Museums at Work
Fragments of Hope
The restoration of the painted Cross of St. Eutizio Abbey
Room XVII, Pinacoteca
After the Reliquary of Saint Galgano, restored to the admiration of the community of Siena, the Vatican Pinacoteca returns to welcome another precious artefact to Room XVII, this time chosen from among the works damaged in Valnerina in the 2016 earthquake, and restored due to the joint and painstaking intervention of specialists in the laboratories of the Vatican Museums.
From Friday 3 March the exhibition curated by Anna Pizzamano and Adele Breda “Fragments of Hope. The reconstruction of the painted Cross of St. Eutizio Abbey” will be inaugurated: an exhibition project realised in collaboration with the Archdiocese of Spoleto-Norcia and which aims to present to the public of the Pope’s Museums the admirable reconstruction, in the aftermath of the terrible seismic events, the wooden Crucifix of Nicola di Ulisse da Siena (1442-1477), seriously damaged in the collapse of the St. Eutizio Abbey in Preci.
Some thirty-three fragments of the Crucifix were found among the rubble by Civil Defence workers and the Vatican Museums restorers who, at different times, intervened on site to recover the artworks.
More than 6 years after that inauspicious 26 October 2016, the Cross of Saint Eutizio will for the first time be newly visible to visitors and pilgrims thanks to the multidisciplinary and synergic intervention of the Cabinet of Scientific Research applied to Cultural Heritage and the Painting and Wooden Materials Restoration Laboratory which, with this exhibition, formally inaugurates the celebrations for its hundredth anniversary.
This summer, the work, thus restored and “reborn”, will then leave for Spoleto to be exhibited at St. Euphemia, pending its definitive return to the abbey complex where reconstruction work has begun.