Restoration & Preservation
The Reading Gallery
In 2024, the Franklin Public Library, with funding from the Franklin Library Association, undertook a landmark art preservation effort with the cleaning and restoration of Tommaso Juglaris’s celebrated mural frieze The Hours. Stretching around the library’s Memorial Hall, The Hours is an allegorical masterpiece that depicts the passage of time through richly painted classical figures. The restoration, led by the Gianfranco Pocobene Studio, carefully removed decades of soot, grime, and discoloration, revealing once again the vivid palette and delicate details envisioned by Juglaris more than a century ago. The project not only safeguarded a cultural treasure but also reaffirmed the library’s role as a steward of community history and art.
Building upon this achievement, the library is now preparing for the next phase of restoration: the monumental mural A Grecian Festival. At 240 feet in length and eleven feet high, it is Juglaris’s largest surviving work and the centerpiece of the Library. The planned project will include both the careful restoration of the mural and the repainting of the entire Reading Gallery back to its original historic colors. This holistic approach will restore the harmony between artwork and architecture, allowing visitors to experience the room as artists Juglaris and Gallison intended it at the time of its creation.
To help achieve this goal, we welcome and appreciate contributions to the Library’s Gift Fund. Your support will help preserve this irreplaceable cultural treasure for the enjoyment of generations to come.
Cleaning and Restoring A Grecian Festival
The condition of A Grecian Festival today reflects both the passage of time and the toll of multiple renovations. Water infiltration has left visible damage, while layers of dust and dirt—accumulated during two major library renovations—obscure Juglaris’s vibrant brushwork. The Greek key border, originally hand-painted by the artist to frame the mural, has fared no better; over the past century, it has been painted over three or four times, blurring and nearly erasing Juglaris’s original design.
The mural’s setting, the Reading Gallery, has also suffered from well-intentioned but historically insensitive updates. The room’s walls, once finished in a palette of natural earth tones carefully chosen to complement Juglaris’s work, have been repeatedly repainted in modern colors. As a result, the harmony between architecture and artwork has been lost, leaving the gallery diminished from the unified vision that once made it a showpiece of late 19th-century design. Recognizing this, the Franklin Public Library is committed not only to restoring the mural itself but also to returning the Reading Gallery to its authentic appearance. This means reviving and repainting the original earth-tone colors of the room, so that mural and architecture once again blend seamlessly
In 2019 John Canning & Co., was retained by the Franklin Public Library to provide a historic paint investigation and mural assessment in the Reading Room and Memorial Hall of the Franklin Public Library. David Riccio of John Canning & Company along with Gianfranco Pocobene of Gianfranco Pocobene Studio, were onsite on August 27, 2019 to extract paint samples for microscopy analysis, perform exposures, and assess the conditions mural. The intent was to identify the decorative paint and designs that may lie beneath the existing paint layers, identify the historic color scheme, and identify treatment and recommendations for conservation of the mural, as well as restoration of the space.
Below is a mockup of the Greek key border restoration.
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