(The Restoration of Piero's Renaissance Masterwork)

BY: RALPH BLUMENTHAL

NEW YORK TIMES, APRIL 6, 2000

REZZO, Italy, April 2—The Pieros are back. After 15 years of arduous, costly and high-tech restoration, the scaffolding has come down in the Church of San Francesco, providing a dramatic new look at one of the art world's splendors, the fresco cycle "Legend of the True Cross" by the Renaissance master Piero della Francesca, called simply Piero by his many fans hereabouts. The dozen 15^th-century paintings on plaster are being reopened to the public on Friday in this medieval Tuscan city with a gala celebration attended by President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi. Local officials in particular hope the restored frescos will bring expanded tourism and cultural dividends.

In addition to Arezzo, a backdrop for last year's Oscar-winning film "Life Is Beautiful," the beneficiaries could include Sansepolcro, Piero's hometown, where the ancient art of lacemaking is still taught; Anghiari, the site of a decisive 15^th-century battle won by the Florentines; Caprese Michelangelo, where Michelangelo was born; and Citerna, an ancient Roman town where local authorities want to revive arts like goldsmithing and pottery.

Promoting Piero as a kind of celebrity, albeit one whose personal life remains sketchy (apart from several sly self-portraits and a historically resonant death date: Oct. 12, 1492), may not be that far-fetched. Rising museumgoing has raised art literacy, some art experts here say, but only in recent decades has Piero been getting his due. His family house in Sansepolcro was bought by the government for use as a museum in 1975. Since then Piero has overtaken contemporaries like Domenico Veneziano, Fra Angelico, Andrea Mantegna and Paolo Uccello to become the 15^th-century artist whom people most often name as their favorite, said Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, an art history professor at Princeton University who was a consultant on the fresco restoration project.

His unsparing hook-nosed profile of a red-clad count of Urbino, Federico da Montefeltro, at the Uffizi in Florence, has become an icon of the Renaissance.

Count of Urbino, Federico da Montefeltro

Piero is believed to have slipped several vigorous self-portraits into his works, one as an awe-struck worshiper under the protective cloak of the towering Madonna in his "Misericordia Altarpiece"

Misericordia Altarpiece

and another as a sleeping Roman soldier in "The Resurrection of Christ," both on view in Sansepolcro.

The Resurrection of Christ

He is also believed to have used his mother as the model for a rare pregnant Virgin in his "Madonna del Parto" on display in Monterchi, his mother's hometown.

Madonna del Parto

Although his paintings can also be found in London, Milan and Urbino, it is here in the church's chancel that sometime between 1452 and 1466 he created "The Legend of the True Cross," regarded as his masterpiece. The cycle of frescoes illustrate a fanciful medieval narrative, a unified-field theory of Christianity that traces the wood of the cross from Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden through episodes of the Old and New Testaments. Sweepingly executed on wet plaster as vividly as a Cecil B. De Mille epic, the paintings are hauntingly representational—Piero was a pioneer of perspective—and coolly abstract, foreshadowing Cubism and Impressionism and influencing, scholars say, Cezanne and Seurat.

Legend of the True Cross: Death of Adam

Legend of the True Cross: Adoration of the Wood and the Queen of Sheba Meeting Solomon

Legend of the True Cross: Exaltation of the Cross

Time has enhanced his reputation, but it has not been gentle with his works. During Napoleon's occupation of the region in the early 1800's, French troops quartered in the Arezzo church fired shots that chipped the frescoes. The changing climate, natural disasters and air pollution have also taken their toll.

The $5 million Piero Project rivaled in complexity the recent cleaning and conservation of Michelangelo's frescos on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. It was underwritten by the Banca Popolare dell'Etruria e del Lazio, a modern Medici of art philanthropy that has sponsored other major conservation projects. The first six years were devoted to a study of the "True Cross" cycle, including damage done by earlier restorations, including the injection of liquid cement into the walls, which caused paint to flake off and sections of plaster to turn to chalk dust.

"Anything that could happen, happened to these frescos of Piero," said Anna Maria Maetzke, who oversaw the project as superintendent of Arezzo's art treasures, bemoaning five centuries of earthquakes, lightning strikes and manmade disasters.

The restoration was noteworthy for its use of computer re-creations and modern chemical technology, said Ms. Maetzke and others involved in the project. The process clarified which sections had been painted by less accomplished apprentices.

Under patient washings with de-ionized water, long-hidden stars were coaxed out of a luminous predawn sky above a sleeping Emperor Constantine where an angel, astonishingly foreshortened, hurtles out of the heavens. A colossal fabrication was uncovered in the form of a Roman ruin that a well-meaning earlier restorer had mistakenly conjured out of patchy sections of sky.

As part of the restoration, the floor of the church was perforated in a honeycomb pattern for better circulation of air, and the outer walls were plastered for better insulation.

The effort was so intense, wrote Silvano Lazzeri, the chief conservator, in a bank-sponsored compendium of articles on the project, that "if I should ever find myself on a remote island in the middle of the ocean, I reckon I'd be able to reconstruct, in my mind's eye, all the scenes of the cycle."

Critics of the restoration say that such intervention risks contaminating masterworks. On the other hand, Vittorio Sgarbi, a prominent Italian art pundit and a member of Parliament, said that the effort might have been too timid in stopping short of recreating lost segments that could easily be established in the context of the fresco. He also said that the costs of the project may have ballooned because of the resources of the sponsoring bank.

Italy has so many priceless treasures that selecting what to conserve and restore takes political and commercial overtones as sponsors vie for projects that will provide maximum publicity while needier or worthier causes may go begging.

But for all-round popular appeal, the Piero Project would be hard to top.

Piero's birth in Sansepolcro to a prosperous family of leathermakers and indigo merchants, probably between 1410 and 1420, seems to have gone unrecorded. By 1436 he was studying painting under a local master, Antonio d'Anghiari, and by 1450 he was carrying out commissions as far afield as Venice. At the same time he held office as a religious lay leader and consul in Sansepolcro and studied mathematics, which led to three groundbreaking works in arithmetic, geometry and perspective. He was assisting a Florentine master, Lorenzo di Bicci, in painting the frescos in Arezzo when Bicci fell ill and died, bequeathing the job to Piero.

His method, the restorers confirmed, was to prepare a sketch on heavy paper, attach it to the wet plaster wall, perforate the outlines of the drawing with pinholes and then slap the paper with coal dust to leave marks on the wall, a technique called spolvero. Then with surprising speed, and nary a correction, Piero daubed in the slabs of color and modeled the figures.

Wet sacks were placed against the wall to keep the plaster damp. After the plaster dried, he sometimes added fat-based colors, which some scholars had wrongly assumed was the work of earlier restorers. When apprentices took over, for example, in a grim sequence depicting the torture of Judas, they cast the shadows in the wrong direction.

How long it took to complete the original work is not clear, but Piero inherited the job in 1452 and the cycle was finished by 1466, according to documents recently discovered by Professor James R. Banker of North Carolina State University. Piero, who had created other masterworks in the meantime and went on to produce yet more, went blind in the 1480's, the Renaissance chronicler Vasari relates. He died on what Americans regard as Columbus Day, one of the few verifiable facts of his life. An excavation at a Sansepolcro church in 1956 unearthed a tall skeleton that may be his.

Today "the Piero trail" has become a tourist draw in a region known for its walled cities, verdant hills, robust cuisine and hearty wines. The "Madonna del Parto" with its plethora of explanatory exhibits in Monterchi receives up to 50,000 visitors a year, officials said. Piero executed the work in seven days—"like God," said Nicola Laneri, an archaeologist working on tourism programs with local culture officials and a Milan-based travel agency, Anteprima.

Among the visitors to Monterchi recently were two Americans, Kaaren Plant of Chicago and her sister, Marcia Jackson of Indianapolis, who stood in a darkened room reverently viewing the delicate images of the blue-clad Madonna and two attending angels, their restored faces also bearing the scars of bullet holes.

"We kept passing it by four years ago and it was never open," Ms. Plant said.

In nearby Sansepolcro, meanwhile, the authorities commonly leave a window of the museum open so that passersby can glimpse the master's "Resurrection of Christ" on an opposite wall. "Piero is always present in town," said Paula Cardelli, cultural counselor for the municipality. "We call him 'friendly Piero.' "