'Scuse Me While I Retouch the Sky, by Lily Prigioniero

Florencia. Palazzo Vecchio. Sala de Cosme el Viejo, frescos de Giorgio Vasari. photo by Miguel Hermoso Cuesta, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

'Scuse Me While I Retouch the Sky

Purple haze, all in my brain
Lately things they don't seem the same
Actin' funny, but I don't know why
"Scuse me while I kiss the sky
Jimi Hendrix, "Purple Haze"

The first time I went to meet the fresco restoration team in Florence, I looked up at the scaffolding covering the ceiling in the Mayor’s office in Palazzo Vecchio where Vasari’s frescos were being restored. I was studying to be certified as an art restorer, so meeting the team on site to take notes felt like a pivotal moment to push me seriously into writing my thesis on fresco and mural restoration. Giovanni Cabras, the head of the project, looked down from the scaffold’s opening and said, "Come on up if the ladder doesn't scare you”, then disappeared back into the lighted space.

I carefully climbed up the wooden ladder and once I got to the top and put my head through the opening — that’s when it hit me. I felt I had entered a sort of  secular paradise, where I had glided into an intense light surrounded by enormous figures in gold cornices, gaping at me in strange angles and altered perspectives.  I had only seen real  frescoes from down below, or images in art books, but from up there, high up in those painted  skies, I held a oneness with the artist’s perspective and his creation.  My innards gnawed and twisted, pushed my emotions to the base of my throat. With all the energy I could muster, I suppressed a horrible urge to cry and tried to focus on the presence of mortals in white lab jackets.

I survived the transition as we walked around the scaffolding while Cabras generously pointed out pieces of fallen paint, cracked cornices, and faded colours.  The surface of what had twisted my head a moment ago became a fragile coloured wall that needed care, Cabras being the doctor presenting me to his patients. He introduced me to the older restorers, Amedeo and Angiolino, who seemed to get a kick out of me wanting to know more about their life-time work. I became aware of the efforts I made to keep my feet planted on the noisy wooden planks and strained to view the lights up there as special neons, not as the celestial glow coming from the Vasari figures.

When Giovanni finished giving me his tour, I realized the restorers were putting things away and getting ready to leave. As I slowly went down the ladder, I looked back up at the Vasari panels with an overwhelming desire to return; it was an intense yearning inspired by a special kind of love-at-first-sight, as if I had arrived at a destination that had been waiting for me all along. I asked Cabras if I could return to observe their work and take notes, and he graciously said he wouldn’t mind, especially if it meant helping a student with her studies. 

When I climbed back up the scaffolding the next day, Cabras and the other restorers greeted me with a friendly “Ciao Bella”. I sat down on the planks and began taking notes, asking them what they were doing as they proudly explained their techniques, sometimes arguing with one another as to who knew more, sometimes speaking up for Vasari himself, as if the 16th century artist was up there telling them what he may have preferred. I began feeling more and more at eaze going to Palazzo Vecchio, filling my notebook with their discussions and giving their job the credit they deserved working on Renaissance art. They had gotten used to my presence and I realized I had put a little perk into their monotonous work routine as days became weeks, and weeks became months. I loved chatting with them casually, observing how they could turn their life's work into playful moments with Florentine humor while expertly restoring ancient art. 

One afternoon, I was sitting next to Giovanni writing in my little hardcover notebook, my legs dangling off the scaffolding with golden putti in front of me.  My notebook had accompanied me since my first day up on the scaffolding where I had tenaciously captured every recipe, every theory, every controversy and technique that I could possibly gather during my time as an observer. It was important not to trust my memory or let any of it slip away, all the while considering I would use my notes for the thesis I was working on. Between that morning's jokes and conversation, I was writing about stucco and the solvents they used to clean the gold gilding over the garlands of fruit, flowers, and putti, when suddenly Cabras stood next to me, his hands on his hips. 
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"Are you going to write the whole damn time you're up here?” Giovanni said abruptly, startling me from my writing. “What are you going to do, go home and say you were with us 'observing'.  Go get your palette ready, you know how to do it, you've watched us enough... "

I looked at him in amazement as he kept saying, "Come on...hurry up...go get it and don't waste any more time — put down that pen, I'm sick of seeing you write — what in the world have you got to write about anyway?   You can't learn to be a restorer with a pen! Jesus."

I thought I felt the scaffolding shake. I went to prepare a palette with the casein colours, carefully using only a dab of each colour like I had seen the others do so many times before, starting with the lighter pigments, the earth tones, and ending in the thick slate black.  Giovanni told me to follow him, he would show me the in-painting technique on a piece of the sky he had been working on but hadn’t finished.  It was unevenly speckled with dark patches of oxidized intonaco under the light blue. He briefly showed me how to lighten them, using pointillism and the layering technique I had watched him do on Vasari’s Knight of the Bande Nere.  He then handed me his paintbrush and made a gesture to go ahead. Do it. 

He watched me intently from behind. That second in time seemed infinite between the point of my brush and the moment I touched the sky on Vasari’s fresco. In that instant I was feeling an intense transition, a pull from my  mortal being towards the magnetism of an immortal image, as if  I was sucked into a timeless sphere. My whole life flashed in front of me and every intention of everything I had ever done until that point turned simple and purposeful and all became clear with no need to look back or forward or think of anything in particular except absorbing the moment in its fleeting entirety. My heart beat like a crazy drummer and I had to get a grip of my emotions. Think technique. Think brush. Palette. Colour. I could feel the sweat in the palm of my hands, the throbbing in my forehead, the intensity of Giovanni's stare on my fingers, the weight of my body on my feet holding everything steady trying not to sway at my light-headedness. I focused on the pigments, the tones, the movement of my brush and connected them to all the exercises I had done at the Institute, my past experiences, my time observing and writing and focusing in on my eye for color.  Giovanni said a brief, “Ok, you got it” and left my side as I continued mending the remaining spots on the sky.

I continued going to Palazzo Vecchio, working on the Vasari project for hours, days, weeks and months until I passed all my exams, handed in my thesis at the institute, and got my certification to work on state-owned works of art. At that point Cabras hired me to be part of the Pitti fresco team where I became one of the few fortunate ones to restore some of Tuscany’s greatest works of art. It was then that my tiny bonds with Italy began to enlarge and  penetrate deeper into the soil of my family’s roots. My life in Florence galloped at a human pace where every step of the way seemed to tell me to stay, to live a life completely different than anything I could ever have imagined when I left the Midwest to study restoration. So many events happened since then, but one thing is certain: my life changed when my tiny brush kissed the sky.

Lily Prigioniero

This story was originally published on the author's Substack, where you may find other articles of interest:
https://lilyprigioniero.substack.com/p/scuse-me-while-i-retouch-the-sky
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Lily Prigioniero moved to Florence, Italy, to be certified to work as an art conservator on historical masterpieces. Her novel, La Cena del Tacchino, won two literary awards and her poems appear in various literary magazines. Her paintings appear in TER and Rattle for their Ekphrastic Challenge where she was also a judge. She has taught writing in Florence for study abroad programs (NYU, Syracuse, Brandeis) and art conservation/fresco technique at the FUA. Her poem in the Polaris Trilogy is scheduled for a flight to the Moon. She lives with her family in the hills of Montespertoli.

Editor's note: Lily was our artist and guest judge for a challenge. Read the responses and view her painting, here:
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-challenges/ekphrastic-challenge-responses-lily-prigioniero