Visitors entering the museum of the Ramona Bowl Amphitheater in Hemet, California are treated to the view of an impressive fresco honoring the Ramona pageant, California’s official State Outdoor Play. It was created by artist Milford Zornes and a small, dedicated group of his students.

Conservationists iLia Anossov and Elisabetta Perfetti pains- takingly removed several layers of white paint that covered sixteen by three-and-a-half feet of the fresco, filled scratches and bolt-holes left from a board mounted to the wall, carefully matched the paint on the damaged portions, and gently overpainted age-damaged sections as necessary. By mid-March 2020, the conservation was complete.

“The iconography of this piece is truly unique. The fresco is a beautiful pictorial description of the novel Ramona , written by Helen Hunt Jackson in 1884. Tradition- ally, large-scale frescos represent religious subjects. One of the functions frescos served in antiquity was to describe or teach a story or specific event almost always religious in nature using images as opposed to words, because the majority of people were unable to read.”

Elisabetta Perfetti