Lorenzo de' Medici - art, language and culture since 1973

This special summer course takes place both in Florence and Chianti. Three weeks will be spent in Florence, in the restoration labs of the LdM school: the class will learn the ancient technique of fresco by using original techniques from the mixing of fresco mortar (intonaco), its application on support, and the use of pigments for painting fresco. Each participant will make a “sinopia” (preliminary painting for fresco), and complete a small fresco on a terracotta support using the participant's choice of subject matter. The course will also discuss the detachment of the participant's own fresco from its support. This is a method used in wall painting conservation, and will give the participant an opportunity to learn the techniques of fresco restoration using their own fresco. The course will also briefly survey the ancient techniques used for making oil and tempera paintings. The participants will learn to recognize the century in which the paintings were created. The class will be working with original paintings from the 16th – 17th century and they will learn how to use all modern painting restoration techniques to bring the antique paintings back to their original states. Scheduled museum visits will help enlighten the techniques they use in class.

During the field workshop weeks participants will work in the town of San Gusmè in the Chianti region near the medieval villages of Radda and Gaiole in Chianti. During this period, participants will be housed in a traditional and picturesque "agriturismo".

The class will ripristinate the original polychromatic surfaces of an important 16th-century altar in the principal church. They will remove the pigments of the preceding restoration of about a century ago, with scalpels, eliminating the chromatic distortion of this overpainting. They will then proceed to reconstruct the work with colored stucco and tempera, with a final wax stratum to complete the beautiful original effect.
As a first step, a complete study of the art work will be carried out in order to understand dates and conservation conditions. Then the class will concentrate on cleaning the art work and consolidate it with the proper materials. For the next step, the participants will learn to use different products for the restoration of the surface layers. As the last step the participants will also work on the pictorial layer and, if necessary, will do some in-painting with appropriate colors.

Dates for Summer 2010: May 27 - June 26,  July 1- July 31
Please "click here" to download the brochure for the LdM Workshops for 2010 and read more about LdM's Florence and Southern Italy Restoration Workshop.