Friday, November 12, 2010 hours 15:00
Working techniques, preservation and restoration of a tempera on an unprepared canvas: the ‘Madonna del Buonconsiglio’ of Bergamo

Antonio Zaccaria Cultural Heritage Restoration
Friday Novermber 12- from 3:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m., Sala Giuseppe Rosi


Speakers:
Emanuela Daffra, Antonio Zaccaria, Paolo Bensi, Claudio Seccaroni, Gianluca Poldi.

The restoration of a small tempera on canvas depicting the Madonna con Bambino, universally known as the Madonna del Buonconsiglio, allocated in the church of the Santo Spirito at Bergamo, is the starting point for a multidiscipline reflection on the execution techniques used in paintings with rubber or protein layers particularly used in the Fiandre, in Germany and in Italy in the 15th and 16th centuries.
The painting, which was given to the church of the Santo Spirito a Bergamo by Andrea Rota in 1496, is part of a series of French objects (xylographies, paintings, painted glasses) of the first half of the 15th century which had the same structure and composition. The painting was for private devotion and the matt tempera technique was functional to devotional cause.
This close liaison between technique and function and the good conditions of the artwork allow us to consider it as a very good example of artwork which need a preliminary diagnostic campaign of analyses. A series of non invasive analyses as the XRF, the infra-red and the FTIR were made on the painting.
The results will be presented in the conference, together with many other studies and researches.
The minimum intervention restoration process will also be detailed and the various steps of it as the painting relining, the particularly type of consolidation used to preserve the delicate tempera colours of the artworks, will be clearly explained to public.

Speakers:
Emanuela Daffra, art historian, Soprintendenza per i beni storici, artistici ed etnoantropologici di Milano
Antonio Zaccaria, Restauro Beni Culturali, via Bartolomeo Bono 19 24121 Bergamo
Paolo Bensi, Università degli Studi di Genova, Dipartimento di Scienze per l’Architettura
Claudio Seccaroni, Ingegnere Chimico ENEA
Gianluca Poldi, University of Bergamo.

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