According to the March 13, 2012 “Arts, Briefly” column of The New York Times, the first data obtained by probes sent through holes drilled in Vasari’s “Battle of Marciano” (Hall of the Five Hundred, Palazzo Vecchio) indicate the presence of a black pigment of the type found in the Mona Lisa. It will be interesting to see what further data is obtained that will corroborate Maurizio Seracini’s assertion that Leonardo’s “The Battle of Anghiari” still exists behind Vasari’s work.
Author: Rebecca Rushfield
Conservator uncovers an early 20th century fraud; debunks myth about a 19th century painting
A February 12, 2012 article in The New York Times (“Mrs. Lincoln, I Presume? Well, As It Turns Out, Portrait Is Deemed Hoax”, by Patricia Cohen) announced that the portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln owned by the Illinois Historical Society since 1976 and displayed in the governor’s mansion is a fraud. Said to have been painted in secret by Francis Bicknell Carpenter as a surprise for the President but never presented to him because of his assassination, the painting is actually an anonymous 19th century portrait of an unknown woman that was doctored in the 1920s and then sold to Lincoln’s descendants. Conservator Barry Bauman who was given the painting to clean in 2011 and who had seen it previously in the 1970s when it was brought to the Art Institute of Chicago for treatment, was instrumental in revealing the truth about the painting.
Help save Giotto’s frescoes
If plans go through and an auditorium and a multistory building are constructed close to the Scrovegni Chapel (also known as the Arena Chapel) in Padua, home to Giotto’s frescos, the stability of the building and its decorations will be compromised. An international campaign is under way to postpone the construction until the Chapel’s foundations can be fortified. English language information about the campaign can be found at http://storiedellarte.com/2012/02/save-giotto-english-version.html
The physical enjoyment of works of art
On January 21, 2012, the Walters Art Museum (Baltimore, MD) opened an exhibit, “Touch and the Enjoyment of Sculpture: Exploring the Appeal of Renaissance Statuettes“, designed in conjunction with the Johns Hopkins University Brain Science Institute to explore the implications of tactile perception for the enjoyment of sculpture. The exhibit provides museum visitors the rare opportunity to touch twenty-two (replica) statuettes. If we conservators were to be candid, wouldn’t a great many of us admit that one of the things that drew us to the field was the opportunity to touch and hold works of art?
Does Kurt Vonnegut’s satire of an artist and his materials still resonate?
While not a new novel, Bluebeard, by Kurt Vonnegut (1987), the “autobiography” of Rabo Karabekian, an artist who was associated with the most famous mid-20th century Abstract Expressionist painters is a cautionary tale about the use of untested art matrials. Karabekian himself is best known for the fact that due to unforeseen chemical reactions between the sizing of his canvases and the Sateen Dura-Luxe acrylic wall-paint he used “whose colors according to advertisements of the day, would ‘… outlive the smile on the Mona Lisa”, all of his paintings destroyed themselves when the paint detached from the canvas not too long after the works were completed. Moreover, Sateen Dura-Luxe has been found to degrade over time into a very deadly poison and is almost impossible to dispose of legally.
Are today’s artists more conscious about permanence and safety of their materials than Vonnegut’s fictional artist of the 1960s?
We Need to Leave Some Work for Future Generations
In the last few months of 2011, Segolene Bergeon Langle and Jean-Pierre Cuzin, two members of the advisory committee overseeing the Louvre’s restoration of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Virgin and Child with St. Anne”, resigned in protest of the way that the project had been conducted.
According to a report in the New York Times (“Leonardo Painting’s Restoration Bitterly Divides Art Experts”, by Elaine Sciolino, January 4, 2012), the Louvre is under pressure to attract audiences with blockbuster shows for which masterpieces from its collection are often spruced up. As “Virgin and Child with St. Anne” is to be part of an exhibit that opens in March, the implication is that the Louvre let economic concerns drive its conservation policy– despite the Louvre’s assertions that the cleaning was necessary and that the dispute is solely about aesthetics.
Bergeon Langle has said that “despite great progress in our competence we need to be driven by modesty. Better and more controllable materials are yet to be discovered. We need to leave some work for future generations.” While her remark may be true about the treatment of masterpieces, with all of the lesser known art works in need of treatment, is there not something a bit disingenuous about it?
Will she have time to do any conservation work once she meets her prince?
According to a profile in The New Yorker (“Letter from Rome: The Renovation”, by Ariel Levy, November 28, 2011), Principessa Rita Boncompagni Ludovisi (the former Rita Jenrette) is writing a thriller titled “Caravaggio’s Treasure”. She says that it is about “a blond art conservator with impossible long legs who is totally unaware of her good looks which make women hate her. She is sent to Rome where she meets a handsome prince.” One wonders if the conservator will have time to do any conservation work once she meets her prince. More seriously, one wonders whether such images of conservators do much to promote the seriousness of our work.
But what if the plan had validity?
As reported in The New York Times (“Methods for Finding a Lost Fresco by Leonardo Lead to a Protest”, by Elisabetta Povoledo, Decmeber 7, 2011), three hundred scholars haave signed a petititon asking the Mayor of Florence to put a stop to a project led by the National Geographic Society and the Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (UC-San Diego) to locate Leonardo da Vinci’s lost “Battle of Anghiari” behind a fresco by Giorgio Vasari in the Palazzo Vecchio. As of this time, six holes just large enough to permit the entry of a four millimeter endoscopic proble have been drilled in previously damaged areas of Vasari’s fresco (no original paint has been removed). Many of the petitioners feel that the project has little validity. But what if it had? How important must the potential results of an investigation be for it to be acceptible to disturb or damage an existing work of art?
Fear of Forgers
In an article about the use of the catalogue raisonne to defend the integrity of an artist’s oeuvre (“Defending the Integrity of an Artist’s Life’s Work”,The Wall Street Journal, December 7, 2011), Jack Flam notes that when connoisseurship, provenance and historical context are not enough to place a work in or out of an artist’s oeuvre, forensic testing is undetaken to determine whether the materials and techniques are in line with the artist’s practice and time period. He then states, “But because disclosing such information might provide a road map for future forgers, most caaalogue raisonne projects do not give detailed reasons for a work’s exclusion.” Should the fear of providing tips to forgers preclude the public sharing of information about artists’ materials and techniques?
Another tale of love and loss and art conservation
Fugitive Blue, by Claire Thomas
Allen and Unwin
2009
A young painting conservator working in a studio in Melbourne, Austalia comes to treat a fifteenth-century panel painted with large quanitities of ultramarine pigment (which makes the title quite bewildering as ultramarine is not a fugitive pigment). As she restores the painting, her fascination with it and its history grows and we learn the story of the painting from its creation until its arrival in Australia after World War II as one of the possessions of a Greek family.
As with many similar novels, there is a love story involving the conservator who has more trouble taking care of her life than works of art.
A sample quote: “I spent so much of time restoring things, trying to reclaim their original beauty. All day, I looked at deteriorating objects with their parts exposed like a person with her heart on the outside. I could touch these paintings, make a decision and watch them transform. Done. But then there was us.”