Opinions

We are about to move the workshops and operations in Madrid to a single, integrated space where everyone can work together – exchanging views, explaining developments, seeking help, providing input, participating in teams and groups in all the various projects that are going on. Exciting.

Factum is a workshop, a group of artisans led by Adam Lowe whose tools include digital technology and other wonders of the machine age.  All those tools will now be available for the various teams to share, in one place – those tools are products of our age. They and the changes they bring to the outcomes is similar in scale of change and importance to the late C15th introduction in Europe of printing.

If we believed the  press we would be feeling that the light at the end of the tunnel is getting larger, the idea is that all our troubles are over and that we can now slip back into a comfortable existence where nothing is lost and we are content – art galleries will exhibit the same paintings and objects, museums will contain the same artefacts, nothing has changed and Dr Pangloss is that strangely dressed man strutting, with a little limp, down the steps. 

We are allowed to feel that perhaps the press might have a bias that is about something other than reality. But then sometimes we are surprised – as we were by the Financial Times last week in a piece entitled Factum Arte remaking history – knowing that nothing in any gallery, any vault, any exhibit – in fact anything – is the same now as it was last week – we are, and all things are – changing and the sooner we understand this the better . ………..well we do, of course, otherwise our world’s personal focus on genealogy and ageing would not be so intense and profitable for the providers of salve.

Though Governments are feeding stories to the press of flickering recovery and use local stories to bolster their claims we are, all of us, still living in an economic turmoil of historic proportions. Some are lucky – they were in the right place or positioned themselves, some were unlucky or made a mistake. But we had little knowledge of where to be or how to react, whose fault it is is not my subject.

The economy does a lot more than create wealth or poverty, it is the way we deal with each other, not just commercially – it is a social and moral issue. To try to get it right we need to understand how it works. Adam Smith helped us to open our collective eyes after the warlord/kingdom years in the west and the C18th and C19th which played out as we began to understand what industry was and what the shift from rural to urban living meant and what intervention could do depending on the instruments and methods used.

This week I’m going to Bologna to visit the new office and to see the work of the Factum Arte team. Most visible are Pedro Miró and Bianca Marchioro who are on the front of the basilica of San Petronio every evening, under the shrouded scaffolding (evening because of the vibration of the visitors below during the day) – recording the great door. I say most visible – in fact they are invisible under their shrouds so I should say, most immediate. This is work that was envisaged in 2011 where white light scanning was successfully demonstrated on the statue of Saint Petronius and the present project has resulted from that. The three great doors, with the vast and magnificent porta magna in the centre, carved around 1430-45 are the immediate focus.

As usual we are starting the new week with a menu of opportunities and projects that are both exciting and also daunting. But because there is a vein running through everything we do and that vein is technology the horizon is always more biased to the exiting as opposed to the daunting. The ‘let’s find out’ as opposed to ‘oh, no, how?’

This week Factum Arte’s tree is being unveiled in London at the Connaught, whose tree it is to become – under the eyes of landscaper Tom Stuart-Smith in whose garden design it is to live and it is a symbol of a thing we forget sometimes. There is always a way to do something and it doesn’t need to be harmful or too difficult.

In Bologna the Factum Arte operations and office were being set up last week by Adam Lowe and Gregoire Dupond. A team began the recording of the great doors of the Basilica of San Petronio (after a little hiatus as the scaffolders released the statues from their shrouds) and work continued on the digital restoration of the Bologna map from the Vatican Sala Bologna…while I was rather more prosaically participating in a conference in London.

Last week I was in Florence and one of the things that is immediately noticeable there is, yes, the numbers of tourists – we all know that and it can be very distracting. But I thought as I walked through the paved streets that this also added a dimension to a visitor’s appreciation as Florence – like Genoa and Venice – must have been host to every language (nationality was, agreeably, less of an issue then) during the period of their absolute and extraordinary dominance of world trade and exchange which brought the ideas and thoughts – and money – to launch and sustain the renaissance; listening to all those tongues passing by made the bustle just a little more acceptable.

Nothing opens mind and heart like free discussion of gifted maturing individuals, coming together with their own national traditions and differing attitudes and approaches

Bernard Berenson

Over the last 250 years we have seen a dramatic advance not just in the industrialisation of our world but in the attitudes that that process has encouraged. We have developed a platform of truly amazing technology – we have created ways to communicate and mediate where nothing existed before – it has made us a better, more transparent and open world but it has also caused attitudes to change and to shift so that we see the world less as something of wonder but more as something that we can manage and something that we need to alter, to adapt to our tastes and needs. We now see nature as something we can tame, we see science as a tool not as a mystery and so when we look at our cultural heritage we want to manage and control that as well.