Arezzo, you will be able to climb the scaffolding of Piero della Francesca's Legend of the True Cross

See up close one of the most important and celebrated fresco cycles in the history of art, Piero della Francesca’s Legend of the True Cross . The chance to come face to face with the famous scenes painted by the great Renaissance artist, a masterpiece of 15th-century painting preserved in the Bacci Chapel of the Basilica of San Francesco in Arezzo, is offered from January 27 to March 12, 2024 with the project All’altezza di Piero, the program of extraordinary visits to the maintenance site of the wall painting cycle of the Legend of the True Cross by Piero della Francesca.

As of next January 10, 2024, in fact, the work will undergo maintenance and conservation overhaul works by the Regional Directorate of Museums of Tuscany, which, for the occasion, has decided to set up an accessible scaffold that will offer, to small groups of visitors, the exceptional opportunity to admire the cycle of wall paintings from an absolutely different and unprecedented perspective.

Together with the Arezzo Intour Foundation, which manages the museum services of Arezzo’s state museums, special tours accompanied by an expert guide have therefore been organized, which will last about an hour and will soon be bookable at museiarezzo.it.

The Legend of the True Cross, created by the artist in a period between 1452 and 1466, presents a series of episodes from the Legenda Aurea of the Dominican friar Jacopo da Varagine, a collection of lives of saints and explanations of liturgical feasts written beginning in the 1460s and circulated with great success throughout the Middle Ages.

The scenes, arranged on three levels on the walls of the Bacci Chapel, tell the story of the Cross on which Jesus Christ was crucified, beginning with the birth of the tree from which the wood with which it was made came. The episodes depicted by Piero are not connected according to chronological succession but by formal and symbolic relationships and are characterized by a careful perspective vision.

The conservation maintenance and overhaul intervention (previously carried out in 2016), includes the removal of the substantial amounts of dust and atmospheric particulate matter deposited on the painted surfaces and the simultaneous verification of the state of conservation of the pictorial film and plasters, in order to avoid the emergence or progression of any new phenomena of degradation (lifting, detachment, sulfation, etc.) that could put the conservation of the paintings at serious risk.

The worksite will also include the restoration of the large painted Cross, dating from the eighth to ninth decade of the 13th century and attributed to an Umbrian painter known conventionally as the Master of St. Francis, and of the stained-glass mullioned window, with the provision of a newly designed external counter-window.

Arezzo, you will be able to climb the scaffolding of Piero della Francesca's Legend of the True Cross

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