ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a dramatic case of preservation that strongly affected the history of an outstanding example of Romanesque metalwork. If the fragments of the bronze doors of Benevento Cathedral had not been rescued from the rubble after the cathedral was bombed during World War II, they would have been lost forever. When evaluating the Benevento doors as a scholar, it is impossible to ignore the extreme degree of damage caused by World War II, and the conservator’s skill in the rehabilitation not only of each individual scene but also of the doors as a whole cannot be minimized. After the initial response of salvaging the shards from the rubble, the preliminary conclusion that the doors could not be restored led to a long period when they were hidden from public view and when art historians wrote that they were virtually lost.
