When Steven Woloshin, an American doctor, first saw the 600-year-old fresco of a Crucifixion by the Renaissance master Fra Angelico inside a cloistered convent in January last year, he was blown away.
“I immediately thought this is the most amazing thing I’ve seen,” he said recently. The image’s simplicity and power overwhelmed him, he said.
His second thought was the that fresco needed some love.
That’s when Woloshin turned to Dr. Camilla Alderighi and Dr. Raffele Rasoini, the two cardiologists who had brought him to see the fresco in the Convent of San Domenico in Fiesole, the hilltop town overlooking Florence, and said, “Well, why not restore it?”
A few years ago, bonding over a mutual love of things cultural, the three formed an organization called Bottega Belacqua that aims to pull off “improbable dreams,” Woloshin said. The restoration of the fresco was their first official venture in Italy.