The conservator laid three options on the table. Full reintegration, in which the missing passages would be repainted to match. Tratteggio, the fine hatching that signals restoration at close range but reads as complete from across a room. Or nothing at all — consolidate the surviving plaster, arrest the decay, and leave the loss visible.
The foundation wanted the first. We argued, at some length, for the third.
What completion costs
A completed fresco tells you what a room looked like in 1560. An incomplete one tells you what has happened to it since — four centuries of water, two structural failures, one nineteenth-century subdivision and a decade of neglect. The second is a far richer document.
Restoration asks a building to lie about its age. Conservation lets it be honest, and honesty is more beautiful.
The green
Where panelling had been lost entirely, we did not attempt to replicate it. New surfaces were taken to a flat deep green in nine coats of Venetian lacquer, each cut back by hand. It is unmistakably of our century, and it makes no attempt to be otherwise.
Standing in the sala now, you can read the building in three tenses at once. That is the whole argument.
Written by
Tomas Rehn
Filed under Craftsmanship on 27 January 2026.
