translated by Giorgina Arcuri

If your plans include a visit to the city of Verona, besides the Arena and Juliette’s balcony, a due itinerary is definitely the viewing of one of the greatest masterpieces of Italian Renaissance, the “San Zeno Altarpiece” by Mantegna. It is a shame that to view this work of art by Mantegna, we will have to wait until 21st May 2009, date when the work is scheduled to be placed in the Basilica di San Zeno Maggiore in the Veronese city, in occasion of the saint’s festivity, 550 years after its realization. But where is Mantegna’s “San Zeno Altarpiece” now? It has been at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence for about a year in order to be restored. A year after the start of its restoration, at last the works, which are proceeding according to plans, have made some progress. As claimed by Marco Ciatti, director of the mobile painting restoration department of the Opificio, it is “a very gradual intervention, aimed at being the least invasive possible” but it is necessary, because the work presented many preservation problems which, left unsolved, would have caused greater damage. 
It will not be a normal intervention of restoration, but an actual integrated project of preservation, which, thanks to the involvement of different subjects, will recover the precarious state of a true milestone of the history of art. After Andrea Mantegna painted the San Zeno Altarpiece, the history of painting in Northern Italy has never been the same. A monumental work of art, the last one that Mantegna realized in Padua before moving to Mantua, at the court of Ludovico Gonzaga.
Commissioned in  1457 by Venetian Gregorio Correr, abbot of the Benedictine Basilica di San Zeno in Verona, it was executed by Andrea Mantegna in his studio in Padua and delivered in September 1459. Proof of this is given by correspondence with Ludovico Gonzaga, who was eager to bring the artist to his court. The Altarpiece is Mantegna’s only mobile painting left in the place intended by the artist, the high altar of the Basilica Superiore di San Zeno. However, this does not mean that the work has not been moved around. Including the Napoleonic misappropriation in 1797. The Austrian government managed to have it returned in 1814, but the three panels of the predella were left in France, where they still are now, between the Louvre and the Tour Museum. They have been replaced by eighteenth-century copies. In 1973, the left panel was stolen, with the request (and payment, although officially denied) of a ransom of 8 million lire. In brief, it has certainly had an adventurous life. Even more if we consider that the greatest damage is the result of the intervention of restoration which the Altarpiece underwent in 1934 in Milan, executed by Mauro Pelliccioli. It is incredible to think how the pictorial surface has kept, despite the devastation endured by the wooden support.
Now the “San Zeno Altarpiece”, disassembled into 14 pieces, including its frame, is in Florence in the workshops of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, where it arrived in February directly from the great exhibition “Mantegna e le arti a Verona 1450-1500”, held last year in the Venetian city as part of the celebrations for the fifth centennial since the artist’s death. In the Tuscan capital, it will undergo the second stage of a restoration project that Ciatti defines revolutionary. “An intervention that will be a model,  in its process and in its results – claims Anna Maria Spiazzi, superintendent for the historical artistic heritage of Veneto – and that lives on the interaction of all the involved subjects”.
From the starting date of the works to today, the restoration has interested both the pictorial surface and the wooden support and the decorated frame, the latter had never treated before now. In order to carry out in the best way the diagnostic investigations and the restoration, the Altarpiece has been divided into 14 parts: three painted panels, three scenes of the predella interposed by carved parastades, the wooden structure of the predella, an architrave, the gable divided in two, the four semi-columns.
Since the restoration has begun, the wooden structure of the three painted panels, heavily altered by the intervention carried out by Mauro Pelliccioli in 1934, has been completely restored.
An important operation has still to be realized, defined of “preventive preservation” and that is a double posterior draining system able to limit significantly the exchange of  moisture between the support and the environment, thus stabilizing the movement of the panels.
More than half of the pictorial surface, which presented some problems – scarce adhesion of the colour in some parts, alteration of the old paint retouches and of the paint of previous restorations – has been cleaned up. According to the principle of “minimal intervention” adopted for this restoration, it has been a “light cleaning up” that, however, has allowed a significant recovery of the transparency and neatness of colour.
Finally, once the works of structural restoration and of completion of some small missing parts were done, the works proceeded to clean up the large decorated wooden frame, removing large reconstructions made with inadequate materials with respect to the quality of the entire work. Currently, the delicate stage of stuccoing the gaps is under way and will be followed by its reintegration.