works of art that I study, as well as in the history of art conservation, and the critical role of the Florentine flood of 1966 in this history. I will take up my symposium mandate now and offer an art historian’s perspective on the flood damage, the initial conservation interventions, and the subsequent exhibition initiatives that have kept the memory of the disaster and recovery alive over the intervening decades.

The flooding of the Arno on November 4, 1966, in Florence affected certain areas of the city more extensively than others. The Uffizi is located very close to the river, and while most of the works of art in the museum galleries were displayed on the upper levels, the ground floor was the site of storage rooms and a conservation facility, where paintings by Giotto, Masaccio, Botticelli, and Filippo Lippi, among others, were awaiting or undergoing treatment. While no public warning was issued about the rising floodwaters on the night of November 3, the director of Florentine museums, Ugo Procacci, was on hand at the Uffizi, and he and his colleagues were able to carry many paintings from the conservation laboratory and storage rooms to safety.[5] Procacci also had the foresight to consider the fate of the glass negatives in the major photograph archive on the ground floor of the Uffizi, which reproduced works of art located in the province of Florence.[6]

There were choices made that first night and again during subsequent years, as the salvage work continued, about which works of art to save and conserve. Should, for example, Botticelli’s Coronation of the Virgin have been transported from the ground floor of the Uffizi, where it awaited restoration, on the night of November 3, or Neri di Bicci’s Madonna and Child with Saints?[7] These choices made by administrators, curators, and conservators were responsive to the multiple and competing systems of valuation that grade works of art according to their relative merits—like artistic quality, association with named masters, cultural capital, exhibition potential, worth on the art market, physical condition, and historical value.[8] While I, too, probably would have saved Botticelli’s painting, and certainly Filippo Lippi’s Coronation of the Virgin, I did cut my art historian’s teeth on Neri di Bicci, writing my “qualifying paper” in graduate school on his remarkable surviving account book and eventually publishing an article on what I called “the commodification of artistic values” in his paintings. For the social history of art, Neri di Bicci is a practitioner of considerable interest.[9] These triage choices that were made during and after the flood should, thus, be acknowledged. The Coronation of the Virgin by Botticelli was carried to safety on the night of the flood and is now on exhibit in the Uffizi. The altarpiece by Neri di Bicci remained behind. It was consequently badly damaged by the flood and later painstakingly restored by Italian and Scandinavian conservators, and now appears to have been consigned to storage.[10]

The Arno overflowed its retaining walls and swept into the city on November 4, reaching its highest point around midday, with waters rising up to twenty feet above street level in parts of the city. The raging waters carried an unsavory mixture of mud, raw sewage, and the nafta heating oil that had leaked from tanks just recently filled in anticipation of the coming winter. The flooding inundated the Piazza del Duomo, forcing open Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise on the Baptistery and dislodging a number of the gilded bronze relief panels. Within the Baptistery Donatello’s polychrome wooden statue of Mary Magdalene was partially submerged. The main sculpture museum in Florence, the Museo Nazionale del Bargello—which, like the Uffizi, was close to the river—was thoroughly flooded. Works of sculpture that were completely underwater, like Michelangelo’s Bacchus in the Bargello (fig. 1), were less affected than those that were only partially submerged but stained by the “high-tide mark” of the black nafta oil floating on the surface of the water.

It was the Santa Croce quarter of the city where the damage to visual art and buildings was the most extreme, and where the flood impacted the lives of residents to the greatest extent. Six of the seventeen deaths in the city took place in this neighborhood.[11] Anger erupted in the quarter over how the city administration was handling the relief effort, with frustration also over the channeling of international aid toward the recovery of works of art rather than urgent humanitarian needs. Photographs document the distribution of food by inflatable dinghy to residents stranded on the upper floors of buildings. The polemical signage in a photograph taken by Nicholas Kraczyna reads, “The best mud cure for those sick from rheumatism on Via Anguillara” and “Money, now, otherwise a second drowning for artisans and others” (fig. 2).[12] The Franciscan church and monastic buildings of Santa Croce, with a museum on the site, located just behind the Biblioteca Nazionale, was among the hardest hit areas in the city.[13] David Lee’s dramatic photograph for Life magazine of the interior of the church, taken just after the floodwaters receded, leaving mud and devastation, was used by the newly formed American Committee to Rescue Italian Art—known as CRIA—in their campaigns to raise money. Public attention became riveted, in particular, on the monastic refectory. It was here that Cimabue’s monumental late thirteenth-century Crucifix was affixed to the wall, and at the peak of the flood, the water rose above the head of the figure of Christ. Over the next days, weeks, months, and years, the Passion narrative of Cimabue’s Crucifix was told episodically through media coverage,[14] from its descent from the wall, to a lamentation over the supine image as it rested on benches in the refectory during initial drying (fig. 3), where it was blessed by the pope during his Christmas visit to the devastated city, to a kind of entombment following transport by motorcade to the painting restoration facility, to its gradual resurrection in the new conservation center at the Fortezza da Basso, with a triumphant Ascension in the form of a world tour in 1982, when the restored crucifix journeyed to New York, Paris, London, Madrid, and Munich. (This Passion drama does not, however, neatly accommodate the criticism levied against the restoration itself, as we shall see.)

Fig. 1. Bargello Museum with Michelangelo’s Bacchus and David/Apollo, with the high-water mark visible on the wall, 1966. Photo by Swietlan Nicholas Kraczyna.

Fig. 2. Via Anguillara in the Santa Croce quarter of Florence, 1966. Photo by Swietlan Nicholas Kraczyna.

Damaged works of art were quickly evaluated, separated according to their media, and treated in provisional facilities set up in the city by a combination of Italian and international conservators and scientists, young trainees, and Mud Angels. Ugo Procacci, as the head of the Florentine museums and artistic patrimony, coordinated the efforts, relying on the specialists from many countries who had quickly assembled in Florence and the funds raised by various international organizations like CRIA in America and the British Italian Art and Archives Rescue fund.[15] Art historians and historians, particularly specialists in the Renaissance, like Marvin Eisenberg, were active in these international organizations. The number of damaged works—in public and private collections, in churches, antique shops, and the flea market—will never be known. The official figures for the flood-damaged works of art located within institutions administered by the state are 734 paintings, 11 fresco cycles and 70 individual frescoes, and 144 sculptures.[16]

Fig. 3. Cimabue’s Crucifix from Santa Croce, after removal from the wall, during initial treatment, 1966. Photo by Swietlan Nicholas Kraczyna.

Conservation interventions were media specific. The treatment of damaged sculpture was among the more positive and successful endeavors, similar in the effective international collaboration and the revolutionization of conservation procedures characteristic of the manuscript and book recovery described by Shelia Waters in these symposium proceedings. Prior to the flood, there had not been a professional Italian specialization in stone restoration, and the conservation of sculpture and the applied arts in Florence was not as advanced as that of painting. The introduction of new conservation approaches to the various sculptural media marks one of the ways in which the initial crisis intervention had a major impact on conservation training and media specialization afterward. Furthermore, Italy was somewhat behind in the integration of scientific techniques for analyzing and treating works of art, and this, too, would change during and after the flood.[17]

A site for treating sculpture was initially set up in the Bargello museum, with treatments coordinated by the sculpture conservator from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, William J. Young, one of twenty conservators who came over from the United States in the days immediately following the flood. Soon afterward, a restoration laboratory was established in the Palazzo Davanzati, with funding and supplies provided through CRIA, as well as English and German aid organizations. In this laboratory, international conservators worked alongside their Italian counterparts, with contingents from England, Germany, Holland, Scandinavia, and the United States.[18] Equipment and supplies were quickly assembled from various sources and transported to Florence. Scientists joined the conservators, and photographers were hired to document the conservation progress. Some of the treatments were overseen by Kenneth Hempel, a sculpture conservator from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.[19] The Victoria and Albert Museum had a state-of-the-art facility at that time, and Hempel had experience working with the museum’s extensive Italian sculpture collection. The museum was also on the vanguard of incorporating scientific techniques into conservation practice. While Hempel waited in London for his leave papers to be processed, he experimented, creating what eventually became known as the “Hempel pack”—a poultice of sepiolite and Shellsol A used to extract stains from marble. In London, he approximated the oily filth of the flood stains by inserting a core of freshly drilled Carrara marble into a mixture of soil, crude oil, and urine for a number of days. After arriving in Florence, Hempel operated out of the Palazzo Davanzati and also dispatched crews to work on marble paneling and statuary on-site in churches. The writer Katherine Kressmann Taylor, in her published journal Diary of Florence in Flood, describes one of the British Mud Angels assigned to work with Hempel, on the verge of a nervous collapse over the slow and meticulous process required to clean stains that could penetrate up to an inch into the marble: “It takes so long. We aren’t getting anywhere! . . . Nobody knows anything,” she lamented.[20]

Once again, triage determinations were made, and not always on the basis of the extent of the damage and the possibility of recovery, with the need now to appeal to international donors contributing funds to organizations like CRIA. Donatello’s Mary Magdalene was one of the poster children in this regard, appearing in photographic essays on the flood, and in one instance, beside the head of Florentine conservation operations, Umberto Baldini. Triage decisions were also made in a manner that privileged works of art from the Renaissance period. In a fascinating volume of essays that came out in 2006 to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the flood,[21] Kirsten Aschengreen Piacenti, who worked in the Palazzo Davanzati facility with Hempel, notes with pride her persistence in restoring a wooden relief which she herself had recovered from a flooded restoration facility, recognizing it as an important seventeenth-century carving by the British sculptor Grinling Gibbons. She writes, “Professor Procacci and [Otello] Capara did not want to have anything to do with it—‘it is nineteenth century,’ they said—and left it there. They would not listen when I told them that it had been commissioned from the artist by King Charles II [of England as a gift for] . . . Grand Duke Cosimo III [de’ Medici of Florence].”[22]

If we turn to fresco paintings, the challenges in conserving the flood-damaged wall paintings were extreme. Even when the water level did not reach the paintings themselves, humidity seeped into the walls and caused salt deposits on the surface. The solution used in many cases was to remove the frescoes from the walls. This technique, known as strappo, was already in practice before the flood but was used energetically during the two years immediately following, with more than 3,000 square meters of fresco detached.[23] In a quite extraordinary technical feat, Taddeo Gaddi’s Last Supper from the refectory of Santa Croce, measuring 122 square meters, was removed in one piece. The results of fresco removal often yielded hitherto unknown underdrawings on the rougher plaster layer below, known as sinopie, and these discoveries were featured in a widely circulating Life magazine feature on the flood.[24] Greater insight into the fresco process became available to art historians by virtue of the exposure of so many preparatory drawings. Strappo, as a conservation practice, has since gone out of fashion and is now avoided if possible, since the most stable condition for frescoes is considered to be the original plaster and wall support on which they were made. There are also now available less-invasive techniques, although somewhat controversial, for removing humidity and consolidating plaster.[25]

One striking art historical result from the fresco recovery following the flood was a remarkable exhibition (fig. 4) that brought seventy of these once immobile objects, affixed to buildings in Florence, to international museums between 1968 and 1971, sponsored by the Italian corporation Olivetti. “Birnam Wood has come to Dunsinane,” wrote Millard Meiss, quoting from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, in his “Preface” to the catalog.[26] One hundred and eighty thousand people attended the exhibition at the opening venue, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, during the first month and a half. The exhibition, both spectacular and spectacularly received, then traveled to Amsterdam, London, Munich, and other European cities.[27] There was a notable appreciation of the sinopie, displayed alongside the finished frescoes, which were considered from a somewhat distorted modern perspective to manifest the personal style and spontaneous creativity of the Renaissance painters.[28] The glossary of fresco terms in the catalog—giornata, cartoon, secco—and the procedures described are the foundation of what I, and my fellow historians of Renaissance art, teach in the classroom about fresco painting. An exhibition of this scale and ambition, involving such a number of a single city’s most celebrated and extremely fragile works of art, would be inconceivable today. It must be understood as a direct consequence of the 1966 flood and was framed in the catalog as a one-time, unique opportunity that was both a gesture of reciprocation by the custodians of the frescoes and a demonstration of the “universal significance of Italy’s cultural heritage.”[29]

In the restoration of panel paintings damaged by the flood, Ugo Procacci and the head of his painting conservation unit, Umberto Baldini, were apparently less inclined to give autonomy to conservators coming from outside of Florence or to work with them in a productive, collaborative manner.[30] There had been a state-sponsored painting restoration facility in Florence since 1932, founded by Procacci. By 1966, however, the Florentine facility had a somewhat strained relationship with the major Italian conservation center in Rome, the Istituto Centrale di Restauro (ICR), where the influential figure Cesare Brandi had presided for years.[31]

In the treatment of paintings immediately following the flood, panel paintings posed the most significant challenge. Marco Grassi, a young conservator trained in Rome who had worked for some years in the Florentine restoration laboratory, describes how each painting was given “a ‘rating’ according to historical significance, state of conservation, age, and size. In effect, it became a kind of artistic triage whereby certain works, such as the Cimabue, went to the head of the line while many others languished in the dangerous limbo of the Boboli greenhouses.”[32] With no precedent for this kind of extensive water damage, some choices were made during the “first-response moment” that proved, with hindsight, to be highly problematic. The panels were treated in a systematic manner, first while still in situ and then in a facility set up for painting restoration. They were laid flat and coated with the synthetic acrylic resin Paraloid B-72, diluted in a toluene solution, and covered with pieces of fine Japanese paper to consolidate the paint, creating a protective covering known as a velinatura. Conservators, trainees, and Mud Angels were sent out with buckets of Paraloid B-72 and mounds of Japanese paper—until supplies in Italy of the latter were exhausted and a variety of tissue papers were substituted.[33] When it became apparent that mold was beginning to form on the panels, the conservators began to spray them systematically with the fungicide nystatine.[34] The panels were then taken to the Limonaia, a complex of greenhouses above the Pitti Palace, which was used in the winter months to house the citrus trees from the Boboli Gardens. A decision was made to dry the panel paintings gradually, and using CRIA funds, a climate-controlled environment was devised in the Limonaia for this slow process of dehumidification.[35]

Fig. 4. Catalog for the exhibition The Great Age of Fresco: Giotto to Pontormo, 1968, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Marvin Eisenberg’s copy). Photo by Megan Holmes.

Years later, Marco Grassi commented, “Ever since those fateful days, legitimate questions have been asked: were these the only solutions possible and with the only material possible.”[36] The gradual drying of the panels led to the continual formation of mold as well as cracks in the wood. Later, when restoration was attempted, it turned out that the velinatura of acrylic resin and paper adhering to the paint layer was rigid rather than elastic and had not dried in sync with the wood and gesso ground, with the wood actually shrinking to smaller dimensions than its preemersion state. The natural animal glues in the gesso had dissolved, leaving the gesso layer compromised. The velinatura also proved to be much more difficult to remove than had been anticipated on account of the unexpected hardening of the Paraloid B-72. Repeated applications of caustic solvents were necessary, causing some damage to the paint layer and exposing the conservators to the solvent. Grassi noted that in the 1960s, there had been an enthusiastic embrace of new synthetic materials that were being developed by chemical companies like Dow, which introduced Paraloid B-72, without knowledge of the behavior of these materials over the long term and under varying conditions.[37] In retrospect, the painting conservator Andrea Rothe reflects that the panels should not have been covered with Paraloid B-72 and paper and that the paint surface should have been left exposed.[38] The drying of the panels should have been rapid rather than slow, with the consolidation of the lifting paint undertaken progressively during this shorter drying time. Whether this would have been possible given the great number of damaged panels is difficult to say.

Perhaps, too, in the two years that the Limonaia operated, before painting conservation was shifted to new facilities in the Fortezza da Basso, the conservation of paintings might have benefited from more open debates about procedures and from the sharing of experiences and technologies among the international group of restorers, akin to that in the manuscript and book recovery field and in the laboratory in the Palazzo Davanzati. Robert Clark, in researching his book Dark Water: Art, Disaster, and Redemption in Florence (2008), consulted the archives of CRIA, which was footing the bill of much of this early conservation of panel paintings in the Limonaia. He found a confidential report written to CRIA during the summer of 1967 indicating that the Limonaia was dirty, insect-infested, and without temperature regulation; people were suffering from respiratory ailments and low morale; and it was an increasingly difficult working environment unless one showed loyalty to what was referred to in the report as a “troika” consisting of the head conservator, Umberto Baldini, and his two chief assistants.[39] The narratives that one reads of in other domains of flood conservation—recounting knowledge gained about historical craft materials and production techniques and effective new methods of conservation—contrast with the accounts of treating panel paintings, which tend to be about the extreme difficulty of removing the velinatura with the least damage to the paintings.[40]

Many of the international conservators and scientists continued to work in Florence for a number of years until their financial support dried up or their home institutions called them back. The Nordic Center of Restoration, accommodated in the Palazzo Davanzati restoration facility, for example, operated for three years, with the participation of more than one hundred conservators during that time, from Sweden, Denmark, and Finland, specializing in different branches of conservation.[41] The Florentine administrators, with still much flood-related conservation work left to coordinate, and with new and more scientific approaches to treating different media put into practice, inaugurated a new conservation system in 1970 known as the Opificio delle Pietre Dure (OPD), with the primary laboratories in the Fortezza da Basso, an old Medici military fortress in the north of the city.

What we have seen emerge in this narrative about the energetic first response to the flood damage to the visual art in Florence is an interesting relationship between crisis interventions and established standard operating procedures. On the one hand, crisis interventions, in their most positive manifestations, foster international collaboration, generosity, unprecedented measures, herculean effort involving human energy and synergy, creative solutions, the use of new technologies, heightened media attention, and extraordinary allocations of funds and resources. But crisis responses are, necessarily, short term. A key question is how to hold on to at least some of these positive features after the fact, once standard quotidian operations resume. In the words of one of the people involved in coordinating the restoration work in Florence in 1966, “When disasters occur, it is best to accept them as portents, and to adopt the target, not of restoring the status quo, but of improving on it.”[42] On the other hand, crisis interventions, particularly on account of the need for quick and often drastic solutions, can also have a high risk factor and can lead to mistakes. The challenge is how to minimize the potential for damaging mistakes through the participation of qualified specialists and capable managers and the sharing of expertise, dialog in decision-making, good record-keeping, and, in the case of art conservation, practices that, to the extent possible, are reversible, noninvasive, and respectful of the original materials.[43]

Some of the ways that Ugo Procacci attempted to support and sustain the energetic international relief effort were to keep the Florentine museums open, to celebrate the recovery and renewal of the city’s visual art, and to share the experience of art restoration with the public.[44] I have already mentioned the 1968–71 international exhibition of detached frescoes from Florence, which Procacci authorized. But there were other key initiatives. The Uffizi—which, in the days immediately after the flood, served as an improvised repository for resituated works of art and as the operational headquarters for coordinating art preservation—quite remarkably was reopened to the public just a little more than a month after the flood. In addition, in late December 1966, a small exhibition, Dipinti salvati dalla piena dell’Arno, 4 Novembre 1966 (Paintings Saved from the Flooding of the Arno, 4 November 1966), was mounted of those works that had been safely moved from the ground floor of the Uffizi during the night of November 3 and the early morning of November 4, as the floodwaters were rising. I have Marvin Eisenberg’s copy of the brochure (fig. 5) that was printed to accompany the small exhibition (in which Ugo Procacci’s foreword is dated December 21, 1966).[45]

This process of commemoration and memorialization through exhibition continued. A year later, in December 1967, Procacci mounted an exhibition at the Bargello museum dedicated to works of sculpture and decorative art that had been physically compromised by the flood and subsequently cleaned or restored.[46] The catalog (fig. 6) is a tribute to the restoration efforts. The entries describe the extent of the damage and the restoration procedures, and rather extraordinarily, they list the individual conservators. Under Michelangelo’s Bacchus, for instance, is listed “restauro William Young”—the Museum of Fine Arts conservator who treated the Bacchus, which apparently required only a fairly superficial cleaning.[47] Special mention is made in the catalog, too, of the professionals and student helpers who worked on-site in the churches and whose efforts were therefore not visible in the exhibition itself.[48] This catalog is an important public record that both documents and brings some transparency to a process involving the modification of the physical integrity of highly valued cultural patrimony in the name of flood restoration.

Five years later, in 1972, a landmark exhibition was held in Florence, in the Fortezza da Basso. This exhibition, entitled Firenze Restaura (fig. 7), was unprecedented in taking restoration itself as its principal subject matter, with 355 works of art, as well as photographs and didactic panels, displayed in sixty-one galleries.[49] The exhibition included triumphant flood recoveries, like Donatello’s Mary Magdalene, but also presented the flood interventions within a broader history of Florentine restoration. Earlier examples were included, which demonstrated changes in the definition of and approach to restoration, from the renewal of cult images, to the remaking of figuration and settings through extensive repainting, to the recovery and consolidation of the surviving original paint and composition. Across the galleries the exhibition visualized the historical shift and reformulation from “restoration” to “conservation.”[50] Cimabue’s Crucifix, still a work in progress at the time, made an appearance, with the wooden cross present but denuded of its painting and the painting itself displayed on an adjacent wall, rather disconcertedly, as detached body parts on fragments of newly reinforced canvas.

Fig. 5. Brochure for the exhibition Dipinti salvati dalla piena dell’Arno: 4 novembre 1966, which opened late in December 1966 in the Uffizi, Florence (Marvin Eisenberg’s copy). Photo by Megan Holmes.

Fig. 6. Catalog for the exhibition Mostra di restauri a sculture e oggetti d’arte minore, 1967, in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence (University of Michigan Fine Arts Library’s copy). Photo by Megan Holmes.

The catalog is not quite as generous as the 1967 Bargello exhibition catalog to the many conservators who labored on the works of art damaged in the 1966 flood, listing them en masse in the preface. There is also a marked parochial emphasis on, and celebration of, Florentine restoration history. This 1972 exhibition date marked the fortieth anniversary of the founding in 1932 of the restoration laboratory in Florence by Ugo Procacci and thus chronicled forty years of Florentine restoration activity. In the last gallery, the curator Umberto Baldini offered his unabashed homage and thanks to Ugo Procacci. Procacci had appointed Baldini as the head of the new Florentine conservation center at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure two years earlier, and a decade later, Baldini was to pull off a rather incredible coup in becoming the director of the rival Roman conservation institution, the Istituto Centrale di Restauro.

There are two further 1966 Florence Flood–related restoration events that I will briefly mention here before concluding. One of these was the completion of the restoration of Cimabue’s Crucifix in 1976, followed by an ambitious world tour of five exhibition venues, authorized by Umberto Baldini and once again sponsored by Olivetti.[51] The reception of the restoration was mixed. Some critics objected to the innovative striation technique used to fill in the extensive areas of loss, which was a modification of Cesare Brandi’s widely used tratteggio technique. The restorers called their in-painting “chromatic abstraction”—an intentionally scientific-sounding term that they linked with both color theory and optics.[52] Critics felt that the chromatic abstraction problematically drew attention away from the surviving areas of original paint so that the restored composition failed to cohere (which was the overriding objective of Brandi’s tratteggio technique). The Frankensteinian dismembering and resuturing to which Cimabue’s Crucifix was subjected has also become a vivid demonstration of extreme measures that are to be avoided, if possible, in the conservation of Italian panel paintings, where every effort is now made to respect the structural integrity of the work, with reversibility and the possibility for future interventions also objectives.[53]

Fig. 7. Catalog for the exhibition Firenze Restaura, 1972, in the Fortezza da Basso, Florence (Marvin Eisenberg’s copy). Photo by Megan Holmes.

A final major flood-related event brings us up to date with the anniversary occasion of this symposium. Giorgio Vasari’s monumental Last Supper panel painting, which had been submerged under floodwater for twelve hours in Santa Croce in 1966, has been restored in a collaborative venture between the Florentine Opificio delle Pietre Dure and the Getty Conservation Center, overseen by the conservator Cecilia Frosinini.[54] The official unveiling was planned for November 4—coinciding with the day of the flood, fifty years ago. This venture participated in a practice that evolved in Florence and beyond of marking each successive ten-year anniversary of the 1966 Florentine flood with an exhibition or symposium—just as we have done here at the University of Michigan.[55] This practice has generated a productive combination of retrospective and forward-looking reflection about art conservation and historic preservation, recognizing the 1966 flood as a critical catalyst.

The restoration of Vasari’s Last Supper is a conservation project that nicely encapsulates a number of the conservation and art historical themes addressed here. There is, for starters, the interesting issue of the amount of money and expertise allocated to remove the resistant velinatura that covered the five sections of the dismembered panel painting and to restore a work of art that has effectively accrued value as a flood victim and memorial to the 1966 flood.[56] At a time when resources for conservation work are limited, one hopes that high-profile endeavors like this one will ultimately serve to draw public attention to the value of conservation and will benefit the wider practice and less sensational projects.[57] The international collaboration between two conservation institutions is encouraging and is in the spirit of the 1966 flood response. It is also healthy to have the financial support of the well-endowed Getty Foundation so that the funding is not directly dominated by commercial contributors from outside the conservation and art historical domains, which can, even in the best of circumstances, have certain negative consequences for conservation projects.[58]

There was an interesting development over the ten-year period in which the active restoration on Vasari’s Last Supper transpired, supported by both changing approaches to conservation and new technologies. It was originally assumed that the paint layer would have to be detached from the wooden support, as had been done with Cimabue’s Crucifix. This would have been a particularly tricky prospect in the case of Vasari’s Last Supper since, by the mid-sixteenth century when the painting was made, canvas was no longer used to cover panels. This makes the transfer process more complicated, since the wood must be laboriously planed down from the back. Furthermore, after the Last Supper was immersed in the floodwater and initially kept upright, the gesso ground between the wood support and paint layer apparently shifted and settled down toward the bottom of the panels. The conservators, in the end, were able to save the original wood support and consolidate the gesso and paint layers.[59]

I would like to conclude with some forward-looking reflections about the historic preservation of cultural artifacts, mindful of the lessons learned from the Florentine flood of 1966. During the symposium, we saw a screening of the University of Maryland’s copy of Franco Zeffirelli’s film Per Firenze (Florence: Days of Destruction), made in collaboration with Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI) and narrated by Richard Burton. We appreciated the impact of this film that was shot during and immediately after the flood and then aired on television in Italy and abroad just over a month after the event. We have also been moved by the evocative, powerful photographs of the flood taken by Balthazar Korab, David Lees, and Nicholas Kraczyna, among others. With these demonstrations of the critical role of film and photography in mind, we want to be mindful of how media and the web operate in the domain of historical preservation at this time and also consider how they might be more productively harnessed in the future. We want to consider the impact on our practices of new technologies, science, and the global reach and rapidity of internet exchanges. As we are all going more “digital”—our files and resources stored on our personal computers and our interactions with colleagues and opinions recorded in personal emails—we need to be sure that there are backups and analog records that document our work and professional activities.

Another subject that I would like to address is disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity in relation to historic preservation. The impressive demonstrations in the symposium papers of collaboration during first-response efforts and longer-term preservation initiatives give rise to reflections about how we operate within our different domains of practice and through our institutional affiliations. In our various endeavors to support the preservation of valued cultural heritage, we need to be mindful of our evolving disciplines and missions, to operate with historical awareness, to exercise self-critique and transparency, and to share our technologies and data. At a time when broad support for our costly and time-consuming work as scholars, conservators, scientists, librarians, and educators is in question, and we are being pressured continually to demonstrate and measure our productivity and utility, we must find ways to work against the potential for isolation, ossification, and compromise, as well as against the unreasonable hierarchies and gatekeeping within our respective fields and institutions. We also need to operate with an awareness of how our respective disciplines are organized across a network of institutions and independent practitioners. Within these networks, the organizations that have more funding and resources—certain museums, libraries, universities, conservation centers, and research institutes—have a responsibility to act on behalf of the wider domain, extending themselves to and involving practitioners from outside. And finally, in the spirit of both the Florentine flood relief and the pedagogy and mentorship of Marvin Eisenberg at the University of Michigan, we want to collaborate and exchange across national boundaries, institutions, disciplines, and generations.