TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/121889/12188900.060

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 6.5 KB | 123 lines

                                                                                TECHNOLOGY, Page 84

Old Masters, New Tricks


Italy has become the capital of computerized art restoration


    Critics scoffed when computers were first enlisted to help
restore Michelangelo's magnificent frescoes in the Sistine
Chapel. What could an electronic filing system in some Vatican
basement contribute to the painstaking, labor-intensive task of
liberating one of the world's largest and most famous paintings
from nearly 500 years of accumulated grime and murky glue? But
the computer -- an Apollo workstation programmed to map every
curve and crack down to the last millimeter -- proved so
indispensable that it was installed 20 meters (65 ft.) above the
ground, on the main scaffold, where it put a wealth of data
about the frescoes at the master restorer's fingertips. Today
man and machine labor side by side, only an arm's length from
Michelangelo's original brushstrokes.

    The Sistine Chapel project was a breakthrough that made
believers of the skeptics. Even the Vatican's chief restorer,
Gianluigi Colalucci, concedes that future computers will recall
in an instant visual information that used to require years of
research, including, he adds with a laugh, "the errors we are
making now." But more important, the restoration marked the
beginning of the Italian art establishment's love affair with
technology. Nowadays, computers linked up to gamma-ray
detectors, infrared cameras and thermographic sensors are
turning up in art-restoration projects all across Italy, from
the vast ruins of Pompeii to the crowded workshops of Venice.
In tasks ranging from simple cataloging to advanced image
processing, the new technology not only is making restoration
more manageable but also is helping solve some of the oldest
mysteries of art history.

    In the past, technological advances in art have moved from
the new world to the old, as when computer techniques developed
by NASA to enhance satellite photos were adapted for use on the
works of the old masters. That flow has, to some extent, been
reversed. With a major portion of the world's ancient art
treasures located inside its borders, Italy has become the
capital of high-tech restoration. Experts from such citadels of
art as the Louvre, the Getty Museum and the Metropolitan Museum
of Art are making pilgrimages to Italy to see how it is done in
Rome, not to mention Venice, Milan and Florence.

    The technology that most fascinates visitors is a method
for peering below the surface of a finished artwork and
analyzing the various layers of paint it contains. The
technique, computerized infrared reflectoscopy, is based on the
fact that some pigments that reflect light in the visible range
(like cadmium red) are more or less transparent to infrared
light. By looking through these layers, art historians can catch
glimpses of the artist's original handiwork: rough sketches,
repaintings and the occasional erasure. Other techniques,
notably X-ray analysis, had been used in the past. The major
advantage of using a computer with a video display screen is
that the artwork can be superimposed over the infrared image,
making the slightest differences easily visible.

    CIS has become a veritable third eye for restorers and art
historians. Paolo Spezzani, a Venetian radiologist who
pioneered the technique with Olivetti, has applied it to
hundreds of familiar paintings, sometimes with startling
results. In one case, an examination of Titian's Albertini
Madonna and Child turned up a praying saint hiding under the
baby's chubby legs. In another instance, the procedure helped
prove that the so-called Sketchbook of Raphael, long thought to
be a 17th century copy, actually did contain early 16th century
drawings from Raphael's Umbrian school that had been later
covered over in ink.

    Sometimes the simplest application of the computer, as an
electronic archive, is the most effective. At Pompeii, experts
from Fiat and IBM, aided by more than 100 young workers,
cataloged thousands of frescoes and mosaics scattered over
36,000 hectares (89,000 acres) of the Vesuvius valley. Result:
a computerized map that makes a great deal of art history
instantly accessible. Says Aldo Todini, IBM's operating director
for the project: "If you see a house on the map, you can go into
that house, go right up to a wall, ask the computer what's
painted on it and see the fresco in living color."

    Computer operators at the Sistine Chapel can call up a vast
library of information for every square meter of fresco, from
the location of weakening areas to the curves of the artist's
underlying sketches. On the screen, green lines mark the
beginning and end of each day's work for Michelangelo, providing
historians with a graphic record of his progress as he struggled
to master the art of painting face upward in soft plaster. It
took him an exhausting 29 days to do 15 square meters (18 sq.
yds.) of The Flood, even with several helpers. By the time he
reached The Creation of the Sun and Moon, however, he could
cover the same space in seven days without any help at all.

    Art-restoration computers in Italy have become nearly as
ubiquitous as masterpieces. In Bologna's Church of Santa Maria
della Vita, a computer analysis of body postures showed art
historians how to piece together a disassembled 15th century
terra-cotta sculpture of Christ and six grieving figures. In
Rome a computer has created a perfect electronic "mold" of the
bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius. Says Giorgio Accardo, head of
the physics lab at Italy's Central Institute for Restoration:
"The idea is to put Italy's artworks on a computer disk so that
if somebody chops off an arm or a leg, we can re-create it."

    But even the smartest computer cannot decide what to do
with the information it gathers. An analysis of Tintoretto's
Paradiso uncovered a coat of arms that had been painted over
with a cloud, presumably by new owners. The decision to remove
or not to remove was one that had to be made by art historians.
(In the end, they decided to bring the coat of arms back to
light.) The loincloths in the Sistine Chapel pose a trickier
problem. Michelangelo's nude figures in The Last Judgment so
offended the prelates of the 16th century that they ordered
papal artists to cover the bodies with strips of cloth. An
analysis of the underlying layers makes it unlikely that the
outerwear will be removed, however. Before the loincloths were
added, Michelangelo's original painting was physically scraped
away.