Mission Is Grad Students’ Cross to Repair

For eight hours a day, perched on five-story-high scaffolding, two graduate students are restoring mission ruins and ancient artwork, several painstaking inches at a time.

Elisa Del Bono of San Juan, Argentina, and Rynta Fourie of Messina, South Africa, are both graduate students in historic preservation at the University of Pennsylvania.

The students and their director, Frank Matero, were chosen after a worldwide search because they had the best resources and the most experience on similar projects, according to mission administrator Gerald J. Miller.

Fourie’s job is to restore 13 designs painted into the arches and ceiling of the dome in the Great Stone Church.

Through chemical testing, Fourie said she’s discovered more than 11 colors in the designs, many expensive European pigments that may have been brought over by journeymen who worked with Native Americans and friars.

“The hot topic is: What do the designs mean?” Fourie said.

The designs may signify the life cycle because they seem to depict flowers in several growth stages, Fourie said. There also are depictions of Acanthus leaves, which have religious significance in Roman Catholicism, and pineapples, which were gifts to welcome guests, Fourie said.

Ultimately, the dome art may help historians learn how Greek murals and frescoes were created, she said.

Del Bono spends her days cleaning fragile stone walls with an acidic wash, injecting holes using a syringe filled with a lime-based grout specially mixed to match the composition of the original wall, and carefully reattaching bits of plaster.

“We do this so that water can’t get into the walls,” said Del Bono, who has been made the full-time conservator for the mission.

The students have toiled for the past 2 1/2 years on the church and will be working on the sagging Bell Garden walls and falling vestry room for several years to come.