Word: baldini
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...world's proving ground for conservation methods-thanks, in large part, to the collaboration of university laboratories and major chemical firms like Italy's Montedison. The techniques used by the more than 60 restorers and artisans in the Fortezza make most earlier methods look antediluvian. Says Umberto Baldini, 50, the dynamic head of the laboratories: "Once, restorers were like doctors who were trying to operate on a body without having done anatomical research. But the emergency of the flood made it obvious that art and science had to be brought closer together in a long-range program...
...Baldini's allusion to medicine is more than casual. Even when the floodwaters had receded, hundreds of frescoed walls in Florence remained so damp that the paintings were threatened by a bacterial onslaught of molds and fungi. "If we had not found a solution," says Baldini, "those frescoes would have been devoured by micro-organisms." He and his colleagues ran through dozens of mold-killing antibiotics to test their effect on paint. Finally one was left: Squibb's Nystatin, a stomach medicine, which did not harm the pigments. But it came in the form of pills, which could...
...Baldini's staff has made startling discoveries as successive layers of earlier restoration and overpainting come off. Donatello's wooden carving of Mary Magdalen, which stood in the Baptistry in Florence, was described for years as an almost expressionist work. It had the blind eyeballs of old age and severe monochrome brown skin. These features turn out to be the work of later hands. On cleaning, the Magdalen's lively painted eyes, light skin and polychrome garments were restored. Thus its whole content has changed...
...left only two prim pockets on an otherwise totally transparent shirt. Veneziani attached five-inch-wide suspenders to the waist of a party skirt and called it an evening gown; Princess Irene Galitzine cut a V that kept going, fore and aft, out of a sleek leopard-printed swimsuit. Baldini decorated a perfectly modest little bathing suit with two prominent painted breasts. And Frederico Forquet un-topped them all with a full-length strapless dress that was minus more than straps, leaving the bosom...
...Remarkably fresh after an hour's hard cycling at Milan's Vigorelli Stadium, Italy's Ercole Baldini clocked just under 29 m.p.h. for a new world's record, announced that he would turn pro in January and was promptly ruled ineligible for the coming Olympics...