Water, Oil and Slime Cover Florence's Art

Superficially, the city will still be the greatest artifact of Renaissance culture. But its richness for scholars has been greatly diminished.

When the Arne River burst over the parapets of Florence on November 4, it submerged the city in unimaginable quantities of mud, a thick layer of oil, and an average of 15 to 24 feet of water. Thirty-three persons were drowned, several are still missing, and the damage to art works, libraries, and architectural monuments -- to say nothing of homes and businesses -- staggers the imagination.

Even more destructive than the water itself was the force with which it hit the city and the gigantic whirlpools that it created at the intersections of streets and in the city squares. The giant waves hurled parked cars against the buildings while wooden furniture and other floating objects were thrown, like projectiles, into everything in the path of the water.

They scarred forever the city which was the birthplace of the Renaissance and which, since the fifteenth century, has been the world's great vault of Renaissance treasures. There was hardly a major building in Florence -- a church, a museum, a library, a palace -- which was not lined with Renaissance art.

By the earlier counts, approximately 885 art works were damaged or ruined. But, according to the report of the Committee to Rescue Italian Art (CRIA), this is only a third of the works actually damaged. There were several major losses. The Baptistery doors, including Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise, were swept off their hinges and smashed against the buildings.

The frame of one of the doors was carried more than a quarter of a mile. Five of the bronze panels for the Gates of Paradise were torn off and badly damaged, and four of the Baptistery's mosaic floors were washed away. Immense quantities of water, mud and heating oil, which polluted the water when the floods burst open storage tanks, inundated both the Pizza Chapel and the Horne Museum. The waters battered the lower portion of Giotto's Campanile so severely that it was feared the tower might collapse.

The National Library sustained the worst damage in the city. Valuable manuscript collections were lost and more than 50 million documents along with hundreds of thousands of volumes in the archives, among them the only complete collection of 19th-century Italian newspapers, were damaged or destroyed. At the Gabinetto Vieussiecux (the library of Italian culture and history), archives, furniture and books, as well as the ground floor of the Palazzo Strozzi, received extensive damage.

The restoration laboratories and storage areas and much of the work on the ground floor of the Uffizi Galleries was also destroyed. Among the works lost are some by Giotto, Botticelli, Filippo Lippi, Masaccio and Simone Martin. The photo library and archives were completely destroyed as well, although 130,000 negatives--covered with oil and thought irretrievably lost -- are now in the process of restoration with the help of Harvard restorers.

At Santa Croce, where the depth of the water averaged 25 feet, the famous Cimabue Crucifix was submerged and almost completely destroyed, the Domenico Veneziano fresco of St. John the Baptist and St. Francis was streaked with heating oil, as were the Tadeo Gaddi Last Supper and other frescoes, including the important fragments by Orcagna. The Bacchus, the Brutus and Pitti Madonna of Michelangelo in the Bargello Museum were also badly streaked with oil.

When the floods struck the Archeological Museum, they overturned the display cases, shattered the glass and swept off the objects on display. Most of the objects came from the Etruscan tombs and need not only to be recovered but must also be sorted out according to which objects came from which tombs.

The full extent of the damage still cannot be estimated. The effect of the heating oil, for example, cannot be predicted until its chemical components are completely determined. Unlike American heating oils, this oil is of an inferior grade; it is black, thick, and totally unrefined. Restorers have had considerable experience with the oils from lipstick which tourists often use to smear their initials on the major monuments. Lipstick oils, they have found, sink into the porous surface of the stone and are very difficult to remove. But no one has had any experience with the effect of this crude heating oil on paper, panels, canvas, or stone.

Foundations Shaky?

There are many other aspects of the damage which cannot be appraised now. The degree to which the foundations of buildings have been weakened by the flood is not yet apparent nor will the damage to paintings and frescoes incurred by the change in humidity be known for many years. In addition, all wood panels, furniture, sculpture, and intarisa may swell unevenly and crack as a result of the saturated atmosphere or partial immersion. A piece which was touched only at the bottom by the moisture may split all the way to the top as a result of this uneven swelling, and much of the paint might chip off. Cheese cloth and rice paper can be used to hold the paint in place until normal conditions resume but much of it still may be lost.

The most significant aspect of this disaster is not the destruction of the art of great masters -- whose work is represented in the collections of important museums all over the world -- but the loss of the work of all the secondary masters, as well as the documents and materials which made Florence the only comprehensive center for Renaissance studies in the world. Superficially, the city will still be the greatest artifact of Renaissance culture. But its richness for scholars has been greatly diminished.

Even the damage which is apparent now will take at least twenty years to repair -- and much of it cannot be repaired. Estimates of the damage are as high as $170 million.

A group of art scholars at the Fogg Museum have joined others in forming the Committee to Rescue Italian Art (CRIA). The committee has already sent American restorers to Italy and also wants to help meet the costs of restoration. It is soliciting contributions now and hopes to receive enough to save a significant number of paintings, documents and sculptures from being completely lost.Interior of the National Library in Florence after the flood.