A Briton hired to run one of Italy’s top art museums has become the target of an apparent nationalistic backlash after priceless paintings in his care were damaged during freak weather.
James Bradburne, director of the Pinacoteca di Brera museum in Milan, was forced this month to rush two 15th century paintings to the museum’s restoration laboratory after a sudden spell of very dry, cold weather shrank their wooden backings, and caused their paint to buckle.
One of the works damaged, Bramante’s Christ at the Column, is among leading attractions at the museum, which also contains paintings by Caravaggio, Mantegna and Raphael.
Another 40 works, including Pala di Montefeltro by Piero della Francesca, have been left hanging, but are covered by strips of thin paper to stop paint falling off.
“This was a natural disaster – the things that a museum professional hopes will never happen happened,” said the Canadian-born Mr Bradburne, 61, who took over in 2015 after a long career in museum management.
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He was one seven foreigners brought in by the government to shake up Italy’s sometimes dusty museums and tempt visitors with innovative exhibitions and money-making shops and cafés.
Italian academics have opposed the changes, and the emergency at the Pinacoteca was pounced on by a leading art historian, Tomaso Montanari, who demanded to know the causes of the “seriously grave” incident.
“Today, the Pinacoteca di Brera is not run by an art historian, unlike all the great museums in the world. The guiding philosophy of the government’s reform is to separate preservation from commercialisation, and the latter has cannibalised the former in terms of finance, personnel, energy and communication,” he wrote in an article in the leading newspaper la Repubblica hitting out at Mr Bradburne.
The museum director said that the alarm was raised on January 7 after exceptionally cold, dry winds blowing from the Alps caused humidity in Milan to fall suddenly to 20 per cent — too precipitous a decline for humidifiers to deal with. Unless air moisture is maintained inside the museum the masterpieces, painted on wood, are susceptible to drying and warping.
“It is the first time the humidity has dropped so rapidly in a decade and the climate system, installed in 2004, could not cope. Back then they didn’t foresee this kind of perfect storm,” Mr Bradburne told The Times. “I am not pointing fingers because we still don’t know exactly what happened.”
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The paint on the Bramante rose slightly off the wood, but the damage was not irreparable, Mr Bradburne said, adding that extra humidifiers had been brought in.
“As for the paintings to which we have applied paper Band-Aids to keep the paint intact, we can remove them as the wood expands.”
He claimed that he was running the museum by the book, adding that the humidifiers were checked three times a week.
“We reacted with enormous professionalism. The four restorers on the staff were rushing around with magnifying glasses to check paintings and we used our own lab for restoring the Bramante. I don’t know of another museum that could have responded so well and so quickly.”
Mr Bradburne already annoyed Italian art experts last year by exhibiting a painting, Judith and Holofernes, which was discovered hidden behind a wall in a French apartment in 2014 and has been attributed by some to Caravaggio. He decided to place the disputed painting next to a genuine work by the 17th-century artist, saying that he wanted to involve the public in the heated debate about the work’s true origin. That prompted one of the museum’s committee of experts to resign, claiming the museum would lose credibility, and was part of Mr Montanari’s criticism yesterday.
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“We must ask if there is a connection between the Brera dedicating such energy to the promotion of an improbable, privately owned Caravaggio and the fact that an extraordinary, publicly owned Bramante has not been well protected,” wrote Mr Montanari in la Repubblica.
Mr Bradburne argued he was not cutting funds for preservation in favour of putting on crowd-pleasing exhibitions. “We have not staged temporary exhibitions, specifically in order to invest in the permanent collection and in preservation,” he said.
“It seems what happened has been used by some to prove my hiring was a failure. It has not — I believe stewardship is a prerequisite for making art accessible,” he said.
“This museum has been a flagship for the government’s reforms, so for anyone wanting to take a swing at those reforms, this is a good target.”
Outside influences
Seven non-Italians were among the experts picked two years ago to take over 20 of Italy’s top museums and archaeological sites and take on the task of boosting visitor numbers with better exhibits, cafés and social media activity.
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As well as the arrival of the Anglo-Canadian James Bradburne at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, two Austrians, a Frenchman and three Germans made the cut, among them Eike Schmidt, a former Sotheby’s staffer in London who took over the Uffizi gallery in Florence. Giving the new directors financial autonomy, Dario Franceschini, the culture minister, said they would be able to invest in innovative exhibits, but critics argued he was cutting essential funding to low-profile but invaluable research and preservation.
Undeterred, Mr Franceschini announced this month he would launch a global head hunt for a manager to run Italy’s archeological crown jewels, the Colosseum, the Palatine Hill and the Roman Forum.