Buboni, Lost In The Woods, parts 212 - 215

Richard Britell June 6, 2012

212. By 1975 the Vatican had set up a fellowship at the University to provide funds, a workshop, and time and working materials and in exchange the University made specific copies at the Church's request, and so gradually the most famous pieces were replaced with excellent copies.

213.  The church did not publicize these changes, and no one noticed them,  for one simple reason, the modern tourist has usually never seen the original, and the original was never illuminated by electric lights. When the modern-day tourist, or art historian stands in front of an old master painting and puts a coin into a slot to turn on the blazing electric lights, he is lucky to emerge without serious damage to his retinas, and he will have little recollection of the painting he was attempting to view.

214. At the end of the article about the consequence of the Lazlio Toth attack was a long list of the paintings the Vatican had replaced with reproductions, third on the list was one Raphael, replaced in 1974, which was of great interest to Thomas Aimes for his article on Buboni.

215. This Raphael, "Madonna and Child", the vary same painting that Buboni claimed was the beginning of his "Theory of Historical Distructivism." 

Buboni, Lost In The Woods, parts 208 - 211

Richard Britell June 5, 2012

208. This mistake of Buboni's may very well have gone unnoticed, and even if it had been commented on in art circles would have done him little damage but there was another article Thomas found in the Vatican Journal that was more embarrassing, although of an anecdotal character.

209. The magazine article which ended Buboni's professional career, and turned him from a respected art historian into a laughingstock concerned the attack on Michelangelo's  Pieta by Laszlo Toth, in 1972.  Here are the highlights of that
article:

210. The art treasures of the Roman Catholic  Church had been freely on view to the public for hundreds of years but after the Lazilo Toth attack on the Pieta the Vatican decided to reconsider it policies.  The church could not afford the enormous increase in insurance costs the attack on the sculpture produced, and so a new policy was put in place.

211. For years at the University of Padua,  the post-graduate art students completed an annual project consisting of making a copy of some great Renaissance masterpiece, and these beautifully executed copies lined the great hall of the school's library.  The Vatican began purchasing these paintings and, one by one replacing the originals with them in the various important churches in Rome.