The Joy of
Creation
A standing exhibition of pigment-exact digital substrates — the world's masterworks rehydrated to their unaged, fresh-paint state, each bound to its plaster and its patent as a single innocent original.
The collection
48 masters · five centuries · three continentsEvery panel is hydrated from primary-source conservation data — its documented support, pigment set, and fresh-paint state. Where a master's full substrate is too heavy to hang inline, its tile shows a pigment core-sample: a stratigraphic band of that work's own documented pigments. Select any piece for its substrate dossier.
The gap is
the meaning
Mancinelli 1994 fixed the finger-to-finger distance at 3.0 cm at scale — a deliberate void, not an accident of cartoon transfer.
The Genesis Vault
9 panels · altar → entranceMichelangelo's ceiling read floor-to-floor, twice. Here the nine Genesis panels run in painted order — light becoming flesh becoming fallen flesh — each carrying its giornate count: the number of single-session plaster days it cost.
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The pigment ledger
cangianti, not chiaroscuroHydration restores hue, not value. The cangianti discipline — shifting colour rather than darkening it — was buried for centuries under glue-varnish and candle-smoke, and recovered by the 1994 cleaning campaign. The same pigment chemistry now drives every core-sample in this exhibition.
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