We were in Padua and sussing the must-sees.
"There are Mantegna frescoes at the church of the Eremitani."
"Let's go."
But I'd read my guidebook too hastily.
When we arrived, the chapel with the frescoes was quite dark.
Nearby was a slot machine. Nigel inserted a euro and lights came on. Which revealed a puzzling scene.
The pictures on the walls showed the life of St Christopher and pulled all the amazing Renaissance tricks of foreshortened anatomy and using architecture to create perspective. However, they were mainly in black and white with colour appearing only in tiny patches which freckled the surface.
An information board explained.
The church had been bombed by the Allies in World War 2 and the sublime fresco reduced to smithereens.
Using earlier photographs conservators had applied a black and white print of the original pictures to the chapel walls and had done their best to fit in the salvaged fragments.
These were the freckles and there had been 80,000 of them.
I remembered the concentration it had taken for our family to complete a mere 1000 piece jigsaw at Christmas.
This must have been painstaking and extraordinary work.
However the result made me sad.
Extremely incomplete, it was much more a memorial of the overwhelming destructiveness of war than a reconstruction of the fresco.
"There are Mantegna frescoes at the church of the Eremitani."
"Let's go."
But I'd read my guidebook too hastily.
When we arrived, the chapel with the frescoes was quite dark.
Nearby was a slot machine. Nigel inserted a euro and lights came on. Which revealed a puzzling scene.
The pictures on the walls showed the life of St Christopher and pulled all the amazing Renaissance tricks of foreshortened anatomy and using architecture to create perspective. However, they were mainly in black and white with colour appearing only in tiny patches which freckled the surface.
An information board explained.
The church had been bombed by the Allies in World War 2 and the sublime fresco reduced to smithereens.
Using earlier photographs conservators had applied a black and white print of the original pictures to the chapel walls and had done their best to fit in the salvaged fragments.
These were the freckles and there had been 80,000 of them.
I remembered the concentration it had taken for our family to complete a mere 1000 piece jigsaw at Christmas.
This must have been painstaking and extraordinary work.
However the result made me sad.
Extremely incomplete, it was much more a memorial of the overwhelming destructiveness of war than a reconstruction of the fresco.
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