A cross that helped start the Renaissance in Florence was returned to the city's Santa Maria Novella church in refurbished multi-coloured glory on Monday.The wooden carving of Christ on the Cross by Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) is hailed by some scholars as showing the anatomical accuracy and plasticity of form that early Renaissance artists took from ancient models, marking them out from the stylised art that had preceded him.
Many experts have compared the cross to a revolutionary fresco of the Holy Trinity in the same church by Brunelleschi's younger friend, the seminal early Renaissance painter Masaccio (1401-1428).
Though Brunelleschi later became known as the Renaissance's pre-eminent architect, known above all for the dome on Florence Cathedral, his earlier rediscovery of linear perspective and treatment of figures in the round are seen by some as crucial to Italy's most famous art revolution.
The nine-month restoration of the cross, by Florence's Opificio delle Pietre Dure, cost some 250,000 euros.
The director of the famous restoration workshop, Isabella Lapa, said experts had removed slapdash plastering done in previous restorations and ''painstakingly restored the original polychromy''.
Brunelleschi is believed to have carved the Christ in about 1418, or almost ten years before Masaccio astonished contemporary Florence with his Trinity fresco (1425-27).
The cross hangs in the Gondi Chapel on the left side of Santa Maria Novella's main altar.
Masaccio's fresco is just over halfway up the church's main aisle, on the left.
Santa Maria Novella is Florence's first great basilica and houses several masterpieces by Gothic and early Renaissance artists including Nardi di Cione and Giotto.
As well as renewing Brunelleschi's cross, the restoration also burnished its marble backdrop, the Gondi Chapel's altar, pavement and illuminated window and ''even some frescos in the vault, attributed to Greek painters active in Florence at the end of the 13th century,'' said the head of the project, Ugo Muccini.
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