Restoration, Replication, Resurrection: Choosing a Future for Amico Aspertini's 'Deposition of Christ' (original) (raw)

2020, The Aura in the Age of Digital Materiality. Rethinking Preservation in the Shadow of an Uncertain Future

Sculpted by Amico Aspertini and his workshop between 1526 and 1530, the lunette tableau above the right-hand portico of the façade of San Petronio shows either Joseph of Arimathea or Nicodemus lowering Christ into the tomb while the two Marys lament to either side. Famously described by Vasari as ‘an eccentric man of extravagant brain, whose figures… are equally eccentric and even mad’, Aspertini (1474–1552) was a skilled and prolific painter and sculptor; Vasari writes that ‘there is no church or street in Bologna which has not some daub by the hand of this master’. By 2010, when the team from Factum Foundation undertook to scan the three doors on the unfinished façade as part of a larger restoration scheme directed by Cavina Terra Architetti (and carried out by the Opificio delle Pietre Dure and the restoration firm Leonardo), the central group of Joseph and Jesus was in a state of extreme fragility. Sections of the marble had denatured and dissolved as a result of time and exposure, a process probably accelerated by modern airborne pollutants and acid rain, and the arms of Jesus in particular, projecting from the main bulk of the statue, were in need of significant consolidation work. _______ Written by: Elizabeth Mitchell, PHD in Greco-Roman archaeology from Harvard University Published in: The Aura in the Age of Digital Materiality, edited by Adam Lowe, Elizabeth Mitchell, Nicolas Béliard, Giulia Fornaciari, Tess Tomassini, Blanca Nieto and Guendalina Damone, Silvana Editoriale, 2020