The_Art_Newspaper_-_November_2016

THE ART NEWSPAPER Number 284, November 2016 39

VIA RICASOLI AND UFFIZI: © AP PHOTO. CIMABUE: © DEAGOSTINI/GETTY IMAGES. MUD ANGELS: P. MATTEUCCI FOR ALINARI/ALINARI VIA GETTY IMAGES

State archive books in front of the Ufizi

Cimabue’s damaged Cruciix, which has now been restored

In their own words: what the mud

angels saw, smelt, felt—and did

Crisis meeting

“There was a general meeting of all the

people at the Uizi, headed up by [Umberto]

Baldini, on the second or third day. The idea

was to discuss the issue of what to do as an

emergency measure. Several things became

obvious immediately. The canvases posed

rather less of a problem, but the panels required immediate

attention. It was clear that the wood and all of the painting

materials had swelled considerably—sometimes unequally,

where only part of the painting was under water. But no one

could stand up and say, ‘Yes, I’ve had a Florentine trecento

triptych under water for two hours—I know what to do.’”

Marco Grassi, New York-based painting conservator with a

private practice in Switzerland and Florence in 1966

Pumping out the Uizi

“I rang my brother-in-law whose

family owned a gravel pit company

with a lot of heavy machinery. He

persuaded his father to lend him a

Land Rover and a big industrial pump.

I recruited a bunch of students and

we travelled to Florence non-stop, arguing our way

through the cordon. Fortunately, we had a four-wheel

drive vehicle—only this type of vehicle could possibly

have got through. The mud was indescribable. The

cold was appalling—it went right through our bones.

The damp and the stink is something that lives with

me to this day—the smell of dead cats, rotting lesh,

decomposing material and sewage all over the place.

Fuel oil was spread all around the city. We drove up

in front of the Uizi and asked what we could do.

They looked at us with horror because it was less than

a week after the lood. I looked around the Uizi’s

basement with all the blackened boxes... the place was

absolutely awash with water. I queried why it had not

been pumped out and was told they didn’t have any

pumps. I said ‘I’ve got a pump!’ So the irst thing we

did was to pump out the Uizi’s basement.”

Patrick Matthiesen, London gallery owner and

mud angel, who was a student at the Courtauld

Institute of Art in 1966

Mud, mud and more mud

“It was one continuous disturbing

moment after another. One would try

to walk around the streets, but with

all the mud and stench it wasn’t easy.

I remember walking down Borgo San

Jacopo right by the Ponte Vecchio in

rubber boots and stepping into one of the many open

manholes because one couldn’t see them when they

were illed with mud. The water pressure had pushed

them open. I was in shock and I was covered with

mud. It was pretty scary. We were told to carry a bottle

of hydrogen peroxide around to disinfect ourselves if

we got a scratch because the mud was so polluted.”

Andrea Rothe, former head of painting conservation

at the Getty Conservation Institute, who was working

in Florence in 1966

Triage on books

“[The books] were sent up to Fort Belvedere,

where a sort of triage took place using

symbols. We had various symbols that we

devised mainly to overcome the language

problems. The books were sorted when

they came in and then shelved. We in turn

went through them to see what could be

processed irst.”

Anthony Cains had a bookbinding shop in

the UK during the lood

A witness to human tragedy

“I bought my parents a set of

lithographs as a thank you [for sending

me to Florence]. One of them shows

the mud. They’re in sepia and there is

one of an older woman that I will never

forget. She became a symbol [of the

lood]. She was a larger, wheelchair-bound woman

who lived in a ground-loor lat. Somehow she was

able to hold onto the bars on the windows. They tried

to go down to get her but they couldn’t get her out

and she drowned in front of all these people. So she

is one of the things that really struck me because she

just couldn’t get out. That particular lithograph—and

anyone who knows the series will know it—that’s the

one that really knocks you over; it’s the one that really

relates to human tragedy.”

Anne-Imelda Radice, the director of New York’s

American Folk Art Museum and a mud angel

Rising above politics

“While we were in Florence in

the autumn of 1968, the Velvet

Revolution took place in Prague [the

Prague Spring]. Suddenly Soviet and

Iron Curtain forces rolled into Prague.

The Czech group and the Polish group

[working in the Fortezza da Basso] therefore became

oicial ‘enemies’. So they took a day o and got

drunk—together. That was really something.”

Erling Skaug, professor and senior fellow at the

University of Oslo, who was an intern at the Istituto

Centrale per il Restauro in Rome during the lood

Assembly line

“I was a nobody, but I watched [and] I did

everything I was asked to do. They had to get me

a pair of boots because I had brought trainers

or something like that. Eventually they had this

assembly line for putting interleaving [paper used

for protecting works on paper] in. I managed to

do a little of that... I never conceptualised myself

as one of the great people who came to save

things. I was not part of anything organised. And

I knew there were students there who must have

been conservation students and I wasn’t. I was

just a schlepper.”

Anne-Imelda Radice

Some of the mud angels in action • Most of the interviews were conducted in 2006

interested in photographers, museum

directors and artists than conservators.

We had to start our own project to ask

the questions required for us to care for

these works of art.”

Hill Stoner has co-ordinated the

project since its inception and was

picked for the job because “I was young,

energetic and could get things done.”

She stresses that while an abundance

of technical information can be found

in specialist journals, what the profes-

sion lacks is anecdotes and the project

is working to correct that.

She says that some still “pooh-pooh”

oral history as a credible source of infor-

mation because they think memories

are not trustworthy, but points out that

memories do not necessarily have to

be true to be useful. “People may have

diferent memories of events, but those

memories are still valuable because it is

how they chose to remember a particu-

lar event,” she says.

She cites the 19th-century Ameri-

can artist James McNeill Whistler as

an example. “He lied all the time, even

under oath,” she says. “He liked to tell

everyone he was born in St Petersburg,

when he was actually born in Massachu-

setts. This detail actually tells us a lot. It

tells us he wanted people to believe he

was from Russia.” For Hill Stoner, “oral

history is not straightforward, factual

history, and should always be looked at

in combination with other sources”.

The conservator Rebecca Rushfield,

who works on the project, says it is not

the individual interview that is impor-

tant but the accumulation of them. “The

value is in the quality and quantity, she

says. “If six people say the same thing,

there must be value in that.”

SOUNDBITE-AVERSE

Hill Stoner had to persuade some con-

servators to participate in the project

and interviews can be embargoed for

50 years by request. “Conservators by

and large do not work in the public eye

and unlike artists are rarely interviewed

because they don’t speak in soundbites,”

she says. “I often have conservators who

say, ‘Why interview me? I’m just in the

service of the artist.’ I explain that they

could talk about their mentors so the

emphasis is no longer on them.”

The interviews related to the Flor-

ence flood, excerpts of which we are

publishing here, reveal that it brought

people around the world together

during a diicult time, both politically

and economically. “Europe was just

beginning to recover from the Second

World War,” Rushfield says. “This disas-

ter enabled people to transcend difer-

ences.” Hill Stoner says: “The response

was amazing because the entire world

paid attention. But what can you expect

when you see a Cimabue floating down

the Arno River?”

Emily Sharpe

• For more on the flood, see Review, p18

Waters inundate

the Via Ricasoli,

which leads

to the Piazza

del Duomo—

the lood left

more than 30

Florentines

dead, 5,000

families

homeless,

6,000 stores

out of business

and around

600,000 tons

of mud, rubble

and sewage

deposited all

around the city