For hundreds of years, most had assumed the entire facade of the La Scala opera house in Milan had been painted white.
However, experts conducting a major restoration of the theatre’s exterior have made a surprise discovery: the tympanum, an iconic triangular decorative feature above the theatre’s entrance, may have originally been painted blue and pink.
During a city-council led clean-up of the facade—the first in 20 years—restorers noticed flakes of unstuck paint on the street below the neo-Classical facade that were coloured blueish-grey on their undersides. After inspecting the facade, they concluded the paint had fallen from the tympanum, part of the 18th-century theatre’s original design, which frames a bas-relief of Apollo on a horse-drawn chariot.
The city council together with the superintendent, the culture ministry’s conservation arm, jointly decided to paint the entire background of the tympanum with a colour believed to resemble the original. “It is a baby blue verging on grey,” Pasquale Francesco Mariani Orlandi, who led the restoration, tells The Art Newspaper. “We used a lime-based paint that will slightly lighten with time.”
Restorers also gave the bas-relief representation of Apollo a rose-coloured tint, the same colour used for other stucco designs on the facade.
The changes were made as part of a €700,000 restoration of the entire facade. During the 240-day project, experts cleaned and recoloured stucco decorations, columns and flat surfaces that had weathered and been damaged by pollution. Iron particles from the tram track outside the theatre, which had been deposited on the facade and turned reddish due to oxidation, had to be removed.
The project has been completed in time for the opening night of the season at La Scala, a highlight of Italy’s cultural calendar that takes place annually on 7 December—the feast day of Ambrogio, Milan’s patron saint. “With the end of the works we have rediscovered the beauty of Piazza alla Scala,” Emmanuel Conte, the Milan councillor for finance and heritage, said in a press note. “Now all is ready for the Milanese celebration… of the traditional opening night”.
Restorers are simultaneously working on Palazzo Marino, the city council’s headquarters across the square from the theatre, using a €2.5m donation by the shoemaker Tod’s.
Mariani stressed it was impossible to know what La Scala’s facade originally looked like. “There is no written or photographic evidence about whether it was coloured or not,” he said. “There is absolutely no certainty here.”
