Category: Conservation
No more holes - search for 'Leonardo' mural ends
September 17 2012
Picture: National Geographic
I learn from the ever-indispensable Three Pipe Problem that the search for Leonardo's mural, The Battle of Anghiari, has ended. The news comes from a few small announcements in Italian press, and means that the National Geographic Channel is no longer funding any research. This is surely a Good Thing. The initial results were rather blown out of proportion (for more see Martin Kemp's view here). But it was all good fun while it lasted.
Who painted this?
September 12 2012
Picture: Your Paintings/Glasgow Museums
Here's a tricky connoisseurship test. I've just come across this picture on the PCF/Your Paintings website. It's listed as copy of a self-portrait by John Baptist de Medina - although you'd be hard pressed to tell from the photo. It must be covered with a very old layer of consolidating material. Still, when the venerable Public Catalogue Foundation said they were going to photograph every publicly owned oil painting in Britain, they certainly meant it.
A reader who is helping the PCF with attributions and identifications has sent in these mystery pictures, and asks the AHN sleuths for some crowd-sourcing assistance; see here, here, here, here, here, and here. Can anyone make any breakthroughs?
Update - Art historian James Mulraine wonders if the neoclassical scene might be by Rosa di Tivoli (1655-1706).
More on that 'Leonardo' sculpture
September 10 2012
Picture: davincihorseandrider.com
Following my report on the 'Leonardo' sculpture last week, and the potentially reckless taking of a modern mould from a fragile 16thC beeswax original, a distinguished sculptor writes:
To make a mould directly from such a complex wax if genuinely by Da Vinci as Pedretti alleges, would - as you say - be reckless.
Even the most minutely detailed 'piece mould' would risk damaging the original as 'walls' would have to be built on the surface of the original wax to mark the boundaries of each part of the mould.
Though there is clearly a wire armature inside -visible where one foot has fallen off, other extremities would also be at risk during the process if the armature was missing in them too.
However Museums and others can now make non-invasive, non contact replicas of even the smallest 3D objects by laser scanning followed by rapid prototyping using an SLA (stereolithography) file generated and processed from the laser scan.
Replicas can be made directly in wax built up in layers by a form of 3D printing. Following skilled finishing to match the surface of the original, these wax replicas could then be used to make bronzes by the traditional 'lost wax' process. Because the 3D information is digitised replicas can also be easily generated in different sizes.
Wrong on so many levels
September 3 2012
Video: Leonardo da Vinci Equestrian LLC
A US company is offering 'original' casts of a sculpture they say is by Leonardo. The casts derive from what the company calls a 'rapidly detoriorating' beeswax sculpture which was attributed to Leonardo some years ago by Professor Carlo Pedretti. Despite the apparently fragile condition of the beeswax sculpture, which remains in a mysterious private collection in Switzerland, a mould was (recklessly?) taken by a business consortium with the intention of selling reproductions. This mould, which is now being hailed as 'the original mold' of Leonardo's sculpture, now belongs to a Mr. Richard A. Lewis of Indianopolis who, through a Las Vegas company called Art Encounter, is offering 'original' casts in bronze for between $25,000 and $35,000. The whole operation has been blessed by Leonardo scholar Professor Carlo Pedretti, who has declared the casts to be 'perfect, perfect, perfect!'. However, he evidently has not told them what the word 'original' really means.
The revered 'original mold' and casts will soon be embarking on a 'world tour' (er, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York and London) this autumn. The casts are available in four limited editions of 996. Sign up to buy yours here! More news reports here and here.
Update - a reader sends me this note from the College Art Association (CAA) on the ethics of making such casts. It concludes:
Posthumous castings from finished bronzes, unauthorized casts such as those made as a result of work being in the public domain, enlargements unsupported by verifiable instructions from the artist, posthumous translating of a carving into bronze, or work in any material other than wax, terra cotta, and plaster that is bronze cast for the first time, are undesirable.
The CAA is always keen to present itself as the mother of all art historical bodies, and even calls for legislation to protect the principles in its casting guidelines. Should the CAA have a word with the makers of these casts, or even Professor Pedretti about his involvement?
Update II - an interesting response from a sculptor here.
The Cecilia Prize
August 30 2012
Picture: www.ceciliaprize.com
This is fantastic - you too can have a go at restoring the famous Ecce Homo. Can you do a better job than Cecilia Gimenez?
Wilton House
August 28 2012
Apologies for the slow service lately - today I took the day off and went to Wilton House. If you haven't been it's well worth a trip. The picture collection, including a parade of Van Dycks, is first-class, and in most of the rooms there are no rope barriers, and it's possible to get up close to the paintings. I wasn't allowed to take photos, so I can't make a very useful report here. But I was impressed by the emphasis Wilton places on its pictures - there's a special painting guide book (a bargain at £3), and the room guides seem to know a great deal about the art. It was quite a contrast to some historic houses, where one can often struggle to find out basic artist information.
Close-ups of that dodgy restoration
August 23 2012
The lady filmed by the fountain is the 'restorer'. She says she needs more time to 'finish' her work. No!
Someone should do a Downfall-type spoof on this.
Here's my contribution to the story on BBC radio earlier today, 1 hr 57 minutes in here.
Update: apparently there's a petition to keep the fresco as it is. Great idea - it should become the town's new masterpiece. you can even follow the fresco on Twitter.
Titian and the restorer from hell
August 2 2012
Picture: National Gallery
Last week we had an interesting story about a Titian in Canada being re-attributed to the great master, following conservation and the removal of later over-paint. I discussed how important it is to fully understand condition before attributing pictures, and how a good picture in bad condition can often be judged merely as a bad picture by scholars.
I've always felt that a similar case to the Canada example might be Titian's Portrait of Vendramin Family, now at the National Gallery. Forever called 'Titian' (even by Charles I's top Titian connoisseur, Van Dyck, who once owned it), it is now labelled as 'Titian and Workshop' by the Gallery. You can zoom in on the painting here. The group of three awkward looking boys on the left are considered to be too weak to be by Titian himself, as are the two furthest on the right. The Gallery says they 'must be by the artist's workshop'.
It's just a hunch, but I'm not so sure. We know Titian employed studio assistants quite widely, but personally I find it hard to believe that he would have allowed five portraits to be painted so badly by his workshop, for what was obviously an important commission. If we are to find workshop assistance in such a picture, it is perhaps more likely to be in the drapery or background. In their present condition, the portraits in question (especailly the three on the left) are so awkward as to make one wonder why Titian would allow the picture to leave the studio looking like that, when the rest of it is so good by comparison.
It seems more likely to me that we are dealing here with a question of condition. The five children seem to have suffered so much damage over time that they now look clumsy, and it is thus impossible to make a firm attribution as they presently appear. Furthermore, I've just come across this interesting reference to the picture in the diary of Joseph Farington from 1818, when it belonged to the Duke of Northumberland. Farington records looking at the picture with the artist Benjamin West:
He sd. that picture was totally ruined by a Frenchman who was employed to clean it. He painted over it & substituted His heavy colours for the charming tints of Titian. Nothing remains of the original but a Candle stick & part of the upper corner of the right hand of the picture as seen when looking at it.
The picture was cleaned in the '70s, and much over-paint removed. But I'd love to know more about the condition of the three heads on the left, and the two on the right. One of National Gallery's excellent Technical Bulletins on the picture would be fascinating, with full paint analysis to determine what is and isn't original paint. I haven't looked at the picture with magnifiers and torches, but I'd be willing to place a bet that, at the very least, the three heads on the left are to a substantial degree damaged and re-painted by a later hand.
Restoring Canada's only Titian
July 25 2012
Picture: Ottawa Citizen
Here's a fascinating tale - restoration has revealed that a downgraded Titian at the National Gallery of Canada really is by Titian. Previously, it was thought to be a copy of a version in the Prado, due to its deletorious condition. But work by the Gallery's restorer Stephen Gritt has led to its reattribution. From the Ottawa Citizen:
[The picture] was a mess — dirty, water-damaged (not irreparably), and the victim of earlier, regrettably bad restoration. It looked, Gritt says, like “it was dragged through the hedge backwards.” Its sorry state, and the royal pedigree of the Madrid Titian, contributed to a drift in scholarly opinion, and by the 1980s the Ottawa Titian was considered a copy of the other. Then came a side-by-side comparison in Washington, D.C. in 1991.
“The general consensus of everyone in the room was that the Prado was probably the real one by Titian and the Ottawa painting was a copy of it,” Gritt says. “So pretty much that was the lid on the coffin being tightened.”
The Ottawa Titian, now not a Titian at all, sat in its grimy, faded glory in storage. Curators at another gallery asked to borrow it, but backed out when they saw its condition. Oh, the indignity. Then, one morning, a glimmer of redemption arrived in the daily mail.
In 2003 a Toronto man wrote to the gallery’s then deputy-director, David Franklin, to ask why the only Titian in Canada was not on display. The reply — that scholarly opinion no longer considered it to be a Titian, and that it was too dirty to hang in public — could have been the end of it. Enter Stephen Gritt.
Gritt, who is from London, England and joined the gallery that same year, kept thinking about the tenuous Titian as he restored other important paintings, such as Tom Thomson’s iconic Jack Pine and, in 2007, Veronese’s Petrobelli Altarpiece. (Veronese also painted a portrait of Barbaro.)
In 2009, Gritt formally put up the Titian and began hundreds of hours of work to undo four centuries of degradation. Gradually, the vibrancy of the original portrait emerged – the nobleman’s perhaps pensive expression, with a sliver of crimson red neckpiece showing beneath his dark cloak. This, Gritt believed, was no workshop copy.
The team turned to X-rays, which see beneath the surface of a painting, and they showed evidence of changes made by the artist during production. For example, Gritt says, “you can see him wrestling over how to paint the nose, because Daniele has a peculiar nose.” Such changes made no sense if the Ottawa Titian was a copy, as a copy would directly echo an original.
Gritt brought the X-rays to Madrid and, with a Prado specialist, compared them in light of these new revelations. “Those really subtle shifts, things that were adjusted by millimetres, the Prado painting doesn’t have them,” he says. “It’s really rather direct.” The conclusion was clear. The Madrid Titian is a copy, and the Ottawa portrait is re-established as Titian’s original Barbaro.
You can see a video of Stephen Gritt talking about the restoration process here. Rather unhelpfully, there is no image of the painting on the National Gallery of Canada's website, so we can make no examination of the attribution ourselves. But if the Canada picture really is by Titian, then it would appear that this is another example of scholars not understanding condition. In my experience, a picture's condition is the number one reason attributions get wrongly downgraded.
Undertsanding condition should be the first skill any serious art historian aspires to learn (at least those studying Old Masters). If I were teaching the art historians of the future, I would make it compulsory for every student to spend a term in a conservation studio. You cannot judge any painting until you are sure you are looking at the artist's original intentions - and it is fact that most Old Masters have at some point suffered from either a degree of damage, or worse, the attentions of later ham-fisted restorers. It's interesting to note that in this case, Harold Wethey catalogued the Canada picture as Titian in full in his 1971 Titian catalogue raisonne.
Please, don't try this at home
July 24 2012
Yikes - lurking on the internet is this video, which tells you to clean your painting with a baguette. Yes, a baguette. Over four thousand people have watched it. Which means that someone, somewhere has wrecked their favourite Old Master with a piece of bread.
Update - a reader writes:
OMG!!!
Titian studio piece restored at Dulwich
July 10 2012
Picture: Dulwich Picture Gallery
A new display opens at Dulwich Picture Gallery today, showcasing the conservation of a Titian workshop piece, Venus and Adonis. The exhibition will:
...celebrate the conservation of Venus and Adonis, a painting produced by Titian’s workshop after the celebrated prototype painted by Titian for Philip II, King of Spain in 1554. The painting has been in storage since the early twentieth century and was in desperate need of restoration, as can be seen from the photograph. The removal of discoloured varnishes and retouchings has revealed the work to be an evocative rendition of an episode from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, centring upon the last meeting of the ill-fated lovers Venus and Adonis. This was the most famous of Titian’s poesies, his series of mythological paintings that he envisaged as visual equivalents to poetry. The Dulwich version stands as an example of early artistic massproduction, providing striking comparison to the Andy Warhol Portfolios exhibition.
Restoring Gilbert Stuart
July 3 2012
Video: AP
At the National Gallery in Washington, a series of 16 Gilbert Stuarts are being restored.
Want to find a Raphael?
June 20 2012
Picture: National Gallery
The National Gallery has a new micro-site to show you how.
Extreme souvenir hunting
June 12 2012
Whilst looking for a video for the story below on the Trevi Fountain, I came across this choice piece of cultural tourism, at the Moro Fountain in Rome.
Things you shouldn't use as a coaster
June 8 2012
Picture: Christie's
Top of the list - drawings by Rembrandt. This slightly soiled example is yours for £50,000-£80,000 at Christie's next month. Of course, if it could be proved to have been Rembrandt's own coaster, then add a nought!
Update - it might indeed by Rembrandt's coaster (of sorts), for Christie's write:
The circular stain is an iron-gall ink stain, probably from the base of an ink-pot, so (while we can never know for sure) there is certainly a chance that the stain could be from the artist’s studio.
'Framing is presentation, not covering.'
June 1 2012
Following my post of the 18th Century miniaturist William Wood's hanging instructions, a reader sends in this note on the back of a painting by John Bratby. The last line is particularly noteworthy - how often have I found pictures shrunken by an over-generous frame rebate.
Prince Charles and Dumfries House
May 31 2012
Picture: ITV
In case you didn't see it, there was a good programme on ITV the other day on Prince Charles' decision to buy and save Dumfries House for the nation. You can watch it again here.
Briefly, in 2004 the Marquess of Bute decided he would sell the mansion and its contents, which included innumerable pieces of furniture made by Thomas Chippendale for the house. After much fundraising, a consortium led by the Prince bought the whole estate for £45m at the last minute. The fleet of trucks carrying everything from the pictures to the doorstops for auction at Christie's, with the catalogues already printed and mailed out, was turned back on the motorway at 1am. It was that close.
Now, the house has been restored and is open to visitors. The majority of the cash borrowed to buy the estate has been raised. In short, all is well, and Prince Charles has done a very Good Thing. You wouldn't think that, of course, if you read the Daily Mail, which called the venture a "£20m banana skin... a colossal error — one fuelled by vanity and hubris... a disastrous deal [and one which has left the Prince with] egg all over his face".
Some egg, some face.
An artist's instructions
May 31 2012
Picture: BG
Interesting to find these strict instructions on both viewing and preservation on the back of a portrait drawing by William Wood (1769-1810).
Every conservator's nightmare
May 29 2012
Picture: The Sun
An artist in the US has taken to painting the Queen in beer and curry.
A fragment of Henrietta Maria's lost Guido Reni?
May 29 2012
Pictures: Sotheby's
There's an intriguing lot coming up at Sotheby's New York next month, catalogued as 'Attributed to Guido Reni'. The picture purports to be a fragment from Guido Reni's long-lost 1637-40 painting Bacchus and Ariadne on the Island of Naxos, which was commissioned by Queen Henrietta Maria. It never arrived in London because of the Civil War, and not long after Henrietta Maria's death was cut up due to its salacious nature. The composition is known from an engraving (below). From the Sotheby's catalogue:
The present composition would appear to be the right hand extremity of Reni's original Bacchus and Ariadne, showing two faun followers of Bacchus with Silenus beyond, on his donkey, supported by two putti. Upon firsthand inspection of the work both Keith Christiansen and David Stone recognized the hand of Guido Reni in the faces of the fauns and in the hands holding the tambourine though suggested, as with the majority of Guido's large scale compositions, the likely involvement of his studio in the execution of certain passages. Camillo Manzitti, meanwhile is in favor of a full attribution to Guido Reni, believing this work to indeed be a fragment of the original. He furthermore suggested that the addition to the right edge of the painting was executed in order to centralize the figures within the composition andto avoid any concealment of Silenus by an eventual framing of the work.
Although there are indeed variances in detail between Bolognini's engraving and the present composition, these would appear incidental. The drapery over the hip of the right hand figure may have been added later and so too the still life of flask and glass of wine, perhaps subsequent to the painting's division in order to bestow the fragment with the more cohesive and traditional composition of a Bacchanal. Yet the presence of a tambourine, under the feet of the larger faun and still visible to the naked eye below the paint surface, provides a compelling argument in favor ofthe fragment's origin. This corresponds with the engraving closely and may have been covered over at the time the other changes were made. This Two Fauns in a Bacchic Dance is not the first fragment from the composition tosurvive; in 2002, Denis Mahon and Andrea Emiliani discovered a fragment portraying the beautiful and vulnerable figure of Ariadne, now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna.The addition to the left hand edge of the Ariadnecanvas shows that, far from being obliterated, the canvas had been carefully cut to preserve the figures, presumablyto facilitate their sale as individual fragments. It too is painted on a heavy weave canvas that appears to correspond to that used in the present picture.
The estimate is $100,000-150,000. The picture has been given several cleaning tests, presumably to tempt the trade. It's hard to be conclusive from the photo, but the drapery over the larger faun's groin appears to be a later addition. In which case, the painting is closer to the engraving. I find the case quite convincing.
