29-TA-2016_Paderno d'Adda, Parish Church of Santa Maria Assunta, G. A. Della Torre, Pietà tra i santi Ambrogio e Girolamo, Reg. Cron. 7841

Facilitated description:

 

Pieta tra i santi Ambrogio e Girolamo is a painting on wood panel. 
The painter Giovanni Ambrogio Della Torre painted the painting between 1500-1550. 
The painting represents Mary holding the body of Jesus dead with two saints, St. Ambrose on the right and St. Jerome on the left. 
The painting is kept in the church of Santa Maria Assunta in Panderno d'Adda and is part of the collection of the Pinacoteca di Brera. 
The La Venaria Reale Conservation and Restoration Centre restored the painting in 2016. 
A student of the restoration course restored the painting for her thesis (final exam).
Scientists at the Venaria Center did scientific analysis to study how the painter Della Torre worked and to see the restorations of the past. 
During the analysis the scientists saw that the painter enlarged the shoulders and hat of St. Ambrose.
The restorers glued the detached colored parts. 
They cleaned the painting of dust. 
They fixed the wooden board.
They put on the table a product to eliminate insects that eat wood. 
The restorers filled the colorless parts with stucco (plaster and glue layer). 
They painted the stucco with watercolors making small vertical stripes to make the restoration recognizable.
After they completed with paint colors.
In the end they put a product to protect the painting from the sun's rays and dust.

 

 

 

 

Abstract of the intervention: 

 

The Paderno d’Adda altarpiece, owned by the Pinacoteca di Brera, was the subject of a masterly thesis entitled The restoration of the "Pietà tra i santi Ambrogio e Girolamo" by Giovanni Ambrogio Della Torre, rediscovered artist of the Lombard Renaissance. Reflections on the use and behaviour over time of commonly used materials in contemporary restoration practices’ by Francesca Bianco, Professor Bernardette Ventura (a.y. 2014-2015) as part of the Degree Course in Conservation and Restoration at the University of Turin in agreement with the Conservation and Restoration Centre. The work was also exhibited at the exhibition Timeless beauty at the Museo Ettore Fico (MEF) (9 September to 2 November 2016), as part of a month dedicated to meetings and educational sites open to the public in collaboration with the ‘La Venaria Reale’ Conservation and Restoration Centre.

Restoration

The work, a large-scale panel, is particularly interesting from the point of view of conservation history and the study of degradation phenomena. The historical artistic research carried out during the thesis has attempted to reconstruct the little-known figure of the author of Lombardy, Giovanni Ambrogio Della Torre, active, according to sources, in the workshop of Gaudenzio Ferrari, and of which the Mercy, to date, is the only known work. To support the conservative intervention, a comprehensive diagnostic campaign (multispectral analysis and stratigraphic sampling) was carried out, which provided useful data on the execution technique and on the previous interventions suffered by the work, the last of which was documented between 1996 and 1998. Among the main data emerged changes in the course of work of the composition, such as the enlargement of the shoulders and the machine gun of St. Ambrose, detected by infrared analysis and the original color of the Virgin's robe (blue and now brown-greenish) thanks to the infrared in false color. While the ultraviolet fluorescence emphasized a greater expressiveness of the face of Christ.
From the point of view of the state of conservation, the most important issue concerned the widespread upheavals of the pictorial film and of the preparation from the wooden support, largely attributable to the unsuitable environmental conservation conditions: one of the most interesting phases of the thesis involved the testing of adhesives on prepared specimens ad hoc, carried out to identify the causes of deterioration that had led to the serious loss of adhesion of the pictorial layers. This phase was followed by the cleaning of the board, the compensation of the wooden support, a biocidal treatment and finally the plastering of the gaps and the pictorial integration with final protective coating.

 

Bibliography

- The restoration of the "Pietà tra i santi Ambrogio e Girolamo" by Giovanni Ambrogio Della Torre, rediscovered artist of the Lombard Renaissance. Reflections on the use and behaviour over time of commonly used materials in contemporary restoration practices’, thesis by Francesca Bianco, Professor Bernardette Ventura, second rapporteur Tommaso Poli, artistic-historical representative Alessandro Morandotti, academic year 2014-2015;

- F. Bianco, The restoration of the "Pietà tra i santi Ambrogio e Girolamo" by Giovanni Ambrogio Della Torre: reflection on the behavior over time of materials of common commitment in contemporary restoration practices, in Extracts from the Master's theses of the five-year single-cycle course in conservation and restoration of cultural heritage 2013-2016, M. Cardinali and A. Romero (eds.), Turin, Editris, 2017, pp. 61- 69.