The Last Supper of Renaissance artist Giorgio Vasari is to be restored 44 years after it was severely damaged in Florence’s Great Flood, the city’s famous Opificio delle Pietre Dure (OPD) restoration lab said Wednesday. The monumental work, commissioned by Florentine nuns in 1546 but housed in the Santa Croce basilica when it was engulfed by water and mud from the Arno River, received emergency work after the 1966 disaster but was never fully restored because techniques up till today weren’t up to the challenges it poses, OPD painting unit chief Marco Chiatti said.

Even now, Chiatti said, "it’s a critically ill patient that will test modern restoration techniques to their utmost limits". The project, presented Wednesday, has been funded by the Italian Culture Ministry and the Getty Foundation which has put up some $400,000 (300,000 euros). The money will also go towards training young restorers to tackle such a tough assignment and a book is planned about their hopefully successful efforts. No one is prepared to say when the eight-by-21-feet panel might be put back in Santa Croce "because of the delicate and extremely complex nature of the work," Chiatti said.

He said the poplar wood of the panel had been "seriously damaged" while parts of the painting had become detached and some areas had even ridden up into "crests". The OPD had a first look at the job facing them on the 40th anniversary of the flood, in 2006, when the work was moved out of storage. Since then they have been performing "diagnostic analysis" and "experimental tests" but only now feel they can begin the work proper. Vasari (1511-1574) was one of Florence’s leading artists but his reputation rests chiefly with a book, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, a series of biographies chronicling the lives and careers of Italy’s Renaissance masters.

The work was to earn him the title of ‘father of art history’, overshadowing his work as an artist and architect. Vasari also designed the famous loggia of the Palazzo degli Uffizi in Florence, one of the city’s most celebrated landmarks. His name has recently come back into the news because of an inheritance tussle over his papers which contain artistic notes as well as letters from figures like Michelangelo, 16th-century Tuscan potentate Grand Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici and a number of popes.