This museum houses the sinopie sketches that were discovered underneath the charred remains of the Camposanto’s ruined frescoes . Placards reproducing Carlo Lasinio’s 19th-century engravings of the finished frescoes sit in front of each sinopie to help you reconstruct what the final work once looked like.
The two most interesting things are how different artists used the sinopia stage of the fresco process (some sketched just rough outlines to guide their later work, others went as far as shading the drapery and detailing facial features) and to see where the master changed his mind between sketch and finished work - like a giant academic’s game of “One of These Things Is Not Like the Other.”
