The conservation of frescoes through the centuries

Commissioned in all probability by the Bardi family, a powerful clan of Florentine bankers, the Bardi Chapel has a development of about 180 square metres, on which Giotto and his workshop represented in six scenes the crucial moments in the life of the founder of the Franciscan Order.

Where dating is concerned, the chronology of the cycle is still a question that is debated in studies: we know that the frescoes were painted after St. Louis of Toulouse was canonised in 1317, simply because that event is depicted on the back wall. However, the date oscillates between 1317-1321 and a date close to the artist's return to Florence from Naples, in 1333.

The vicissitudes of this late Giotto masterpiece have been troubled: its traces and its memory were in fact lost under layers of whitewash in the first half of the eighteenth century in 1812 and 1818, applied at the height of the lower register of the side walls, where the two cenotaphs of the grand-ducal architects Giuseppe Salvetti and Niccolò Gaspero Maria Paoletti were inserted.

In 1851 the project to redecorate the chapel gifted us with a first discovery under the whitewashing of portions of fourteenth-century painting: the task of proceeding with the rediscovery of Giotto’s paintings was entrusted to one of the most famous restorers of the time, Gaetano Bianchi, who completed the operation in about a year (between 1852-53), alas making use of the clumsy help of some friars before carrying out the actual restoration of the paintings.

Many of the widespread abrasions, scratches and leaks that so clearly mark the painted walls, are due precisely to the procedures used when removing the whitewash. During the nineteenth-century rediscovery the two funerary monuments were removed, and Giotto's painting that was underneath was alas completely lost. Today the silhouettes profoundly influence the image of a reading as powerful as it is fragmentary.

Finally, the layout of the painted decoration of the chapel prior to the current intervention was due to the work that took place between the summer of 1957 and the end of 1958, conducted by two protagonists of the Florentine restoration of the 20th century, Superintendent Ugo Procacci and the restorer Leonetto Tintori. The current intervention started from here.