The flames that consumed the Rio de Janeiro National Museum of Natural Sciences on September 2, 2018, left a landscape of ashes and devastation that four years later begins to be left behind.
The restoration of the main façade of the old palace where the Portuguese royal family lived is the first milestone in a tortuous path whose main challenge is the recomposition of the collection.
The colossal fire four years ago left practically nothing behind.
The facades, the internal walls and little else were saved.
Dozens of Egyptian mummies, animal skeletons, a valuable collection of indigenous ethnography… They were 20 million objects and 85% were lost.
Now the goal is to obtain 10,000 pieces to exhibit them in the new museum, which is expected to be ready in 2027.
"We have already achieved 1,000, but we are still missing 9,000 objects," explained this Friday the director of the museum, Alexander Kellner, who has been pulling strings for months in search of donations.
"We all have to deserve the new collection," he said from the scaffolding of the building under construction, emphasizing that the world has to feel confident in the new project and be sure that the tragedy will not be repeated.
At the moment, the donations are timid and on a small scale.
A retired diplomat donated his collection of Greco-Roman art, and a researcher, more than 200 pieces of African art.
The singer Nando Reis contributed his father's mollusk collection.
Germany gave away the skeleton of a 25-meter whale, and the mining multinational Vale, a large collection of minerals.
The largest donation to date comes from the Joanneum museum in Graz, Austria: several feathered headdresses, weapons, and ornaments by the Brazilian indigenous Kayapó, Asurini, and Aararas.
To give a boost to the recovery of the collection, the museum launched a
website
(recompoe.mn.ufrj) that works practically like a wish list.
The four circuits that the museum will have are detailed (one historical, two more focused on natural sciences and the other dedicated to cultural diversity) and broadly the pieces that are sought for each of them are explained.
At the moment there is not enough budget for purchases.
In the future museum there will also be some of the pieces that managed to recover from the rubble, such as Luzia's skull (the oldest human fossil in South America, 13,000 years old) or the Bendegó meteorite, which resisted the fire and remained practically intact.
Converted into a symbol of resistance, the meteorite will be exhibited in the next few days in the museum hall, where the recently restored green doors contrast with the charred walls of the interior.
Inside the museum, practically everything remains to be done, but the façade is already gleaming after a restoration supervised by Unesco in which 23 million reais ($4.4 million) have been spent, financed mainly by private sponsors.
In addition to recovering the original painting and decorative elements, the 30 Carrara marble statues that crowned the building representing Olympus divinities were restored.
In its place replicas were placed, because the originals were very weakened after the fire.
From now on, work will begin on the internal parts and on the museum project.
At least one of the large rooms will be left with exposed brick and heat-twisted beams, as a reminder of the horror of that September night.
The inauguration of the main façade takes place just four years after the fire and 200 years after the Austrian Empress Leopoldina signed the documents that would precipitate the independence of Brazil days later.
Before being a royal residence, the building was the mansion of the slave trader Elias Antonio Lopes, who gave it to the then Prince Regent Don João VI when the Portuguese court landed in Rio de Janeiro in 1808.
Although it was mainly dedicated to the natural sciences, the old museum also told the dense history of the building with valuable historical objects that also went down in flames and for which it is even more difficult to find an equivalent more or less to the height.
“In the historical part we could have enormous help, both from Portugal and from the imperial family.
We are talking about it, but we have to wait a bit”, says the director.
Descendants of the royal family who live in Brazil manage the Imperial Museum of Petrópolis, the former summer palace located in the mountains outside Rio, but have not yet made any donations.