Word: pelliccioli
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...Mauro Pelliccioli, Milan art professor famed for his restoration of Leonardo's Last Supper: "Today more art is destroyed than is rescued by restoration. There has been no epoch so dangerous, so catastrophic for painting as that through which we are passing. It is the duty of our civilization to prevent the continued perpetration of this crime against...
...that the picture was altogether dry, the possibility occurred, for the first time, of scraping it down to what Leonardo himself had painted. X rays are useless with frescoes, so no one knew quite what the result would be. but after bitter controversy, a brilliant restorer named Mauro Pelliccioli was commissioned to attack the picture with a surgeon's scalpel (TIME, May 4, 1953). The job took him three years and is now at last finished. The completely cleaned painting is reproduced, for the first time anywhere, on the following pages...
...world's greatest paintings and muttered in annoyance as the tourists clustered around. To the spectators, his knife-wielding seemed the final indignity to the remains of Leonardo da Vinci's famed Last Supper, sorely damaged by 400 years of weather and bungling restorers. Professor Mauro Pelliccioli, 65, knows better. Next month Italy's No. 1 art restorer will finish up his work on the 15th century masterpiece, and one government official has already pronounced it "the greatest undertaking ever accomplished in the art and science of restoration...
Scraping one tiny area at a time, Pelliccioli started his monumental job on the 13¼-by-29¼-ft.surface almost two years ago. His main guide was a faithful copy of the Last Supper painted by a follower named Andrea Solario in 1520, only 22 years after Leonardo had finished the mural. Solario's copy was destroyed during World War II, but Pelliccioli has a photograph of it and a vivid memory. First he took minute samplings of the surface where past restorers had painted on overlapping layers, then painstakingly scraped down to the original, finally swabbed over...
Professor Pelliccioli knows that no restoration can bring Leonardo's Last Supper back to its original brilliance. It is too far gone for that. But Italy's experts think that the restoration job has brought the Last Supper closer to the original than it has been within the memory of living man. And what's more, says Restorer Pelliccioli, his special shellac skin ought to keep it that way as long as the wall stands...
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