Cenni di Pepo (Giovanni) Cimabue

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
Scott Adams

I felt like this quote was particularly relevant to today's work of art as this one involves what several people in the art world regard as a mistake. I give you Cimabue's Crucifix of 1287-88 as it looked several decades ago:

And as it looks now:


Sorry for the poor quality of that last bit. It was taken in person and the lighting was not so good.

Anyway, the crucifix was made/painted by Cimabue in the late thirteenth century, like I said. It hung in the Basilica at Santa Croce in Florence, Italy for centuries, although it wasn't too popular or well-taken care of. In 1966, when the city was badly flooded, the crucifix was horribly damaged. In fact, it ended up face-down in the mud that had piled up in the Basilica. As the story goes, volunteers (Florence's "mud angels") collected paint chips from the crucifix into a paint bucket, which was unknowingly dumped into the trash by a fellow worker. So restorers were left with more than half of the original paint missing from the crucifix.

The debate over the restoration of the Crucifix centered around what to do with the missing chunks and this lasted for decades. Should they leave it blank as a sort of tribute or try and fill in the missing spaces with paint matching the original, thereby negating the effect the flood had on the work? Eventually, two restorers decided to move ahead with a kind of crosshatch pattern to, well, fill in the blanks. The result is a kind of green-ish looking color that one's eyes are supposed to glance over. This has been, supposedly, scientifically proven to cause the mind to fill in the gaps with what is meant to be there and not to focus on what isn't present any longer. I was a little skeptical about this technique when I first read about it, but I saw the Crucifix in person last fall and was surprised to find that it does sort of work! Maybe it doesn't work as well for me because I know what it's supposed to do, but the crosshatching did fill in the blanks in a way that doesn't distract you very much from the paint that remains. It would be interesting to see what a viewer thinks who knows nothing about the restoration techniques used...

Cimabue's Crucifix became ridiculously famous in the years following the flood of '66 as a symbol of the devastation caused by the flood in terms of art. It's not exactly a shining example of Cimabue's work, but the story behind its restoration interests me enough to post it here.

So what do you think? Have you seen the Crucifix for yourself? Does this kind of restoration technique work or do you think there was a better solution?


Katherine