A graduate of Camberwell College of Arts in London, Beatrice Cuniberti began her successful career in paper restoration as an apprentice at the British Museum and the Tate Gallery. She moved to Florence to restore and preserve documents, books, antique drawings and etchings at the National Library.
Churches, monasteries, archives and banks turn to Cuniberti, and she has worked on countless objects damaged by the deluge of water, mud and heating oil in the 1966 Florence flood. She has also restored a delicate pencil and tempera document damaged in the 1993 bombing of the Uffizi Gallery and the Accademia dei Georgofili.
Cuniberti and her assistants return paper treasures to their former splendour in her workshop in Palazzo Ricasoli in via Maggio. She has restored works by Rembrandt, Canaletto, Carracci, Renoir, Miró, Picasso, Dalí, Soffici, Severini, Morandi, Bacon, Man Ray and Warhol.
Like any restoration work, repairing works on paper is an exacting process. After taking a series of photographs to enable comparison, the next step is dry cleaning, using erasers to remove superficial dirt; then wet cleaning, using distilled water. Ideally, any missing paper must be replaced with the same used in the original; thus Cuniberti keeps on hand more than 6,000 types of paper from India, Asia, Africa and Europe, acquired from monasteries over the last 20 years. Where necessary, she uses a thin layer of very fine yet strong Japanese paper.
Since 2009, Cuniberti has devoted much time and energy to the Atelier degli Artigianelli (via dei Serragli 104), a cultural association and learning centre for artisans. President of the association, she also teaches paper restoration.
This article is published in collaboration with Artigianato e Palazzo (www.artigianatoepalazzo.it)
