From Rome to Venice: A Life in Restoration – An Interview with Gea Storace
- Nicoletta Fornaro
- 7 giorni fa
- Tempo di lettura: 11 min
A city is made of its people, who are like the heartbeats that keep it alive. People who contribute daily to maintaining it beautiful and link past times and history to the present days. In this post, I want to introduce you to Gea Storace, born in Rome and adopted by Venice. Gea is a brilliant and knowledgeable art restorer who chose to live and raise her children in the lagoon.
Here below, our brief conversation:
1) Dear Gea, from Rome to Venice. Tell us a little something about yourself and what brought you to the lagoon.
The profession of restorer itself implies a little bit of nomadism. Although there are many resident restorers, I have always traveled for work, moving for short and long periods to the places where I was called. Already during my university years at the Istituto Centrale per il Restauro (ICR) the summer months were spent in Assisi, where I worked on the wall paintings by Cimaue and Giotto of the Basilica Superiore of San Francesco. In addition to Venice, I also operated in Pompei, Vicenza, Orvieto, Padua, Salerno, Positano, Ravello, L’Aquila and Crotone, just to name a few. It wasn’t always easy to organize everything, consider that I have three kids, but it has definitely been wonderful. In 1983 the Venice Superintendence of Architecture was programming the restoration of the entrance of Arsenale and its enclosing, crowned by sculptures and four lions located in the campo, a war loot from the times of Francesco Morosini, and I was invited to work on this project, which included also the restoration of the internal door of the Artillery and the Gate of the Weapon Room. The same year, the Superintendence of Historical and Artistic Goods of the Veneto proposed the restoration of the wall paintings located in one of the courtyards of Villa Pisani in Strà. Thus, it was thanks to these two projects that I arrived in Venice. At their conclusion, I spent some years in Vicenza working on the restoration of the main works of the picture gallery of Palazzo Chiericati, which was being re-fitted, among the many paintings I must name the ones by Bartolomeo Montagna, Carpaccio, Cima da Conegliano, Memling, Van Dyck, as well as the frescoes by Tiepolo in Villa Cordellina-Lombardi and the Olympic Theatre, a Palladio masterpiece.
In 1989 the request for tender of the Venice Municipality for the restoration of the BallRoom of the Correr Museum, which had been closed to the public for many years after a fire, led to a professional journey that in different steps brought to the restoration and the re-discovery of the forgotten Royal Palace in Piazza San Marco. During the first step, in the years 1989-1992, the Napoleonic Wing was restored. From 2000 to 2021, in different moments, the other rooms of the Royal apartments were renovated. The Palace was born in 1807 at the beginning of the Napoleon era, from a troubled project that had encountered the opposition of Venetians, and was inhabited first by the Viceroy Eugène de Beauharnais, then from 1814 by the Habsburgs and finally from 1866 by the Savoia; its many rooms were modified, renovated, enlarged and made more beautiful over the years, at least until the 3rd of October 1919, when Vittorio Emanuele III donated a significant part of the Palace to the Italian State. From that moment on, the Royal Palace was forgotten as a historical and architectural monument, fortunately without being physically destroyed. Its transformation into forgotten and denaturalised residence took place with its splitting up: some rooms were given to the Correr Museum, others to the Archaeological Museums, others to the Marciana Library, and the other twenty rooms became offices of the Superintendence, of Amici dei Musei, of the authority of the Veneto Villas, the District State Attorney and of Unesco. Doors were closed, sometimes walls were used to separate one room from the other. Halls, dining rooms, bedrooms, toilettes, noble sitting rooms turned into offices, with the furniture spread with very little care and disregard in dusty depots. The memory of a Royal palace was quickly obscured: shelves on the walls, desks full of folders, papers, pens, photocopiers, chairs, computers and stamps replaced the old furniture. Radiators and dozens of electrical plugs, meters and meters of telephone wires, faxes, junction boxes and more, holes and nails destroyed the polychrome Venetian plasters, already damaged by the dark and heavy recolourings. Due to years of dripping from the radiators, the parquet floors got lifted. Silk tapestries were ruined. It was necessary to wait some ten years for the rebirth of the Palace. I like to describe the long recovery journey, which lasted about 30 years, as a journey through rooms of different historical periods, decorative expressions, and techniques, years of conservative problems, doubts and choices to be made. Room after room. A mending of a completely exhausted fabric, the physical recovery of places, their reconnection, in order to return them their capacity of evoking a forgotten era. Venetians preferred to forget about it and remain faithful heirs of the glorious Serenissima Republic, the only one recognized and symbolically represented by the Doges Palace. The distinct historical moments and properties of the Palace have determined stratifications of different decorative levels, which we can read on the walls and ceilings.
History cannot be deleted. Any attempt to do so is destined to fail. Men need history. Memory is an absolute necessity. Returning a place to the artists and craftsmen who, during years hidden to the public memory, have added their contributions in the making of a Palace that with dignity represented the inevitable changes of history. My story intertwines with the one of this long restoration , about which I could write an entire book. The many steps of the works, in charge of Stefano Proviciali and myself as restorers and technical directors of Corest, saw the succession of Ministers of the Cultural Heritage, officers of the Superintendence, Directors of the Musei Civici Veneziani (today MUVE), Directors of Works, and also different commissioners. The most consistent interventions for the recovery of the Palace were carried out thanks to the dedication, diligence, perseverance and will of reaching the final goal, thanks to the important financial support of generous sponsors, promoted by Jérôme-François Zieseniss, president of the Comitè François pour la Sauvegarde de Venise.
During the long phases of the conservative restoration of the huge historical and artistic heritage that the Royal palace of Venice is, in the evaluation of each choice, Stefano and I have been led by a thread, like Ariadne and her maze, that brought us to reconnect in time and space all the rooms of the apartments, never forgetting the overall balance, to be reached with humility, strength of the doubt, and awareness of measure. Venice has seen us work also on other great masterpieces, among which the sculptures by Canova in the Correr Museum and the Fine Art Academy, the door and sacristy of the Santi Giovanni e Paolo Basilica, the monument dedicated to Mocenigo in San Lazzaro dei Mendicanti, Ca d’Oro’s ground floor portico overlooking the water, part of the facade of the Procuratie Nove, the frescoes by Castagno in San Zaccaria, artworks inside the Fortuny Museum and many more.
2) When was your love for restoration born and how did it develop?
Art has fascinated me since I was a child. I would cut from papers and magazines all the images of art works and keep them in folders and boxes. Then a catastrophic, and at the same time uncommon, event occurred: the flooding of the Arno river that in 1966 caused enormous damage to the cities of Venice and Florence. The images of the huge damages to the historical and artistic heritage left a deep impression in me. The ‘angels of the mud’ who in Florence worked to save the volumes of the libraries from the slime, the transportation of the Crucifix of Santa Croce by Cimaue, severely damaged, the run against time to save as many works as possible and many more dramatic images, I think this was the first seed that remained ‘asleep’ in me for years, without me being aware of it. After high school, I would have liked to study architecture, my other big passion, but for a series of personal and family reasons I was not able to follow this path. I chose History of Art and it was in those years that I started to understand I wanted to become a restorer. I learned about the Central Institute for Restoration (ICR), a multidisciplinary public structure designed as a place of research, elaboration of methodologies, specific material technologies, and their testing and experimentation, as well as an educational centre. I studied hard to pass the admission exams for the courses with a closed number and it was tough because there were only 13 places for Italian students and 5 for foreign students and the applications were hundreds, which meant rather complex theoretical and practical exams. For me, who had studied humanities in high school, a new world opened.
Cesare Brandi, one of my professors at university, had founded the ICR in 1939. We owe to Brandi the new methodological and philosophical definition of ‘modern’ restoration of historical and artistic manufacts as complex discipline based on theoretical foundations. Brandi’s was a real revolution: in addition to the definition of a discipline, transitioning from the artistic sphere to the mere world of crafts to the rigorous one of science, qualifying it as a critical act towards the work of art, he established that theory and practice would not be separated in the courses of the ICR. For the first time a multidisciplinary course was finalized to the education of operators with strong theoretical foundations, practical competences and experience; a unique masters degree in those years, at an international level. I passed the admission exam and attended the painting restoration course: paintings on canvas, wooden panels and frescoes. As a masters degree I chose restoration of stone materials, to amplify my education and include sculpture. The ICR gave to their new graduate students who founded a cooperative or a union, the opportunity of a first contract for the restoration of the Basilica Superiore of San Francesco d’Assisi, where we had already operated during our studies. So it was that in 1980, at the conclusion of my studies, I founded COREST (Consorzio Restauratori) with four of my fellow students, three of which undertook different paths after some years, whereas the fourth one, Stefano Provinciali, also became my partner in life. Anyhow, my first contract was for the restoration of the Cimabue frescoes in the left transept of the Basilica Superiore di San Francesco in Assisi.
3) Tintoretto: curiosities about the canvases, colours, and preparatory drawings.
A painting, independently from its technique, thus even a wall painting, is a system of overlapping layers. In general, Tintoretto used canvases for his paintings, only on a few occasions he used wooden panels. In his paintings, the support is composed of a main canvas with eventual additions of cloths or patches of irregular shape, different weaves, size, sometimes even quite small, masterly sewn, until he obtained the size needed for the painting. This tells us how relatively important it was for him to have a uniform canvas and how important it was not to waste fabric. The preparatory layers applied over the canvas to make it apt to receive the color have a very thin thickness, which lets the weave of the canvas emerge, allowing, at close vision, to appreciate the differences. Nothing to do with the precision of the preparatory layers of a painting on a wooden panel of the 1300s, for example. When we read about Tintoretto’s works, one of the peculiarities that is underlined is the speed with which he would work, which takes nothing away from the excellent results. The traces of the preparatory drawing that I observed were done in black coal on some skin tones, as for example in the figure of Cyclops that gives his back to us in the Forge of Vulcan, to define elements of the entire figure. The rough drafts, with a white pigment, were used not only for the human figures but also for the architectures. About the pigments I will only say that the light blue in many paintings look faded due to the use of smaltino, which changes over time losing shine, as in the case of the sky of Santa Giustina with the three chamberlains and the three secretaries.
On the contrary, the clothes of the paintings of the Allegories in the Doges Palace are intense and bright, for which ultramarine blue lapis lazuli and azurite were used, also mixed together. I have been asked many times which novelties emerged during the course of the investigations, which the discoveries highlighted by the restorations. I have always replied that since the first days, what has always been clear to me is that my discovery consists in the recognition of the expressive strength of the paintings on which I operate. An expressive strength that remains firm and strong despite the damage of the paint, which I noticed from the first investigations. Conditions that are very different from the ones of the more reassuring distant overall view. The signs of the passing of time, a little less than 500 years, the agonizing conservative vicissitudes, the dirthying of the support, the abrasions, the damages due to the unfavorable micro-climatic conditions, have not impeded to appreciate the beauty and genius, still able to amaze. Masterpieces that continue to generate interests and emotions.
4) Among the many works you have restored inside the Doges Palace, is there one you are particularly attached to and, if so, why?
Among the many paintings by Tintoretto which I have had the privilege to get to know closely thanks to our prolonged contact during the restoration works, I have definitely loved the four Allegories painted in 1578, currently in the Sala dell’Anticollegio, which celebrate the good government. It is difficult for me to identify one favorite, because all of them possess outstanding elements, although I can say to have enjoyed a particular relationship with the one depicting the Wedding between Bacchus and Ariadne in front of Venus.
The composition is so modern, the partial view of the figure of Venus and the light of her skin, barely covered by a veil that escapes from her body as if flying. Baccus is so human, almost shy, his head bent, offering the ring, and Venus so regal in her simplicity and beauty. There is a silent dialogue among the characters. There is also a reason linked to the restoration work itself, because with the cleaning of the painting I have been able to return to light some details of the composition that had been altered during the retouches dating 1977, which altered the reading of the iconography. Ariadne is represented on the sea shore where she had been abandoned by Theseus. A substantial dark coat had transformed the waters of the sea in which Baccus had immersed his legs, into land. This had completely hidden the slim remains of the light blue pigment of the veils, which represented the surface of the water; another dark coat of paint was hiding the corner of the step on which the draperies and the foot of Ariadne lay, and we recovered some creases of the light blue drapery.
5) Can Tintoretto teach us something about contemporary Venice?
It is difficult for me to think of Venice as something separate from current times. We live in a globalized world and despite the peculiarities of the city, we know that, with regard to the difficult problems, its uniqueness does not help: over-tourism, climate change, near and far wars, deviations of violence, fascisms, individuality and the pressing over-national control of the web. Nevertheless, thinking about the modernity of the myth, I go back to the four Allegories. The goal was to celebrate the good government: the decorative program was surely not decided by the painter, but the way in which it was realized was entirely decided by him, a master of communication, able to apply his artistic and technical skills and create potent and direct images.
In one of the four canvases, Minerva protects Peace and Abundance and moves away Mars, god of the war. In the goddess’ gesture, I can read a firmness that without violence, actually, almost with sweetness, but determination, shields Peace and Abundance and with the other hand keeps the god of war away, an ever present threat among humans. Never like today we need gestures like these, to remind us and show us the route to follow.
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