Giuseppe Gnoli

Giuseppe Gnoli carried watercolors like a doctor carries a black bag—fresh out of Florence’s Academy, he’d trek to old churches just to sit and copy faded frescoes. In 1888 he stood in San Gimignano’s Collegiata, hunched over a sheet of paper, trying to coax back the ghost of Ghirlandaio’s colors. Why bother? Because the faded original had begun to fade faster than tourists could read it. The door in Gallery Tiles is Gnoli’s exact copy: look for the way he left the edges of the page just a little raw, as if the work still had room to breathe.