snip> Our alarm system (fire and intrusion) has its central panel located in our main museum building, with "satellite" alarms in our historic outbuildings working off this central panel. To make a long story short, we continually have problems with false alarmsSusan: You haven't quite identified the distances and sources of the "falses". Are they motion detectors or some other type of device. How are the satellites connnected? Wireless, microvave, hard wired, etc.? Also, who manufactures the panel and how old is it. Is there lightening too? How is the alarm system when it does not rain?
AFTER 20 years of bitter debate that has split the international art world, the public will deliver its own verdict this week on the controversial restoration of The Last Supper, Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece. The 500-year-old wall painting, obscured by scaffolding for the past two decades, will be unveiled at the Santa Maria delle Grazie monastery in Milan on Friday. Italy's minister for arts, Giovanna Melandri, has hailed it as "the restoration of the century", but a leading international art critic describes the finished work "as a forgery". Professor James Beck, who is a member of the art history department at Columbia University in New York, said: "To claim this is the original is pure nonsense. It's taking art lovers for a ride." Pinin Brambilla has spent two decades - seven times longer than da Vinci took to paint the original - peeling off layers of attempts to paint over the gaps in the famous picture. But, with 80 per cent of the original Last Supper missing after 250 years of decay and degradation, the restorer has also done some extensive repainting. Michele Cordaro, director of Rome's Institute for Restoration, said: "The public will see not so much a restoration of The Last Supper, but a conservation of what remains of da Vinci's original." Prof Beck said: "Nonsense. This woman has simply produced a new Brambilla. What you have is a modern repainting of a work that was poorly conserved. It doesn't even have an echo of the past. At least the older over-paintings were guided by Leonardo's work." According to Prof Beck, Miss Brambilla has gone as far as to fill in Christ's head, although not even da Vinci completed the figure. He said: "It looks silly. The mouth is peculiar and off-centre." Supporters claim that Miss Brambilla's work has brought greater clarity and colour to The Last Supper: a group of dark and grimy figures gathered around a grey table. Miss Brambilla said: "Take Matthew. We always knew him with dark hair yet we discovered that he was blond." She also points to the exquisitely painted flowers, bread, glasses, knives and plates previously invisible but which now fill the table in front of the Apostles. However, Michael Daley, editor of Art Watch and a contributor to Art Review, has described Miss Brambilla's work as "simply catastrophic". He wrote: "The restoration has cut the painting's link with the past, reducing it to little more than a naked wall." Even Martin Kemp, Professor of History of Art at Oxford and a world expert on da Vinci, has questioned Miss Brambilla's decision to fill in the gaps with similar tones of water-colours. Prof Kemp, soon after the restoration began, said: "In The Last Supper, the amount of original work by Leonardo is very small." The leading Italian expert on da Vinci, Carlo Pedretti, recently likened work on The Last Supper to an archaeological site, with restorers digging through the past to excavate remnants of a once-great painting. Official criticism of a project that has come to symbolise the government's investment in state-of-the-art restoration techniques to conserve its rich artistic heritage is frowned upon in Italy. Mr Cordaro said: "I don't think Beck has even seen the finished product. Sixty per cent of the original is still there." Guilio Bora, an expert in Renaissance history at Milan University said: "No one could have worked better than Brambilla. After all, they've been trying to save The Last Supper since the mid-1500s." Da Vinci's refusal to follow tradition and paint the fresco on the monastery's refectory wall when its plaster was still wet meant that The Last Supper was cracking and peeling within his lifetime. By 1620, it was scarcely recognisable and the Spaniards unwittingly stuck a door in the middle of the wall. Artists tried a variety of techniques to restore the painting, from the use of oils and glue to stop it dropping off to a bizarre Twenties scheme to iron out creases. By the Fifties, over-painting was eating away at the original and doing more damage than a Second World War bomb that scored a direct hit on the monastery. Then, in 1953, Mauro Pelliccioli, a master restorer, appeared to have safeguarded da Vinci's creation with a glue-like substance that set like rock. But, in 1979, Miss Brambilla was given the go-ahead to chip away at the protective shield and get at the original. Prof Beck said: "Twenty years later, we are left with a perception of Leonardo's work that never was."
(Daily Telegraph London)
THE GROWING trade in valuable artefacts looted from America's vast "cities of the dead" was exposed last week by the arrest in New York of a world authority on Tiffany stained glass. Alastair Duncan, an international art expert, has been charged with selling a Tiffany window, stolen from a Jewish cemetery, to a Japanese collector for more than £100,000. His arrest by the FBI has drawn attention to what appears to be a systematic looting of statues, bronzes and other antiques which are easy pickings for a new generation of tomb robbers. In charges brought in a Manhattan court, the FBI accused Duncan, 57, of receiving the nine-foot high window, estimated to be worth more than $1.5 million (£960,000), and organising its sale overseas. The window was one of a number produced by the exclusive and highly collectable Tiffany workshops on Long Island to decorate elaborate mausoleums for the city's wealthiest families. It was stolen in 1992 from the cemetery of the Temple Emanu-El, in Brooklyn, the last resting-place of families such as the Warburgs and Guggenheims. Duncan, based in New York and the author of numerous works on Tiffany, had been an adviser to Christie's in Manhattan and to the FBI on other cases. He has refused to comment on the charges, beyond issuing a denial of his guilt through his lawyers. They say Duncan will prove his innocence in court. The case highlights a growing trade in funeral antiquities from largely unprotected Victorian and early-20th century cemeteries, built as symbols of the growing wealth and power of America's industrial barons. Looting has become a big problem in many areas, but particularly in the Old South, where fine examples are to be found, draped in moss and almost forgotten. Police in New Orleans say that grave robbers have stolen statues and antique marble urns worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in the past three years. A raid on 25 antique shops in the historical French Quarter found stolen items from local cemeteries in three-quarters of them. Many of those arrested and charged were pillars of Louisiana society. Even the most famous funeral statue in America, the bronze "bird girl" that appeared on the cover of the international best-selling book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, has been moved from the Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, Georgia, to a local museum to protect it from thieves. Few items are as coveted or as valuable as the stained glass windows created at the studios of Louis Tiffany, who died in 1933. Duncan was aware of the location of most of the windows, having lectured on the popularity of the designer among affluent New York families at the turn of the century. The FBI alleges that the window, which shows a pastoral scene at sunset and is one of the finest examples of the Tiffany workshops, was offered to Duncan through a middleman. The indictment claims that he was aware of the "large, lucrative market for Tiffany stained glass", and that Duncan "turned to suppliers legal and illegal". After selling the window to a Japanese collector, the FBI says Duncan received a cheque for £137,000. He later attempted to buy another stolen Tiffany window from a cemetery in New York where the musicians Tommy Dorsey and Rachmaninoff are buried. An FBI spokesman said that the window was still in Japan, although negotiations with the buyer for its return were taking place.