Book on the restoration of the San Marco Altarpiece by Beato Angelico is released

A book on the restoration of the San Marco altarpiece, the masterpiece by Beato Angelico that underwent a significant intervention in 2019 that returned it to the National Museum of San Marco in Florence in an excellent legible condition, is out. The book, entitled La Pala di San Marco by Beato Angelico: restoration and research, is edited by Cecilia Frosinini, is published by Edifir and will be presented on Thursday, May 5, at 4:30 p.m. in the Michelozzo Library of the San Marco Museum. The presentation will be introduced by the Regional Museums of Tuscany Director, Stefano Casciu, the Director of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Marco Ciatti, and the Director of the San Marco Museum, Angelo Tartuferi, in the presence of the curator, Cecilia Frosinini. The speakers, Giorgio Bonsanti, secretary general of the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno and former director of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, and Gerardo de Simone, professor at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Carrara, will present the volume, which is part of the series Problemi di conservazione e restauro," published by Edifir .

The book illustrates the results of the research and conservation project that theOpificio delle Pietre Dure completed in 2019 on Beato Angelico’s St. Mark’s Altarpiece, executed in 1438-1440 for the high altar of the Dominican church of San Marco, adjacent to the convent where the friar painter lived between 1438 and 1455. A complex work that after years of investigation and research, and thanks to the restoration carried out at the Laboratories of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, has allowed the work to be re-presented in October 2019, on the occasion of the museum’s 150th anniversary, in the Beato Angelico Room, where the world’s most important collection of masterpieces on panel by the Friar painter is concentrated, recently renovated and remounted.

The essays collected in the volume give an account of the results of the work, directed by Marco Ciatti and Cecilia Frosinini, which over the years has involved many technicians, restorers and experts in a restoration operation that has been marked by many difficulties and uncommon complexity, involving both the conservation of the wooden support and the pictorial film. Specific and innovative methods were developed for both, the result of the overall approach of the restoration project understood as a research project. The volume documents this complexity at its best, with contributions of the highest level dedicated to the history and meanings of the work, its importance in the course of Italian painting of the early Renaissance, and all the methodological, technical and scientific aspects that emerged in the course of the work.

The restoration has enabled an exceptional recovery of the altarpiece, which was much damaged by ancient interventions and inappropriate restorations, returning an absolute masterpiece to the world and restoring its pictorial, chromatic, perspective, volumetric, iconographic and symbolic values. The functionality of the monumental wooden support was also recovered, executed with a technique that was revolutionary at the time to correspond to the new need to arrange the painted scene on a unified surface, suddenly overcoming the traditional partitions of medieval polyptychs. Already ancient sources cite the work as innovative, the first ’tavola quadra’ all’antica in Italian painting, set in a monumental frame, unfortunately lost, inspired by modern revived classicism. At the same time, the St. Mark’s Altarpiece is the perfect fruit of the eloquent synthesis of Art and Power: the up-to-date and sublime art of Angelico and the power of Cosimo de’ Medici the Elder, patron of the church and convent, renovated at his own expense by the family architect Michelozzo according to Brunelleschi’s most recent dictates.

One of the results of the intervention, in addition to the preservation of the wooden support and the restitution of a correct reading of its artistic values, consists precisely in having highlighted the central role of the San Marco Altarpiece in Beato Angelico’s activity, contributing to the definition of the museum’s identity image, which is an expression of a unique synthesis between the life and work of the Friar painter.

Pictured is the St. Mark’s Altarpiece after restoration.

Book on the restoration of the San Marco Altarpiece by Beato Angelico is released

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