Ferrara: after 50 years of waiting, Avanzi's maxi canvas will be recovered and relocated to the Certosa

It had been sitting idle in restoration laboratories forfifty years, and now, thanks to a partnership between the City Council, the Region and the Ministry of Culture, the 36-square-meter maxi canvas entitled The Apparition of the Blessed Virgin and St. Peter to the Companions of St. Brunone painted by Giuseppe Avanzi in about 1695 will be able to come back to life. It has been waiting to be recovered and relocated in Certosa since the time of the bombing of Ferrara on Jan. 28, 1944. The canvas measures 9 meters and 30 centimeters by 4 meters and 25 meters in height. The administration, through a council resolution, approved today the outline of an agreement with the Emilia-Romagna Region, which is committed to an allocation of 60 thousand euros. Under the agreement, in Article 5, the Municipality of Ferrara will instead bear the additional costs (the entire project drawn up in accordance with the Superintendence’s prescriptions is estimated at around 97,500 euros) to complete the restoration and carry out “interventions of study, documentation of activities, communication and enhancement of the work.”

This is a decisive step forward in this affair, at the culmination of a path that has also seen the Municipal Councillor for Culture Marco Gulinelli, with Cristina Ambrosini, director in charge of the cultural heritage service of the Emilia-Romagna Region, engaged in a visit in December 2021 to the Ottorino Nonfarmale workshops, in San Lazzaro di Savena. It also opens a new perspective for Avanzi’s other work recovered from the Certosa titled The Apparition of St. Brunone to Roger Count of Sicily before the Battle, which has seen similar vicissitudes in recent decades and is now preserved in the Ottorino Nonfarmale workshops, still rolled up: opportunities may arise thanks to additional resources provided for in the Ministry of Culture’s three-year public works program 2022-2024.

“This is a historic agreement, and I thank the Region and the Ministry for teaming up with us to achieve a goal that has been awaited for decades. The completion of this work will make it possible to return to Ferrara an important part of its heritage, preserved in the ’casket’ of the Certosa, one of the most interesting examples of Renaissance architecture, with a Carthusian apparatus among the best preserved in Italy,” Gulinelli explains.

“This extraordinary and imposing painting had been here since the 1970s, it was sent to us by the Superintendence to try to start the recovery and put it in a better conservative condition, after it was collected in storage,” explains Giovanni Giannelli, owner of ’Nonfarmale.’ Since that date, with the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Ferrara and the civic museums, a path has begun, as part of a major restoration campaign of the Carthusian church’s furnishings, to bring its beauty fully to light and restore its condition. The project was also presented at the Restoration Fair in Ferrara. Unfortunately, bank-related vicissitudes imposed a stand by. At present, therefore, the canvas is only partially restored. I therefore learn with great satisfaction of this agreement, which, I am confident, may also lead to the restoration of the other masterpiece preserved in our workshops."

St. Brunone, portrayed in several scenes in Avanzi’s canvases, is the founder of the Carthusian order and was born around 1030 in Cologne. The two maxi-masterpieces at the center of the inter-institutional agreement for recovery were commissioned from Avanzi by the then prior of the Certosa of Ferrara, Daniele Campanini (in office from 1692 to 1698). In 1801 the Charterhouse was secularized and the monastic community dissolved; the municipality acquired it in 1812. In 1944 the Anglo-American bombing also hit the church of San Cristoforo and the Charterhouse itself with heavy damage. The canvases also show damage from shrapnel and dust. From 1946 to 1956 they were thus separated from the frame and placed on the floors of the sacristy, without protection. The precarious conditions from the conservation point of view then made it necessary to transfer them between 1962 and 1963 to the deposits of the Pinacoteca in palazzo Diamanti, before handing them over to the Nonfarmale workshop, where they have been placed since about 1970. In 2004 the Municipality of Ferrara, with the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Ferrara, will include the two works in the major restoration campaign then underway, but ups and downs related to funding will not allow them to be completed, leaving the Apparition of the Blessed Virgin and St. Peter to the companions of St. Brunone only partially restored and the sister canvas still rolled up in the San Lazzaro di Savena workshops.

Ferrara: after 50 years of waiting, Avanzi's maxi canvas will be recovered and relocated to the Certosa

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