Marco Grassi, a connoisseur of old masters who brought a restorer’s hand to art criticism and a critic’s eye to restoration, died on March 30 in Manhattan. He was 90.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his wife, Cristina, who is an artist.
As a third-generation scion of Florentine art restorers and dealers, Mr. Grassi, a rare freelance restorer, was the product of a world that was itself rarefied: the art of late medieval and early Renaissance Tuscany, and those who lived among it.
Like his grandfather, he had trained as a conservator at the centuries-old Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Moving between Europe and America, he was as comfortable in the gilded salons of the world’s richest private collectors as he was at his workbench.
In his sunlit restoration studio, first in downtown Manhattan, then on the Upper East Side, Mr. Grassi was in intimate touch with the paintings of long-dead masters, including Ugolino da Siena, Luca di Tommè, Giovanni di Paolo, Domenico Beccafumi and others. They gave him sustenance. He, in turn, gave them renewed life.
Mr. Grassi, who often wore a tweed suit underneath his blue apron, moved in “that murky backstage frequented by scholars, technicians and craftsmen where the pulleys, gears, curtains and props of the art world are manipulated,” he wrote in “In the Kitchen of Art: Selected Essays and Criticism, 2003–20” (2021), an anthology of his writings for The New Criterion magazine.
For more than 20 years he worked in Switzerland as the personal conservator for Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, a billionaire industrialist, “vacuous and ephemeral” though “passionate,” in Mr. Grassi’s trenchant assessment. The baron had perhaps the greatest private art collection in the world (which is now the basis of the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid), and Mr. Grassi had the free run of it.
In the beginning of the 1970s, he set up in New York City, where he became one of the world’s most sought-after restorer of old masters. He established a studio at Broadway and Houston, and later a gallery.
“He was among the most admired private restorers of Italian painting, in particular of the 14th and 15th century,” Keith Christiansen, the former chairman of the department of European paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said in an email.
To his criticism for The New Criterion, Mr. Grassi brought this tactile sense, his editor, Roger Kimball, recalled in an interview. “You felt that his encounters with the art was hands-on,” he said. “You felt there was a deep interaction, having to do with the senses.”
Mr. Grassi’s analysis of the famous “Madonna and Child” by Duccio di Buoninsegna, a 13th- and early 14th-century work acquired by the Met in 2004 for more than $45 million, the museum’s largest purchase at the time, displays this visual sensitivity.
“Although tiny, it has none of the annoying “look-at-me-with-a-magnifier” precision of a miniature,” Mr. Grassi wrote of the painting in one of his essays. “The artist places the Virgin at a slight angle to the viewer, behind a fictive parapet. The Madonna “gazes away from the child into the distance while he playfully grasps at her veil,” he wrote, adding: “With these subtle changes, Duccio consciously developed an image of sublime tenderness and poignant humanity.”
For centuries the paintings of this early period were held in lesser esteem, compared with the masterworks of the Renaissance. Mr. Grassi was their great champion, an epoch in painting “generally called the primitive period, but which is not primitive at all,” he remarked in an interview with the fine art firm Disegno.
Marco Ralph Grassi was born on July 7, 1934, in Florence, Italy, to Arturo, an art dealer, and Cornelia(Lemky) Grassi, an American from Indianapolis. Mr. Grassi recalled in his book that his parents entertained the liberating American generals in his boyhood home as the war ended, including Mark Clark.
These contacts helped the family gain passage to New York in 1945. Mr. Grassi attended the Delbarton School, a Catholic boys boarding school in New Jersey, and graduated from Princeton with a B.A. in art history in 1956.
Homesick for Italy, he returned to Florence in 1959 and began an apprenticeship at the Uffizi’s restoration workshop, then undertook four years of training at the Istituto Centrale per il Restauro in Rome, and at the Swiss Institute for Art Research in Zurich.
He set up his own restoration studio in a Florentine palazzo in 1962, but the business struggled, until one day in 1964 when Baron Thyssen turned up and asked the young restorer to authenticate “an almost comical late-19th-century imitation of a Florentine Renaissance sculpture.”
Mr. Grassi spotted the fake immediately, and his decades-long partnership with the free-spending, high-living baron was born: Mr. Grassi was hired as the nonresident conservator for the baron’s collection. For years thereafter he “had the pleasure of strolling at will, often entirely alone and undisturbed, through Thyssen’s incomparable anthology of European art,” he wrote.
This was when Mr. Grassi’s essential training took place. “He was from a generation where you just took a painting and started working on it,” his son Matteo, also an art dealer, said in an interview. “He was used to being with Thyssen. They would have lunch and he would say, ‘I want to work on that one.’”
He was working for the baron in Lugano, Switzerland, in November 1966 when the Arno River leaped its banks and a torrent of mud and filthy water overwhelmed Florence’s treasures. Mr. Grassi got in his car and drove 12 hours. “We and other ‘first-aid’ intervention squads were dispatched as the need arose — and Santa Croce,” the great basilica and repository of masterworks, which flooded in the disaster, “was immediately identified as the highest of priorities,” he wrote. The water had risen 20 feet around the church.
Mr. Grassi was put to work helping to restore Giorgio Vasari’s immense “Last Supper,” which had been “totally immersed for more than 12 hours,” Paula Deitz wrote in The New York Times. It was a process that took five decades to complete, but which he helped begin by “‘papering’ the surface to protect the color layer,” using small squares of mulberry paper with an adhesive.
Mr. Grassi and his family moved to New York in 1971 to escape Italy’s darkening political climate, and there his connection with Baron Thyssen and a booming art market were a great help in gaining clients, his son said.
Apart from his wife, whom he married in 1969, and his son, Mr. Grassi is survived by a daughter, Irene; a brother, Luigi; and four grandchildren.
“He knew how to work the paintings,” Ms. Grassi said in an interview. “He knew what the artist was doing. He was in front of something he understood.”
Jack Begg contributed research.
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans, and is now a Domestic Correspondent on the Obituaries desk.
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