When Steven Woloshin, an American doctor, first saw the 600-year-old fresco of a Crucifixion by the Renaissance master Fra Angelico inside a cloistered convent in January last year, he was blown away.
“I immediately thought this is the most amazing thing I’ve seen,” he said recently. The image’s simplicity and power overwhelmed him, he said.
His second thought was that the fresco needed some love.
That’s when Woloshin turned to Dr. Camilla Alderighi and Dr. Raffaele Rasoini, the two cardiologists who had brought him to see the fresco in the Convent of San Domenico in Fiesole, the hilltop town overlooking Florence, and said, “Well, why not restore it?”
A few years ago, bonding over a mutual love of things cultural, the three formed an organization called Bottega Belacqua that aims to pull off “improbable dreams,” Woloshin said. The restoration of the fresco was their first official venture in Italy.
It was not so improbable, as it turns out.
On a recent morning, two restorers scrambled up scaffolding in the convent’s chapter house to put some finishing touches on their work. The fresco has been restored in time for a major Fra Angelico exhibition that opens at Palazzo Strozzi and Museo di San Marco, both in Florence, on Sept. 26. It looks set to be one of the major European art shows of the fall.
The restorers dabbed lightly at the vast blue background that surrounds a lone Christ, his head bent and his hands clutched into fists, a fitting image of meditation for the convent’s former chapter house, where monks once reached the order’s main decisions.
The fresco’s inaccessibility — the convent is still cloistered, so the friars have little contact with the outside world — meant it was not on the radar of many Fra Angelico aficionados. “It was practically unknown,” said Rasoini, also a member of Bottega Belacqua, named after a character shared by Dante and Samuel Beckett.
And it had not been flagged as needing immediate restoration on a list drafted annually by local art authorities. That list is flexible — and long — while funds are always in short supply. Private donors, individuals or groups, are a boon for Italy’s rich, if fragile, cultural patrimony, though state art authorities still oversee privately funded projects.
In the case of the chapter house fresco, Bottega Belacqua was not able to cover the costs on its own, so it turned for help to Friends of Florence, a nonprofit American organization, which immediately pitched in. “We had a donor right away,” said Countess Simonetta Brandolini d’Adda, who co-founded Friends of Florence with her sister.
