Grab Bag #5: In Restauro

(An assortment of other things I intended to write about while I was away but didn't have time)

We love the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella. However, I am not sure if we've ever been there at a time when all of it was visible, as conservation work necessarily is an ongoing process for a structure of very considerable size whose construction began in 1279 (on the site of a 9th-century Oratory of Santa Maria, making this church "new"). Some part of it must always be in need of repair and restoration, the way painters on the George Washington Bridge, having completed a new paint job of the entire bridge, go back to the beginning and start again. This time the work that we were most disappointed to see in restauro, concealed inside a curtained area printed with an approximation of the composition hidden inside, was the pioneering early Renaissance work "Holy Trinity" by Masaccio, who incorporated revolutionary concepts of perspective and mathematical proportions.

We had also hoped to see Orsan Michele, which we've often passed but if we've ever been inside the church I don't remember when it was. It built as a grain market (on the site of a former monastery's kitchen garden), then became offices for the primary guilds of the city, then a church where statues of those guilds' patron saints were commissioned during the first quarter of the fifteenth century, to embellish the facades of the church. Of course many parts of the city's cultural patrimony need to be in restauro from time to time, but must it always be when we are visiting and want to see it?! Alas, yes.