Crowdfunding starts Culture vs. terror. A game to be won

Commendable initiative promoted by the Uffizi Galleries, Corriere Fiorentino and Federico Del Vecchio Bank: yesterday, June 27, a crowdfunding campaign to restore"The Card Players" by Bartolomeo Manfredi, a painting that went into fragments in the Georgofili massacre on the night of May 27, 1993, was presented at a press conference.

The goal of the crowdfunding is to carry out the restoration by May 27, 2018, on the 25th anniversary of the massacre.

The restoration will be supervised by Daniela Lippi and will require 22,212 euros, of which 1,000 have already been donated by Banca Federico Del Vecchio. It is possible to participate in crowfunding"Culture vs. Terror. A game to be won" through a bank donation of any amount onIban IT57 T032 5302 8010 0000 0123 456 or by attending the first gala dinner at Palazzo Pitti on July 20.

Director of the Uffizi Galleries Eike Schmidt said, “With the restoration of this Caravaggesque work we will close, so to speak, the circle tragically begun in that May 1993, giving new life to the last salvageable work that was still to be restored; the Mafia, in addition to having caused the death of five people, innocent victims, has caused serious damage to our artistic and cultural heritage. After the loss of three works and the restorations of others carried out in the years following the attack, there is now an opportunity to be able to return to Florentines and visitors the painting by Bartolomeo Manfredi that was believed to be almost unrecoverable. The restoration will not erase the traces of the bombing, which will remain as indelible scars on a work depicting a normal moment, playing cards, normal moments like those in which terrorism strikes today. The restored work will be a double memento against the terrorism of then and now that can strike an entire community and its cultural heritage.”

Corriere Fiorentino editor Paolo Ermini added, “A newspaper is not only a diary that tells, trying to understand, the life of a city, of the territories, it is also part of a community, it shares its events with its head and also with its soul. We turn to the city and those who love it to mend one of the rips that the Via dei Georgofili bombing caused. The recovery of this work, which now no longer even looks like a painting, is not only meant to stitch up a serious wound inflicted on the city’s artistic heritage, but also to fix in Florence’s memory a shocking page. We ask for help from the whole city to say loud and strong that beauty and culture win against terror.”

Restorer Daniela Lippi recounted, “I saw the canvas for the first time in February 2014 in the Uffizi storerooms. It was as you see it today, many fragments of paint covered with tissue paper for protection-the operation of veiling was done immediately after the Georgofili massacre-next to which there were small detached pieces of the painting, as if they were pieces of a puzzle, that had been collected and assembled in the aftermath of the bomb blast. What prompted me to dare a restoration hypothesis was the realization that, although so damaged, that painting, in which six card players had been painted, had, still visible, the faces of four of them.”

Source: Ansa - Corriere Fiorentino

Image: What the painting looked like before the Georgofili massacre.
Bartolomeo Manfredi, Card Players (1618; oil on canvas, 130 x 191.5 cm; Florence, Uffizi Gallery)

Crowdfunding starts Culture vs. terror. A game to be won

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