Ana De Roo ’09 knew she wanted to spend her summer vacation exploring the field of art conservation. She found a company in Madrid that was recreating Italian painter Paolo Véronèse’s “The Wedding at Cana.” 

 

Napoleon’s troops had taken the massive painting (about 23 feet by 33 feet) from Venice to Paris in 1797, and it now hangs in the Louvre, across from “The Mona Lisa.” Factum Arte, the Madrid conservation company, was creating a facsimile for the church in Venice where the painting originally was displayed in 1563.

 

With financial support from Princeton in the form of a Dale Summer Award grant, De Roo, who is from Grosse Point, Michigan, arranged to work at Factum Arte, and she spent the summer preparing the painting’s 10 canvas panels and hiding the seams.

 

“I had a good time. I was able to go to Venice at the end of the summer to see the installation,” De Roo says. “With the lighting just right, you couldn’t see the seams between the panel pieces … It was exactly the same as it was in the Louvre.”

 

The experience helped De Roo get the hours of hands-on experience she will need for graduate school in art conservation. Graduate school also requires that De Roo have a background in chemistry and she was surprised at what happened when she began fulfilling that requirement.

 

“I started taking orgo [organic chemistry] because it’s required, and then I decided to major in chemistry,” she says. “I might be a conservation scientist.”

 

While De Roo is carving out a niche for her academic interests, she has been able to share some of her Princeton experience with her older brother, Pier De Roo ’06. He was a senior at Princeton during her freshman year, and they both majored in chemistry and participated in crew.

 

“It was great being here at the same time,” she says. “Because it’s such a great school, I couldn’t say no when I got in.”