Restored in 1993 with partial funding from Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat.

In sixteenth-century Venice, the buildings in the area around the Rialto Bridge were covered with elaborate fresco decoration, little of which remains today. After a painstaking restoration that removed numerous layers of nineteenth-century plaster, many of these frescoes are once again visible on the vaulted ceiling of the arcade of the Drapperia (cloth market), located just south of Campo San Giacometto.

Save Venice funded the conservation of frescoes in two of the thirty-four vaults of the Drapperia arcade, specifically uncovering and restoring depictions of the Four Seasons and a Christian Monogram, which are located between the shopfronts at civic numbers 52 and 54. The vibrant colors of the frescoes are striking, from the reds that trace the fictive ribs of the vaults to the tones of green and blue employed in the landscape elements of the Four Seasons. The representation of autumn, season of the harvest, is particularly evocative with its large barrels of grapes that are to be transformed into wine.

Save Venice’s successful restoration led the Italian Ministry of Culture and the Venetian Magistrate of Water to sponsor the recovery of the frescoes in the remaining thirty-two vaults of the Drapperia.

The frescoes were restored by conservator Pinin Brambilla Baracilon, with the guidance of project director Amalia Donatella Basso of the Superintendency of Monuments of Venice.

For select projects, conservation dossiers in Italian containing limited textual and photographic documentation may be available for consultation by appointment at the Venice office of Save Venice and the Rosand Library & Study Center. For inquiries, please contact us at venice@savevenice.org.

Unidentified artist
The Four Seasons; Christian Monogram
c. 1520, fresco

Calabi, Donatella. The Market and the City: Square, Street and Architecture in Early Modern Europe. London: Routledge, 2017.