SA ITALY

Artworks too are subject to wear and tear. Overtime, their colors fade and before everything turns into black and white, Annali enters into the picture. Her job is to restore these masterpieces as close to how they looked when they were created a few centuries ago.

She graduated from the University of the Philippines with a degree in Interior Design. A few years after college, she was given a study grant in Spain to take a master’s degree in Heritage Conservation in Universidad de Salamanca’s prestigious Facultad Bellas Artes. Her hunger to gain more knowledge and hone her craft was boosted by another study grant from the Italian government. She took a course in art restoration at the Instituto per I arte e il Restauro, Plazzo Spinelli in Italy.

For her, it is an awe-inspiring career. Her job as a freelance professional artwork restorer provides an opportunity for her to travel to different cities in Europe and in the process, meet different kinds of people who share a common interest – the passion for art. She hopes to extend her skill to Asian cities sometime this year.

Late last year, she opened her first solo exhibit at the Ufizzi Center in Firenze. It was sponsored by the UNESCO and the Banca Profilo.

Her world revolves around celestial beings, saints and other paintings of various themes. On her last project, she restored a couple of murals in centuries-old palazzos.

She admits there are occasions where she encounters paintings from the great masters. “Imagine yourself in front of a masterpiece by Michaelangelo or any other great artist. In that very moment that you are doing an intervention, you will find yourself communing with the painter. You are actually entering his world of colors and figures, studying the lines and getting completely absorbed in the work.”

According to Annali, her work “depends a lot on manual skill, similar to a surgeon’s work, where so much depends on the lightness of one’s touch, the precision of every stroke, total focus and full concentration.”

Her normal working day starts at 9 in the morning as she prefers to work with “natural light.” Her other daily routines, like buying groceries, drinking coffee and talking to other people, starts at 1 in the afternoon. She confesses that her job can be very isolating and emphasizes her need to interact with other people.

With a smile showing almost all of her pearly whites, she says, “Easily you can forget about your daily concerns, your social life and love life. You just enter the whole new mural! The work takes out so much from you, yet you’re happy and you want to do the job right. For me, every project I work on pulls me like a magnet, and before I know it, I’m glued to the painting!”

Museum officials and private painting collectors entrust their invaluable treasures in Annali’s capable hands – the next best thing to a time machine - to bring it back to how it looked a few centuries ago.

Truly an extraordinary passion for an extraordinary Filipina who’s working in a country that produced painting masters like Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.
GlobalPinoy