The 150-year-old frescoes in the U.S. Capitol’s Brumidi Corridor can overwhelm a visitor’s senses with rich detail, graceful forms and vivid color. Everywhere you look, the flora and fauna of America, portraits of historical figures and metaphorical references abound.
George Adams, 64, who died March 2 in Cambridge, Md., of lung cancer, saw even more.
A self-trained engineer with a deep appreciation for art, Mr. Adams looked at the wall beneath the plaster and found deteriorating masonry in numerous areas. He designed a system to test the strength of the mortar and walls and to detect and digitally map defects without damaging the art, which is painted directly on the mortar, in the age-old style of frescoes. Then he invented a system to inject material that would shore up the walls.
While working on the structural integrity of the walls for the past 13 years, he became familiar with the exquisite portraits of squirrels and mice, flowers and fruits and birds of a hundred species that Constantino Brumidi painted between 1856 and 1880.
He pointed out themes in the art that helped his wife, conservator Christiana Cunningham-Adams, resolve mysteries about recurring color and figures that tied the massive work together.
Brumidi, dubbed by fans as the “Michelangelo of the Capitol,” based his work on frescoes in the Vatican, where he lived and worked before immigrating. His masterpiece, “The Apotheosis of Washington,” a colorful fresco in the eye of the Capitol dome, took 11 months to paint in 1865.
Mr. Adams, a native of New Haven, Conn., trained at Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, although he did not graduate from either school. An omnivorous talent, he went into naval architecture, then aircraft engineering and later ran a firm that distributed photovoltaic solar energy cells.
In 1988, he turned to conservation of fine art, forming a company with his wife. Together, they restored the Jules Guerin murals in the Lincoln Memorial, the Works Progress Administration paintings at the Departments of Justice and Interior, and murals at Fisk University in Nashville, for which they won a National Trust for Historic Preservation Award.