Have you ever accidentally damaged an item you’d borrowed? Are you familiar with that hollow feeling in your stomach as you gaze at the splintered glass of your neighbour’s crystal trifle dish on your kitchen floor? Then you’ll know how custodians at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence felt when they discovered that a painting on loan from France had fallen down during Friday – Saturday night.
The painting, Filota giudicato davanti ad Alessandro Magno [Philotas Tried before Alexander the Great] by the eighteenth-century Florentine artist Gian Domenico Ferretti, is on loan to the Uffizi by the Musée Calvet in Avignon for the exhibition Il fasto e la ragione [Pomp and Reason]. Custodians opening the Gallery on Saturday morning found the picture on the floor. It is thought that the hook on which the picture was hung was “a bit loose”.
It turns out that the canvas itself is not damaged but there is a little damage to the frame, which the Gallery’s Director, Antonio Natali, says his restorers could repair in a morning but they have to await instructions from the Musée Calvet. The French Museum is not going to sue as the painting is insured.
The Uffizi, it seems, has been having an unlucky November: Corriere della Sera reported on Wednesday that a nineteenth-century statue of Pier Capponi, in one of the niches of the open gallery facing the Arno, had unwillingly “had a foot amputated” by a badly parked van. However, the “amputated” part of the unfortunate Capponi’s foot has now been found and this work, too, can be repaired in half a day by the Gallery’s busy restorers.
The exhibition Il fasto e la ragione runs until 13th December at the Uffizi Gallery, Florence.
Do you think that art restorers do an important job?
