From March 17 to May 30, 2026, the Museo dell’Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence is hosting the exhibition Farsi forma. The Restoration of Five Etruscan Vases from the Guarnacci Museum in Volterra, part of Caring for Art. Restorations on Display, an initiative through which the Florentine institute presents to the public the outcomes of the activities of its eleven restoration sectors through the exhibition of newly restored works, before they are returned to their respective owners. The stars of the exhibition are five Etruscan vases from the Mario Guarnacci Archaeological Museum in Volterra, selected for the quality of the artifacts and the complexity of the conservation work carried out. The finds are part of a group that came to the Opificio as part of a collaboration agreement aimed at the study, conservation and enhancement of Volterra’s collections.
“A choice,” stresses Emanuela Daffra, Superintendent of the Opificio, “that allows us to fully understand and appreciate the executive refinement of this pottery, but also to read its more recent history.”
All of the artifacts come from the Hellenistic necropolis of Volterra and are referable to two Etruscan productions datable between the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C.: the black-glazed pottery of the so-called Malacena Group and the Etruscan red-figure pottery. To the former belong two goblet craters characterized by a particularly shiny bluish-black glaze and plastic decorations of considerable refinement. The nucleus of red-figure vases, on the other hand, includes a cup(kylix) attributed to the so-called Maestro dei Tondi, whose production is now more convincingly traced back to the Volterra area, an Etruscan crater(kelebe) attributable to the Volaterrae Group and a jug(oinochoe) decorated with figurative elements that show influences from the coeval Campanian productions.
Restoration of the artifacts began as part of the training activities of the Opificio’s School of Higher Education and Study, where students from PFP 4 conducted the initial cleaning, disassembly, gluing and integration of some specimens. The intervention was later completed by restorers from the Ceramic, Plastic and Vitreous Materials Sector, who carried out the full restoration of the vases, including plastic additions and pictorial retouching. As is the case with the interventions conducted by the Opificio, this project is also part of a framework of methodological reflection destined to constitute a reference for future restorations on ancient figured and black-painted ceramics from important collecting contexts, including the historical collections of the Guarnacci Museum, formed from the second half of the eighteenth century.
The intervention, as the title of the exhibition suggests, pursued the goal of restoring an accomplished form to the artifacts while maintaining the historicized appearance derived from previous restorations. Therefore, work was carried out on two levels: on the one hand, the philological recomposition of the forms, implemented in cases where it was possible to reconstruct the original arrangement with certainty; on the other hand, the definition of the chromatic finish by means of a pictorial retouching carried out with an undertone dotted technique, a solution that allows the visual unity of the object to be restored and, at the same time, to make the additions recognizable. The five vases will remain on display until May 30, 2026, at the end of which time they will be returned to their museum of origin.
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| Five restored Etruscan vases on display at Florence's Opificio delle Pietre Dure |
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