- It was a Monday morning and I got to work
and I got a phone call from Jack Sultanian
and he said, "Can you come to the Blumenthal Patio?
There's been an incident."
And he sounded very serious so of course I went upstairs
and I saw the sculpture in pieces all over the floor.
He was on a plywood pedestal and that collapsed,
it buckled underneath the weight of the sculpture.
- For a piece, you know, that important, to be damaged
was something catastrophic.
Really high-quality Renaissance sculpture outside of Italy
is not common.
This was an iconic piece in being one of the earliest nudes
going back to inspiration from antiquity.
- I think there's a purification of form going on here
that makes it even exceptional in Renaissance depictions
of Adam overall.
There's this forthright and yet dreamy quality
about the Tulio that set it apart.
- The reaction is to document everything as it is,
just like you would on a crime scene.
We immediately began plotting out a grid on the floor
and then we went and took a picture of every single square.
And after that we began to pick up the pieces.
He's in about 28 major fragments,
but there are hundreds of very small fragments,
and it was all saved.
Then there was just a period of pausing
and trying to come up with a general plan of what to do.
- I proposed that we may be able to utilize
three-dimensional imaging.
If we scanned the object, we could create
a virtual reconstruction and hopefully move on
to doing finite element analysis of the piece.
- You're taking a structure and you're basically turning it
into a 3D jigsaw puzzle,
the difference being that all the pieces in that puzzle
are glued together.
You're analyzing what's happened with each individual piece
and then determining how that pertains
to the entire structure,
because all the pieces are connected together.
The color distributions that you see
are graphical representations of stress distribution
or displacement.
- If we were to be asked, look, you have to put this together
next month, we would have done what we've always done before.
We would have drilled holes in every joint,
used stainless steel pins, rather large and long,
to put this sculpture back together
and use very strong adhesives.
But we wanted to say, can we step back from those materials?
- We have a class of acrylic adhesives that we use commonly
in conservation that are reversible.
They've never really been tested adequately for the kind
of stress that the fragments of the Adam would be under
when they were rejoined.
- So this is about an engineering,
material science approach
that includes mechanical testing, computer science.
What arose out of that work was the fact
that these reversible adhesives are strong enough to carry
some of the big joints on this sculpture, all by themselves.
Stones and all materials have a different strength
and they have a different stiffness,
and there are pinning materials
that have similarly different stiffnesses.
And as we assessed different pinning materials,
we came to a material which needed to be stressed
very, very highly to fail, but when it failed,
the pin failed without damage to the stone,
and that pin turned out to be fiberglass.
- We sort of, from the beginning,
felt that the ankles-- because of the stress on them,
basically had the whole weight of the sculpture
on a relatively small surface area--
that they were going to require some pinning.
We ultimately wound up drilling it
only in one other area,
which was this fragment in one of the knees,
which was an area where the angle of the stress
shifted very quickly and where there was a small fragment
of the knee which lessened the stability of that joint
and had to be dealt with.
- The breaks on the sculpture were so fresh,
we wanted to minimize the amount of times
we put the pieces together, took them apart, moved things around.
We sort of collectively came up with this idea,
like wouldn't it be great if we had another sculpture?
And of course we weren't just going to break any sculpture,
a work of art, so we thought that we could get
some kind of reproduction.
- There was a possibility of getting
this very ugly marble statue of David.
We broke that David along the fracture lines of Adam...
- And we used that to plan our armature.
- There was a full-scale copy made, CNC-milled piece
of each and every piece of Adam.
- We then applied those concepts to the milled version.
Those carbon fiber straps could be taken off the model
and used directly on the sculpture.
- We're starting at the ankles and we glued the two ankles
and then we stacked everything up just for the ankles,
so we knew that everything was in line.
- And then we slowly worked our way from the bottom up.
Joining the legs to the torso, we were aligning two places,
all very rigid.
Michael was on one leg, I was on the other,
and we became very familiar with our particular joint.
When you're just going stone to stone,
things kind of lock together in a very nice, satisfying way.
When you put the adhesive in there,
things kind of move around.
It's like having ball bearings in the joint,
and you really need to let that adhesive kind of ooze out
to create a very consistent film.
I'm putting plenty on...
- Okay...
After years of seeing it as fragments,
got the head on and actually have it be a complete form,
it was quite an amazing moment.
So, congratulations, Michael.
Luckily, the major fragments fit together very well,
but in other areas, particularly in the arms and hands,
there was considerable damage.
In terms of the aesthetic presentation of the sculpture,
it's going to be those small fills
that are going to be the most critical aspect.
- Over the years, dirt had accumulated on the sculpture.
It was cleaned before filling any of the losses.
You work on different areas of the sculpture simultaneously.
The main philosophy is to have an even surface.
- When it comes to putting on fills or retouching something,
we always use reversible materials.
We tried to get everything we could
out of this horrible accident.
I think, in the end, he will be back to where he was.
So, is that the same or not?
That's for everybody else to decide,
but I think that the spirit of the sculpture
and the true beauty of it is still there.