Restitution of San Juan Bautista Niño

In 1994, the Fundación Casa Ducal de Medinaceli, on the initiative of its President, the Duke of Segorbe, and through the mediation of the Marquise de Bona de Frescobaldi and Professor Giorgio Bonsanti, deposited in the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, a restoration centre of extraordinary prestige in the conservation of stone materials, whose origins date back to 1588, the seventeen preserved fragments of an infant Saint John the Baptist, then attributed to Michelangelo and now confirmed, from the Chapel of the Saviour in Úbeda, which was destroyed in 1936.

From the outset Opifico accepted that the aim could not be the mere material conservation of each fragment, which would only serve to perpetuate the memory of the vandalism of its destruction, but the recomposition with new pieces added to the original ones to restore the sculpture to its original state, giving it back its dignity and visibility. The actual restoration work was carried out over the last year and a half, between 2012 and 2013. All the previous years were focused on research and the search for a method that, in addition to fulfilling the aforementioned purpose, would work mechanically and would be respectful of international restoration criteria.

One of the great difficulties was that the legs, which were to be modelled in a modern material completely different from marble, would have to support both the fifty kilos that the marble of the original fragment of the hip weighed, and the thirty kilos of the remaining fragments of the bust and head. Initially a handmade method of restitution was considered, but this proved to be impossible.

Thanks to state-of-the-art volumetric reconstruction technologies using two-dimensional images, it was possible to construct a three-dimensional digital image that made it possible to locate the position of the preserved fragments (which turned out to be fourteen of the seventeen) with total accuracy, and to faithfully model the new pieces in fibreglass with a stainless steel structure inside so that they were invisible.