The_Art_Newspaper_-_November_2016

(Michael S) #1

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
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