I am listening to the recording of Barbara Schleicher’s soft-spoken voice when I interviewed her in 1999. Though much technical information can be found on the important works she restored, this recording is a precious document of her personal point of view as she recalls her childhood and the gradual accumulation of experience during her career as the world’s expert restorer of Medieval and early Renaissance polychrome wooden sculpture.
“At home in Heidelburg, my grandfather was a music and art historian. In that sense, I was privileged because I drank his culture from as early as I can remember. And I loved it. It was obvious that I was going to go into some kind of field in art after high school, so I went to the Academy of Art…I had a good art history teacher that guided me, which was wonderful for me. But then I came to a fork in the road: I was to do either art history or restoration.”
She eventually learned of a restoration studio in Florence, where she moved from Germany in the early 1960s and began working with restorers Andrea Rothe (who later became the director of the Conservation Department at the Getty Institute in Los Angeles) and Leonetto Tintori, now considered the “father of conservation science”. The first project they gave her was a life-size group of the Three Kings that had been painted over at least three times in the past six centuries. She said, “Once I began cleaning them, a beautiful polychrome from the end of the 1300s appeared, and from then on I slowly started working on art works of great importance.”
“In the year 2000, I will have been in Italy almost 40 years,” she ventured to say in the interview, speaking in Italian with her German accent. “I’ve always liked living in Italy, otherwise I wouldn’t have stayed. Besides, Florence is extraordinary. Since it is a city of art, I have acquired so many friends that are like minded.”
Back in the 1980s, I had the privilege of working under Barbara Schleicher’s supervision in the Pitti Restoration studio in Florence, where I got to know her as a kind person and dedicated restorer. At that time, she was completely immersed in her work restoring the Volto Santo di Sansepolcro, the most important piece of her career. Barbara’s patient cleaning of the Christ figure, sculpted on one huge oak tree trunk 280 cm in length, revealed a superb polychrome from the 12th century under various layers of overpaint. I was fascinated observing Barbara’s careful fingers controlling her scalpel, occasionally swiping an area with a cotton swab dampened with white spirits to show me the luster and quality of the original paint layer she had uncovered.
When I asked what her best advice would be for young restoration students, she replied, “The thing I find very important is to have a well-rounded education, to see restoration not only as manual execution, but to be interested in the painting’s history and technique. The most excellent restorers I have known had artistic sensitivity, manual ability and, of course, a passion for art…It is a privilege to be able to have a work of art for days, months, sometimes years, in front of my eyes, and completely emerge myself not only in the piece, but also into the artist’s life.”
Barbara became a dear friend to me when I was in my first trimester of pregnancy and Chernobyl’s nuclear cloud hovered over Italy. She brought me solace by inviting me to her small apartment close to the Pitti Palace. I wrote in my journal, “I’m in the quiet atmosphere of Barbara’s guest room with antique dolls and old Pinocchio puppets, books and ceramic bulls, tiny wooden plates on tiny wooden shelves, vases of beaded flowers and ceramic whistles, all carefully displayed. There is a sense of satisfaction here – of a humble woman who knows herself and knows what she likes; someone who has no problem enjoying the world within her own solitude…”
It had been quite a few years since the last time I went to visit Barbara in the studio she shared with her colleague, Renato Castorini. He kept me informed on her declining health, how her niece came to Florence to take her to Germany to be her caretaker and then the sad news of Barbara’s passing on October 7.
In a time when some restorers consider themselves more important than the works of art, Barbara’s humbleness showed through when she said, “The greatest compliment I can get as a conservator is to say that one can now admire the beauty of the work without thinking that it has been restored.”
