Sant Romà de Aineto

 

Romanesque mural painting.
Commissioned by Pallars Sobirà County Council.
Originals preserved in the Diocesan Museum d’Urgell.

Sant Roma d’Aineto is a preromanesque church, simple and harmonious. It was built strictly for worship, unassuming monumentality. From the mural decoration just some fragments of the paintings have been preserved from the apse and the arches, all preserved in the Diocesan Museum d’Urgell.


Everything in the church of Sant Roma is simple: the choir, the altar, the polychrome sculpture dedicated to the saint, the elements offered by their neighbors, and so on. The walls have significant losses coating showing the bare stone. Therefore, the first objective of the intervention was not breaking the delicate balance.

The approach demanded relocate each preserved as if the fragments that sustained mortar had remained intact, while ensuring the complete reversibility of work.

adapting the wire mesh

structure fastening detail

surface appearance before the mortar

A galvanized steel mesh structure was built adapted to the original walls also the arcs and the apse. This mesh is held by a lightweight wall anchors. This solution has several advantages: on the one hand, several inches apart avoiding copying encapsulate the necessary permeability of the wall, and on the other, allows rapid reversibility of the replica.

On this structure is applied polyester resin reinforced with fiberglass.

The mortar is made with the area slate sand this way the appearance of the areas for which losses of paint layer simulating the original, thus, a compelling integration.

The surface, where to fix the images was searched to find a proper texture, similar to a paint like this.

The images were scaled and mounted transfer from the high-resolution photographs from the museum.

The imatges were printed on the Papelgel material with long lasting pigment inks and were adapted to the shapes and textures of the new surface.

Finally, a protective varnish was applied on the transferred image.


copy detail

detail of the triumphal arch

photography at the Diocesan Museum d’Urgell

«agnus dei»