The Ruspoli Chapel at the Porte Sante Cemetery in Florence. Material and diagnostic survey for conservation
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Abstract
Porte Sante is one of the monumental cemetery in Florence, located within the fortified bastion of the Basilica di San Miniato al Monte.
In the 1840s the town council decided to find a large area near Florence, to use as a cemetery. It was chosen the Fortress of San Miniato for the solemnity of the place.
The first project was entrusted to Niccolò Matas in 1844 and in the 1860s the architect Mariano Falcini designed a new project using the area of the sixteenth-century fortress that stretched around the church.
The Porte Sante cemetery surprised visitors with its comingling of styles: it was important to appear, to show the dignity of their own social class. This eclectic mix reveals interesting monuments for the style, for materials and construction methods.
One of this examples is the Ruspoli chapel, designed in 1891 by Giovanni Paciarelli, architect sensitive to modernism and designer of Paggi Palace in Florence.
The chapel, commissioned by Valsè-Pontellini family, stands out in the landscape for the precious texture of exotic carvings and inlays of polychrome marble, mosaics and historiated glass. Today it is in bad state of conservation.
Today it is in bad state of conservation.
The recovery of the chapel must provide for a careful restoration project whose foundation is the comprehensive knowledge of good, which can be achieved through the survey operations, the historical analysis and diagnostic investigations.
The use of a photogrammetry software allowed us to obtain a virtual 3D model, which forms the basis for subsequent analyzes and evaluations on the state of conservation of the building.
Such study will be applied to other artifacts in the cemetery, by implementing current and future studies on the whole complex of the Porte Sante.
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