AgorawoodarT is a composite event that springs from the coming together of different experiences and arts.

The exhibit, entitled The Fresco beyond Its Genesis with Giotto, parses our knowledge of frescoes by steering research into unbeaten ground, taking sui generis fresco samples as models of study and reworking the painting techniques developed by the great masters of Italian art, from the "classic" genesis in Giotto’s workshop to Leonardo’s bold experimentation.

The fresco opens a scene of great suggestion, much as a kaleidoscope does, introducing an array of forms and colors to the viewer’s direct observation, the effort being to ferret out the secrets of mural painting, an art whose timelessness is the very trait that makes it deeply expressive and meaningful even today.

The study models on view at the exhibit are made complete with UV-ray images (of the same models) and with a glossary.

The exhibit has been set up and arranged by the researchers of the Vainella Fresco Workshop, a fresco technique and research school of international standing that draws in students from all over the world.

The school’s founder, Leonetto Tintori, has revolutionized our understanding of mural painting and our approach to the restoration of it, and he is responsible for many of the most important restorations undertaken over the last century.

Giuseppe Centauro, the exhibit’s coordinator, is president of the Elena and Leonetto Tintori Fresco Workshop and has coordinated some prestigious projects for the conservation, historical research, and documentation of art: especially worthy of mention are the diagnostic studies made for Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto in Monterchi and the museum set up for the same project.

AgorawoodarT is a workshop/exhibit project: making up its core are the workshop days, in which the teachers of the Vainella fresco school, adopting a hands-on approach, help trainees uncover the technical and expressive secrets cached in the fresco tradition.

Also in the program, a demonstration session open to all: your chance to become familiar with the fresco-making technique and take part in the suggestive moment of its creation.

By way of expanding and rounding out the range of themes and analytical points the exhibit is designed to address, a debate will be held on the controversial question concerning the close link that binds fresco-painting technique with the conservation effort to restore fresco work.

For this final debate, the AgorawoodarT project is honored to have guest speaker Guido Botticelli, professor of mural-painting restoration at the Università Internazionale dell’Arte in Florence and at the University of Macerata and other universities. The Madonna del Parto restoration is the work of Guido Botticelli, who also works on and consults for restoration projects in Italy and abroad; the cloister in the church of San Francisco in Lima, the frescoes for the church of San Antonio in Texas, and the Buddhist monastery of Baja in Tibet are just some of the internationally noted restorations for which Botticelli has been a curator.

The final debate that brings activities to a close will also be of interest to all those who are not professionally trained in the field: new tools will be made available with which to approach and understand the artistic heritage surrounding us; also, the debate will be a chance to focus on the issues and questions that every conservation or restoration project inevitably raises.

In sum, AgorawoodarT is a highly technical and scientific project, a big opportunity for all students enrolled in art and restoration schools, for everyone involved in protecting the great art of times past, and for all art lovers and professionals active in the field to learn about the advancements made through a scientific endeavor concerned with fresco painting: a new approach to fresco not only as the technique of tradition, but also and on account of this very tradition as an expressive medium open to the experimentation and research that goes on with contemporary art.

Holy Wood is fundamentally devoted to making our relationship with art a living, ongoing relationship: this we can do by nurturing the interplay between music and the visual arts, between cultural traditions and different expressive techniques, and by setting up expositions in such a way as to draw out a natural, but never a habit-forming approach to art, one more open to unwonted readings and developments, and so more likely to bring out meaning.

It is so that with each new exhibit inauguration AgorawoodarT welcomes a banquet decked with food and wine products selected for these occasions because they result from researching the realm of flavor, and coupled to this, a jazz concert, because jazz comes closer than any other contemporary music to the gesture and movement specific to fresco painting.

Performing at the events, in an initiative advanced in collaboration with the Siena Jazz Association, is the Siena Jazz Quartet: two of its members, Gianluigi Troversi and Gianni Cosci, are former students of the prestigious Sienese school and now teach there as well.

On other occasions (on dates yet to be scheduled) the concerts will be graced by Memphis musician Michael Allen, who also provides artistic consultation for the Porretta Soul Festival: this festival brings forth a spatial and temporal crossover in which a piano accompanied by a string quartet, a chamber formation typical of the Western tradition, revisits the history of 20th-century and contemporary Black music in America.