Voces del Prado

John Brealey’s call

George Bisacca, Restorer, 1985-What's on

After some years in the Palazzo Pitti, every time an American restorer would come through Italy and maybe come and visit the studio (mostly because Andrea Rothe was there). Andrea had told John Brealey about me, about working there. So, one day I was in the studio and the phone rang. Someone told me, “George, it’s for you, it’s from New York”. I picked up the phone and it was John Brealey. He just introduced himself, and he said: “Look, I want to talk to you. We’re going to send you an airplane ticket and have you come to New York for a week, if you agree, so that we can talk”. So, I flew to New York and spoke to John over a course of a few days and he said, “Ok, fine, we want to hire you, we want to create a position for you, because it never existed in the Metropolitan in 120 years, but it’s going to take me time to have the position created in the structure of the Museum. In the meantime, I want you to go back to Italy, for one more year, and if there’s some area that you feel that you are deficient in, you can get better training in that”. So, I did, I went back. The MET paid me just to be able to live there anyhow so that I could train with machinery and with some specialized tools that I had little experience. I did that for a year and then I moved to New York.