Art: Air-Conditioned Frame

For months, Italy’s art experts had debated how to preserve Da Vinci’s masterpiece, the Last Supper, which Allied bombings exposed to the weather after it had already faded and blistered through the years (TIME, Dec. 9). Last week, an Italian Government Advisory Commission came up with a tricky solution: they would build an air-conditioned frame around it.

The mural itself will serve as the back wall of a new airtight chamber, to be kept at about 64°. The front wall will be a sheet of glass 46 feet high, for visitors to peer through.

Some experts think that building an air-conditioned frame will be a sheer waste of effort. The trouble is really in the damp wall, they insist, and not in the air. They contend that the mural, which is painted directly on the plaster of the wall, must be peeled off somehow and pasted to a dry one. Rome’s revered Art Critic Lionello Venturi, who refused to serve on the commission, has no hope that the commission will come around to the radical idea of peeling off the mural. Said he: “The painting is so sacred to them that they will not dare touch it. And by trying to preserve the sacred thing, they may allow it to destroy itself.”