Art conservator Dan Tarnoveanu of Renaissance Art, Restoration and Architecture Inc. in St. Paul meticulously removed 22 layers of old paint. He used scalpels and tweezers to recover what he could of the original designs, and he then documented them. He sent old paint chips away for chemical analysis to match the colors and, in a year-long effort, most of the designs were restored onto a new layer of plaster. Seven designs were saved on the original plaster. In a process similar to the restoration of the Vatican's Sistine Chapel and the frescoes of Pompeii, the missing paint on these designs was filled in with a lighter tone.
Visitors can see the difference between the original work and the restoration.
It seems peculiar to us that the rathskeller was ever covered up and changed, but now visitors can recognize its tremendous art value and elegance. Rathskellers originated in Germany as restaurants in the basements of town halls. Many German rathskellers of the 19th century were decorated with painted mottoes and murals. A German theme was appropriate in 1905, because Minnesota's 361,000 Germans were the largest group of foreign-born immigrants. When it opened that year, the Capitol rathskeller served as a full-service restaurant, and true to the rathskeller tradition, the walls bore 29 painted mottoes in German .