Quake-damaged Giotto frescoes restored

A fresco by Cimabue is carefully pieced back together

By David Willey BBC correspondent in Rome, Italy

Exactly five years ago a disastrous earthquake seriously damaged the basilica of Saint Francis and the historic town of Assisi in central Italy.

Now the famous frescoes by Giotto in the upper basilica have been unveiled to the public again after painstaking restoration.

The restored St Jerome fresco

The earthquake thundered through the hallowed nave of the upper basilica, whose walls and vaulted ceiling are covered with fresco paintings of the life of Saint Francis attributed to Giotto and other 13th and 14th century Italian masters.

To anyone who saw the debris and destruction immediately after the earthquake, the restoration is hard to believe.

Mosaic

Approximately 60,000 pieces of a painting of Saint Jerome on one of the ceiling rib-vaults which crashed to the ground have been reassembled and put back into place.

About 35% of the fresco is still missing, but the gaps have been left free of paint in order to keep a sense of the authenticity of the work.

There is little retouching and the overall effect is as if the painting has become a mosaic.

The St Jerome fresco at three stages of restoration

It took a small army of 150 restorers, many of them unpaid volunteers, to retrieve the fragments of Giotto's fresco from the debris, catalogue them, and solve what became essentially a huge jigsaw puzzle with a lot of missing pieces.

"I arrived at the basilica half an hour after the earthquake," Professor Giuseppe Basili, the art restorer in charge of the project, told me.

He had to order rescue workers from day one onwards to tread carefully among the ruins in order not to crush the fragile pieces of fresco painting still littering the marble floor.

Four people were killed as the ceiling collapsed.

Souvenir hunters repent

A few pieces of fresco were stolen by souvenir hunters.

But restorers were delighted when two years ago the Brazilian ambassador in Rome returned three fragments.

A work by Cimabue was shattered into 250,000 pieces

They had been taken by Brazilian tourists, who subsequently repented when they learned of the restoration project.

In one of the rooms in the sprawling monastery which adjoins the basilica, completed shortly after the death of Saint Francis in 1226, preparatory work is now almost finished on a computer programme which experts hope will enable an even larger fresco to be pieced together again.

This was by another renowned artist, Cimabue, and was situated at the centre of the nave of the upper basilica.

Cimabue by numbers

About 250,000 fragments and slivers of painted plaster from this fresco have been assembled meticulously in specially constructed plastic boxes.

Each has been photographed digitally and the hope of experts from Rome's prestigious Central Restoration Institute is that the tiny fragments can eventually be pieced together first electronically, then in reality, with the help of colour photographs taken before the earthquake.

Attolico Giovanni, head of the computer art simulation project, explained: "Unlike a normal jigsaw puzzle - where the pieces fit smoothly together - the Cimabue puzzle, some pieces of which are no bigger than a fingernail, are so fragile that they can never fit snugly next to each other."

Patience of a monk

But Mr Giovanni remains hopeful that within two years visitors may once again be able to view the Cimabue fresco on the ceiling where it was originally painted.

Work on restoring the living quarters of the 60 monks who live in the monastery is due to begin shortly.

Father Thomas Calleja from Malta, who was working as a missionary in the Philippines at the time of the earthquake, told me: "I am happy that they gave priority to the repairs of the basilica. But many of our monks cells still have big cracks from the earthquake."

Asked whether he was afraid of another earthquake in the future, he replied: "These are natural calamities, we don't think about them.

"But for the basilica, today has been a resurrection!"