The Silver Altar from the Baptistry of St. John was unveiled to the public this week after six years of intensive, surgically delicate work by the Florentine Office of Precious Stones. Though outranked in popularity by Titian's "Venus of Urbino" or Leonardo da Vinci's "Annunciation," the imposing work of ecclesiastical art (which measures 10 cubic feet) is attributed to a veritable who's-who of Renaissance Florence masters, including Tommaso Ghiberti, Bernardo Cennini, Antonio del Pollaiolo, and Andrea del Verrocchio. Given the breadth of talent in Verrocchio's workshop, some have even speculated that da Vinci, who worked as his apprentice, was among the altar's sculptors.
Project director Clarice Innocenti respectfully shrugged off this hypothesis. "The restoration brought us very close to what we can see was a mature artist," she told ARTINFO. "Leonardo was an experimenter, who probably would have found the capillary technique of silver work boring. But there's always a need to include more, important names." Without the name-dropping, the public's reaction to the newly-polished sculpture was nevertheless tremendous. "It's not something that you can walk by without noticing," she said. "It's enormous, and the impact on visitors was really remarkable. People were really affected by it."
Newly-installed at the museum of the Basilica of Saint Mary of the Flower, the four-hundred-year-old altar has regained much of the luster it had lost to tarnish and oxidation, and surfaces that had turned completely black are restored to their previous shine. Since Florence's Accademia made no small matter of the quadricentennial scrubbing of Michelangelo's "David," some expected a string of world premiere-style ceremonies to promote the eminent work of art's new look, perhaps to the tune of the Louvre's controversial cleaning of Leonardo's "Virgin and Child with St. Anne." So far, none have materialized, but Innocenti isn't sulking. "Public opinion doesn't place it on par with painting or sculpture," she said, "but I can tell you that silversmiths in the 1360s, the 1370s, and the 1380s were much further evolved stylistically than the painters of that period, and when people actually see the work, they're completely stunned by its beauty."
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