Gianfranco Pocobene has touched the hand of God. Before long, he’ll rub the nose of Moses, stroke the neck of the Madonna, and wipe the fangs of the great green demon who guards the gates of Hell.

"I feel privileged," Pocobene says, sitting a matter of feet from the crucified Jesus. "This is an amazing experience."

The man responsible for bringing Pocobene so close to God is John Singer Sargent — or, more specifically, Sargent’s Triumph of Religion, the mural he painted for Sargent Hall, the second-floor hallway of the Boston Public Library’s McKim Building. Sargent, of course, is renowned for painting elegant portraits rather than creating enormous, complex, Sistine Chapel–like murals. Indeed, even here in Boston, many people are completely unaware that Sargent’s BPL mural even exists. Part of the reason is that for a long time, people haven’t really been able to see the thing.

Since it received its last overhaul, back in 1953, Triumph of Religion has steadily receded behind a mire of filth. Its magnificent colors and fantastic imagery have become dim and ill-defined. Crud has gathered, thick as moss, on the shoulders of Christ. The fires of Hell have been blotted. Heaven is a bleak and boggy mess. The largest and most ambitious project of Sargent’s career has become, as conservator Gianfranco Pocobene puts it, "gloomy, dark, and depressive." Now, however, all that’s about to change.

In recent years, BPL president Bernard Margolis has made it a personal mission to see Sargent’s neglected masterpiece restored to its former glory. "Every time I go up there [to Sargent Hall]," Margolis says, "I’m overwhelmed by a feeling of responsibility, as a caretaker of this, and that has inspired me to get this project moving, to raise the money and do whatever I have to do to make this happen." By the time work is completed — in early 2004, if all goes well — the library will have shelled out close to a million dollars for the restoration.

The person leading the Sargent-restoration project is Pocobene, a conservator with Harvard’s highly regarded Straus Center for Conservation. Every day since last November, Pocobene and his crew — which generally numbers between five and eight people — have climbed a scaffold to a wobbly platform, 20 or so feet above the ground, and set about the business of giving Sargent’s mural its much-needed overhaul. The job is, as Pocobene puts it with some understatement, "a challenge." The mural’s size alone is daunting. A sweeping, 16-panel pictorial narrative, the work covers more than 2000 feet of the hall’s ceiling and walls. It takes one person an entire day to swab a single square foot of canvas. That’s something like 48,000 hours of nose-to-the-canvas toil.

In the best of times, art conservation is a tricky, nitpicky business. There are, for one thing, no real guidelines involved — every project presents its own challenges: the kinds of paint used; the kinds of surfaces involved; the kinds of coatings applied; the flaking, peeling, and cracking a work has sustained through the years; the aftereffects of past restorations. All this must be taken into account before work can even begin. And during the restoration process itself, things get even trickier: challenges are met, new challenges emerge, and when these are dealt with, the old challenges re-emerge. It’s a shifting, slippery business, like trying to pin a tail on a moving donkey. And restoring Sargent’s Triumph of Religion in particular is more akin to trying to pin a bucketful of tails on a herd of wild stallions.

Though much has been made of the iconographic complexity of Triumph, the work is equally remarkable for its technical innovations. It is, for instance, possibly the first multimedia mural in history, employing more than 600 relief elements: glass beads, bits of wood and metal, papier-mâché, plaster, and snippings of commercial wall coverings. Sargent also incorporated outright sculpture into the work — a carved Christ, a whittled Moses. Beyond this, he used lavish amounts of gold paint, applied different kinds of coatings to create various visual effects, and even scuffed the surface in places. While all this makes for a dazzling spectacle, for the conservator it adds up to a huge pain in the neck.

In his 14 YEARS at the Straus Center, Gianfranco Pocobene, age 46, has faced his fair share of difficult jobs, including major projects in the capitol buildings of Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. Nothing, though, has quite prepared him for what he has faced at the BPL over the last seven months. "We knew it was going to be complicated," Pocobene says, "but as the project has evolved, I’ve realized that it’s more than that — all these applications, the different materials, the architectural elements, the lighting, the theatrical scene that Sargent created. This is in a world of its own."

Pocobene, a soft-spoken, congenial man, seems tailor-made for this kind of work. His manner is deliberate, thoughtful, and reassuringly calm. "One thing you have to remember," he says, "is that it’s okay to stop. There is an excitement to this — Wow! Look how clean I can get this! — but that can be a dangerous thing. There are always surprises. Certainly, with this project there are all sorts of things that can get you into trouble. We’ve had some tense moments up there."

Tense indeed. When you’ve been entrusted with the well-being of one of the finest artworks in America, mistakes are not an option. The people who restored the mural in 1953, an outfit called the Finlayson Brothers, found this out in the hard way. After completing their work — a mere three months after they began — the restorers faced widespread criticism for having ruined sections of the mural with a ham-fisted and hurried execution. Even though the extent of damage caused by the Finlaysons was probably overstated, it seems likely that the company wasn’t flooded with mural-restoration work in subsequent years. As Bernard Margolis says of Pocobene and his team, "They know that their professional reputations are wrapped up in how they go about this, what they do and don’t remove from the mural."

An added pressure surrounding the Sargent conservation — as if one were needed — is that the work being done on Triumph of Religion is intended not only to restore the surface of Sargent’s work, but also to restore Sargent’s reputation as a muralist. The thing is, for all its accomplishments — "It’s an architectural marvel," says Margolis, "a painting masterpiece" — the mural has never really gotten much respect. "Isn’t that sad?" Margolis continues. "We’re going to change that. This work will put Sargent back on the map. There will be a much greater appreciation for these murals when we’re done."

Sargent would likely be shocked, not to mention dismayed, to discover how little attention his mural gets today. Triumph was by far the most ambitious work of his career, a massive undertaking that consumed 30-plus years of the artist’s life (he started work on the mural in 1890, finished in 1919, and fretted about it until his death in 1925), and led him to all but abandon his thriving career as a portrait artist. Indeed, so complete was Sargent’s dedication to the project that he insisted on designing the lighting, the architectural details, and even the light sconces of Sargent Hall. He considered the work to be his crowning achievement, his truest claim to immortality.

Triumph of Religion was intended by Sargent to be a kind of tutorial on religion’s progress from the superstition and dogma of old to the more enlightened, personal spirituality he believed it could become in the modern world. The work represents a kind of elaborate before-and-after. In the "before" panels, Sargent painted phantasmagoric idols, damned souls being crammed into the mouths of demons, feverish depictions of Armageddon, figures tumbling through space on their descent into Hell, scenes of suffering and uncertainty. The "after" was represented by the triumph of law and introspection — God tenderly teaching a child, the complex human emotions reflected in the faces of his prophets.

In the 30 years it took Sargent to complete the work, he employed a wide range of styles — from the portrait-like realism of his Frieze of Prophets, to the stylized mishmash of ancient iconography in Pagan Gods, to the churchly carvings in Crucifix. Further, he drew his imagery from hundreds of sources, ranging from the work of Michelangelo to pagan idols. The result is a mesmerizing, sometimes unsettling feat. "Sargent’s achievements in [Triumph of Religion]," says art historian Mary Crawford Volk, "are equal to and possibly greater than his achievements as a portrait artist or any other aspect of his art."

Many of Sargent’s contemporaries, however, were decidedly less enthusiastic. Although critics heaped praise on Triumph’s early panels, by the time the mural had neared completion, it began to draw scathing criticism, largely from Modernists, who viewed it as a throwback, an aesthetic dinosaur. As Margolis says, "People were looking at contemporary artists. They were looking at Picasso." Sargent’s detractors were merciless. Critic Roger Fry called the mural "wanting in decorative coherence, filled with common and inexpressive figures, and inspired with journalistic pedantry." Another derided Sargent as "an illustrator."

To make matters worse, one of the last panels that Sargent completed — a metaphoric depiction of a synagogue that showed a broken, blindfolded figure— was criticized as anti-Semitic. The controversy that greeted the panel — the Massachusetts legislature considered passing a bill to have it removed from the library — haunted Sargent to the extent that he eventually abandoned the mural project altogether. The final panel was to have been the mural’s keynote painting, tying the entire project together: a rendering of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. The panel remains empty to this day.

Even now, some critics snidely dismiss Triumph (a recent article in the New York Times described it as "Sargent’s ambitious but soulless masterpiece"). But there are a number of art historians, like Volk, who are working to prove these critics wrong. Sally Promey, author of Painting Religion in Public: John Singer Sargent’s Triumph of Religion at the Boston Public Library (Princeton University Press, 1999), recently gave a lecture at the BPL in which she sang the praises of the artist she describes as "intelligent in his consultation of contemporary scholarship, imaginative in his use of art-historical sources, modern in his attention to the optical effects of pattern and lighting, [and] attuned to the choreography of bodies moving through space."

Volk, who is also working on a book about Sargent, believes that the restoration of Sargent’s mural will awaken us all to the true genius of the work. "The cleaning is a kind of prelude to the main act," she says, "which is going to be a better-informed and appreciative audience for the mural."

Pocobene, meanwhile, says he’s not sure whether his restoration work will have profound or far-reaching effects on America’s perception of Triumph of Religion — in fact, you get the sense he’d rather not think in these terms. He will allow, though, that his own appreciation of the mural is growing every day. "The surfaces are becoming enlivened, and that’s really exciting," Pocobene says. "We’re starting to see Sargent again."

Chris Wright can be reached at cwright[a]phx.com