Romanesque polychrome wood sculptures in Italy: towards a Corpus and a comparative analysis of the data from art-historical and technical studies

Résumé

The most important and rich collection of wooden sculptures in Italy is conserved at the National Museum of Palazzo Venezia in Rome. Some years ago, the study of this collection was carried out by the University of Urbino in collaboration with the Institute for Conservation and Valorization in Florence (ICVBC-CNR) thanks to funding by the Getty Foundation. This was an extraordinary opportunity for interdisciplinary research, between art history and technical-material scientific analysis, concerning the almost two hundred works preserved there, of different dating and provenance. Among them is the so-called Madonna di Acuto, one of the most fascinating wooden sculptures of the Romanesque period in Italy, remarkable for its stylistic quality and state of preservation. And it is precisely the interest aroused by this Madonna at the origin of a new research project, just started by the same team, dedicated to the polychrome sculpture of the Romanesque era in Italy; a subject that is still little frequented by scholars. The aim is to collect data concerning the historical-artistic and technical-material aspects, with particular attention to polychromy, and to create a digital database, to verify if, between the 11th and the third quarter of the 13th century, existed a “typical behaviors" by the masters of lumber operating in a specific geographical area. This will help to establish the relationship, which was certainly created, between the nature of pigments, iconography, and symbolism of colors.

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