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An Alive Again in Maps

In a cleanup, the glue is gone and old details are back

BY LIAM MOLONEY

IN THE DAYS when pontiffs rarely left , Gregory XIII commissioned giant maps depicting all of Italy—so that he could explore the peninsula without leaving the city’s safety. By 1582, a team of top artists had painted and illustrated 40 meticulous maps, most of them measuring some 15 feet by 16 feet, onto the walls of a vast gallery. In their original form, the paintings had an almost 3-D effect, with city landmarks, mountain valleys and the white crests of ocean waves clearly visible.

But the centuries were not kind to the Vatican’s Gallery of Maps, which stretches the length of a football field and is the world’s largest series of painted maps. The works were gravely damaged by dust and water over the years. Botched restorations erased or covered up key features, and a glue used in a 19th-century effort left the maps dulled by a yellow patina. In recent years, most visitors to the gallery—part of the Vatican Museums —simply ignored the maps as they rushed to the near the gallery’s far end.

Some of those tourists now may start slowing down on their way to Sistine masterpieces. A four-year restoration by a team of more than a dozen experts has returned the gallery to something close to its original grandeur, with an inauguration set for Saturday.

In the 16th century, Pope Gregory assigned the monk and geographer to carry out the project. In turn, Danti hired several artistic stars of the day and up-andcomers as well to illustrate the maps, including , and the Flemish brothers Matthijs and . The Brils excelled at landscape paintings— an essential skill for the work.

“The maps had no mistakes,” said Maria Ludmila Pustka, head of restoration at the Vatican Museums—at least based on what was known of Italian geography at the time. “Danti did an excellent job. [The artists] omitted what they didn’t know for sure or didn’t have details—they didn’t bluff.”

But a few decades after the maps’ creation, things began to go downhill. Pope Urban VIII’s restoration of 1630 omitted some details that had blurred, such as a hamlet on a lake. Urban—a scion of the Barberini family, whose symbol is a bee—had a map representing the papal territories reworked so that it was filled with bees. He also placed bees above the golden-colored dragon that symbolized the family of Gregory XIII. (The bees are still there.) Separately, an image of the Brenner Pass between Italy and Aus- tria disappeared, apparently painted over because its position high on a gallery wall made it hard to reach.

In 2011, the Vatican decided to restore the maps and turned to the Patrons of the Arts in the Vatican Museums, made up mainly of artloving Catholics. Among other projects, the group has funded restorations in the Sistine Chapel and the Pauline Chapel, which is the private chapel of the pope and features frescoes by Michelangelo.

The Patrons’ California chapter, of about 300 members, jumped at the maps project, which cost around $2.3 million. It was an obvious choice for those of Italian descent, many with special links to the maps, said Feeley, chairman of the chapter. One family “paid for the map of Umbria because [family members were] devoted to St. Francis of Assisi,” a town in the Umbria region, Mr. Feeley said. The chapter eventually raised 25% more than needed.

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In the restoration, experts injected organic glue into the plaster holding the artworks in place to anchor them, then divided each of the 40 maps into 64 sections—roughly the size of a sheet of typewriter paper— just as the original artists had.

The restorers then laid special paper over each section to absorb the yellow glue from the 19th-century restoration that had blurred the colors, removed the paper and spread a special glue made from seaweed onto the maps to hold the original colors in place. The restorers colored or redrew any missing details.

The restoration tried to reproduce the original techniques of the map artists by adopting chemical-free color pigments and by using an ancient recipe for the Roman stucco.

Visitors to the restored galleries will be able to identify street names in Bologna that still exist 500 years later and can make out the arcades in St. Mark’s Square in . Some visitors of Italian descent often linger in search of their ancestors’ village, said Romina Cometti, restorations project manager at the Patrons of the Arts.

The restoration has brought a new clarity to the depiction of Lepanto, the naval battle in which Catholic states defeated the Ottoman fleet in 1571. The gallery also depicts Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon River and Hannibal with his elephants ready to fight the Roman legions, as well as St. Leo I, who persuaded Attila the Hun not to sack Rome.

“The paintings are so precise in their details,” added Mrs. Pustka. “I challenge Google Maps to be so accurate.”

VATICAN MUSEUMS

For accuracy, a challenge to

Google Maps.

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THE VATICAN’S Gallery of Maps, photographed before the restoration that is being unveiled Saturday.

Saturday, 04/23/2016 Pag.C014 Copyright (c)2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 4/23/2016

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