Transmitting to the future: protection, maintenance, planned conservation

Only through knowledge is it possible to define the real needs of a good, take care of it and transmit it to the future.

The Villa Carlotta Museum and Botanical Garden together with the ‘La Venaria Reale’ Conservation and Restoration Centre have defined a collaborative project aimed at drawing up a preventive conservation plan for the Museum and Park of the Como Villa.

The project starts from the need to rationalize and enhance existing studies and risk analysis, updating them according to a structured and interdisciplinary protocol that involves considering and cross-referencing:

• Methods for analysing the environment and environmental, hydrogeological and seismic risks for the park and villa located on the western shore of Lake Como
• Methods of analyzing the risks and the state of conservation of the buildings in the park and the architectural structure of the villa
• Methods for analysing the risks and the state of conservation of the art collections, furnishings and decorated surfaces in the museum

The methods of analysis will be applied to several pilot cases that will allow to draw methodological lines, conservative priorities and preventive and maintenance activities to be scaled over the years to plan and improve the management of resources with a view to a sustainable transmission to the future of the Goods.

One of the focus of the project will be a workshop on Bertel Thorvaldsen’s important frieze depicting theEntry of Alexander the Great into Babylon (1818-1828), a masterpiece of nineteenth-century European sculpture, an early stucco version of which had been made for the Quirinale Palace in Rome.

DIGITAL DATING CYCLE

The project ‘Transmitting to the future and, consequently, the issue of preventive conservation applied to complex assets, such as museums’, is addressed in three webinars organised by the ‘La Venaria Reale’ Conservation and Restoration Centre and the Museum and Botanical Garden of Villa Carlotta on 12 and 27 May and 10 June 2021, from 5.30 p.m. to 6.30 p.m.