55mc02-DM-2014_Milano, Pinacoteca di Brera, B. Luini, Celebration of Easter, inv. 5521

Facilitated description:

 

Celebration of Easter is a mural painting (painting made on a wall). 
The painting decorated Villa della Pelucca in Sesto San Giovanni. 
The painting was detached from Villa della Pelucca in 1821-1822 and was put on wooden board.  
Bernardino Luini painted the painting in 1514. 
The painting is kept at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan.
Restorer Pinin Brambilla Barcilon had already restored the painting in the late 1900s.
The La Venaria Reale Conservation and Restoration Centre restored the painting in 2014.
Scientists at the Venaria Center did scientific analysis to study the substances present above the painting and the colors used by the artist.
The restorers worked on the wooden board behind the painting. 
They have eliminated the insects that eat wood from the table. 
They stopped the parts of color that were peeling off. 
The restorers treated the yellowed colored parts and the colorless parts. 

 

 

 

 

Abstract of the intervention: 

 

Restoration 

The intervention on Celebration of Easter is part of the extraordinary maintenance of the works from Villa La Pelucca (Sesto San Giovanni), a series of wall paintings detached from Stefano Barezzi and became part of the collection of the Pinacoteca di Brera. The works have undergone numerous restorations, including the one by Pinin Brambilla Barcilon at the end of the nineties, which this project has decided to respect.
The main objective of the restoration was the stabilization of the wooden supports, in fact, the transport of the works on board has led to serious degradation of the pictorial film, caused by the sensitivity of the wooden support to thermo-hygrometric variations. In addition to these damages, attacks of xylophagous insects and defects due to the structural stability of the supports were detected due to the poor quality of the wood used. With regard to the pictorial surface, deadhesions were detected especially in correspondence with the orders, caused by the dimensional variations of the constituent materials and rigid containment systems. Therefore, the previous restorations have been maintained and a homogeneous aesthetic reading has been re-established.

In particular, the intervention on this painting has tried to solve the main conservative problems: at the level of the support cracks, flicker holes, unsuitable inserts and uneven grouting; at the level of the pictorial film gaps, slight fractures, widespread yellowing, raising of the canvas and flickering holes.

 

Bibliography

M. Cardinali, P. Luciani, A. Minì, Conservation interventions on complex wooden supports: some application cases faced during the restoration of the frescoes by Bernardino Luini torn from Villa La Pelucca and four panels with chinoiserie from the Quirinale Palace, in The State of the Art, XIV National Congress IGIIC (Accademia Di Belle Arti di L’Aquila, 20/22 October 2016), Nardini, 2016.