The Bottarone Urn, an unusual Etruscan cinerary urn with an effigy of a married couple on its lid, has been comprehensively restored in vivid polychromy 60 years after it was submerged in mud by the Arno River floods in Florence in 1966. Major new conservation has restored the alabaster’s natural luster and restored the intensity of its original painted colors and patterns. Diagnostic tests also revealed the presence of Egyptian blue pigment for the first time.
The urn is dated to between 425 and 380 BC and is exceptional for the quality of its material—alabaster with a delicate gray tint—and the artistry, both in the carvings and the detailed polychrome painting. Its subject matter is also unusual for the period. The lid depicts a man reclining on a kline (daybed/dining sofa) holding a patera in his left hand and reaching his right arm to embrace his wife. She sits with her feet on the pillow in the process of removing her veil. Etruscan sarcophagi with married couples on the lid were a popular form in earlier periods, but when they were made, the urn lids of Senre usually featured the deceased with semi-recumbent figures or winged female demons.
It was discovered in 1864 in Botarone, a small village in the province of Perugia, and after passing through several private hands, it was acquired by the National Archaeological Museum of Florence (MAF) in 1887. It was put on display on the first floor of the museum on November 4, 1966 when the Florence River and the Arnondam entered the Florence River. At high water mark in the neighborhood of Santa Cruz, it reached a height of 6.7 meters (22 ft). A hundred people lost their lives and thousands lost their homes and livelihoods.
The devastation was incalculable. Florence is not particularly prone to flooding, so they had to go back centuries to 1557 to find a flood as bad as this one, and since then the city has accumulated a lot of art, books and artifacts. As an estimated 600,000 tons of toxic sludge from sludge, sewage, oil, and naptha invaded the city, millions of books, manuscripts, archives, and nearly 14,000 works of art were damaged or destroyed. Thousands of volunteers known as clay angels came to Florence from all over the world to help sift through the mud for valuable pieces of art and clean them with raw materials in makeshift facilities.
The flood damaged Florence’s immense cultural patrimony, which encouraged the development of new technical and methodological approaches to conservation. This was a tectonic shift at the very core of restoration, permanently abandoning the reconfigurations and harsh treatments that began in the Renaissance and evolved in the Grand Tour era into the non-aggressive conservation approach that defines conservation today. A pioneer in this new approach, the Archaeological Restoration Center of Tuscany was inaugurated in the same year in the same building as the National Archaeological Museum. The new laboratory was used to quickly document the damage, clean up the toxic flood sludge, and restore the specimen to maximum stability without committing to an ambitious restoration that exceeded its capabilities at the time.
The mud inside the National Archaeological Museum reached a height of more than six feet and hundreds of artifacts were damaged in the catastrophic event. The Bottarone Urn took a direct hit from the mud waves as they hit the building. His first treatment after the flood was completed and published in 1969. The mud was cleared, But in an effort to protect the surface, a sealer was applied that has darkened over time. The painted surfaces had grayed out, obscuring the original color intensity and variety, and the male head was becoming structurally poor. With the urn rapidly deteriorating, it was removed from public display for its safety.
In 2022, a comprehensive new scientific study and conservation of the urn began.
The intervention yielded major results, including the identification and mapping of Egyptian blue, as well as ocher and cinnabar, allowing a more accurate reconstruction of the work’s original polychromy. “The imaging investigation yielded interesting results: we identified the Egyptian blue color and were able to map the polychromy, visualizing the urn in its original form,” said Giulia Basilesi, conservator restoration officer at the museum.
The urn is on display at the Palazzo dei Congressi in a special exhibition dedicated to its 60-year journey from destruction to renewal before returning to the National Archaeological Museum this weekend.
