The original Giotto painting (L) and the same artwork under ultra-violet rays (R).


Art restorers working in Florence’s Santa Croce church have shed new (ultraviolet) light on Giotto’s faded paintings, discovering lush details and tridimensional scenes that have been hidden for centuries.
Painted around 1320 to decorate the 40-foot-high chapel of the wealthy Peruzzi family, the murals recount the lives of John the Baptist and John the Evangelist.
“All of a sudden these ghostly scenes took on a new life. We could see these paintings with Giotto’s eyes,” Cecilia Frosinini, mural paintings section director at Florence's Opificio delle Pietre Dure art restoration laboratory, told Discovery News.
Extravagant scenes in the 1,830-square-foot chapel include St. John the Evangelist ascending to heaven and John the Baptist’s head being offered to King Herod on a silver platter by a Roman soldier.
Whitewashed around 300 years ago to make way for a new chapel design, the wall paintings were recovered using harsh steel wool scrubbers and solvents in 1840.
“Most of the details were scratched away. What remains are ghostly images of the original work,” Frosinini said.
Despite the damage, the paintings are considered to be at the foundation of modern Western art for their revolutionary degree of perspective and sense of life.
Indeed, Giotto di Bondone (1266-1337) is widely regarded as the father of Renaissance painting for turning flat, iconic Byzantine figures into more realistic three-dimensional renderings.
In a study partly funded by the Getty Foundation in Los Angeles, Frosinini and her team worked for four months on a three-story steel scaffolding trying to gather information for a possible restoration.
“We were using ultraviolet light to examine the pigments and natural compounds in the paintings and we stumbled on something astonishing: All that was opaque and illegible became clear, full of contrast and tridimensional,” Frosinini said.
The reason for the unexpected effect lies in Giotto’s experimental painting technique. Unlike his famous frescos of St. Francis in Assisi, the Peruzzi walls were painted "a secco," or on dry plaster.
By capturing the organic binding materials used in the paintings, the ultraviolet rays have basically allowed the restorers to see long-lost details clearly.
Indeed, in the scene where John the Evangelist ascends to heaven, everything -- John’s wrinkles in his forehead, the threads of his beard, the whites of his eyes -- appears in shining detail.
“Bathed in ultraviolet light, the walls became a virtual set in which Giotto’s characters resurfaced into a new life,” Frosinini said.
The plan now is to reconstruct a digital, ultraviolet version of the paintings as Giotto must have seen them 700 years ago.
“We would like to make it possible for everybody to enjoy this discovery,” Cristina Acidini, superintendent of Florence museums, said.









Source:
http://news.discovery.com/history/ul...al-giotto.html