Category: Conservation in the News

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?

The following information was received from the International Conservation Centre – Citta’ di Roma (the Center), Old Acre, Israel.  For further information on this and other projects or  to visit the restoration site, contact Mrs. Shelley-Anne Peleg, Director, International Conservation Center, Citta’ di Roma, at shelleypeleg@gmail.com.

A multi-phase mural conservation project is currently taking place at the International Conservation Centre – Citta’ di Roma (the Center), Old Acre, Israel.  A team of skilled professionals from two conservation institutions joined forces on this unique project, which includes practical mural conservation, a series of related workshops, master classes and on-going professional cooperation.

The Center in Acre and the Istituto Veneto per Beni Culturali in Venice, are both hubs of conservation in their respective countries, Israel and Italy.  Now, under the auspices and support of the Italian Embassy in Israel and the Italian Cultural Institute in Haifa, they cooperate on a conservation project and training programs.

The practical conservation of the ceiling at the Center’s building, a grand house in the Pisan Quarter of Old Acre, commenced in early November. Experts from both institutions inspected the mural, documented it, and carried out tests and analysis. They then jointly constructed a relevant intervention plan, which formed the basis for conservation work currently carried out. Work is expected to continue until February 2012 and involves Italian restorers, under regular guidance and inspection by experts from the Israel Antiquity Authority (IAA) Conservation Department.

Alongside the practical conservation, the Center and the Venice Istituto run open workshops and master classes. Those study days are directed at both professionals in related fields and interested individuals with a background in conservation. During the last open workshop, (November 23^rd – 24^th, 2011), architect – restorer Paolo Mariani from Venice, examined the relations between monuments degradation and its painted masterpieces, the degradation process of wall painting, and relevant restoration methods. His lectures were followed by specific reference to the painted ceiling currently restored at the Center.

Participants on the workshop had the privilege of additional professional visitors that are leading figures at the IAA: Mr. Raanan Kislev- Head of the Conservation Departments, Kamil Saari – Head of Research and Inspection Department, Jacques Neauger -Head of Artistic Conservation. The workshop was also attended by Mr. Giovanni Pillonca, Director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Haifa, who expressed his delight with the workshop’s content and suggested presenting a summary of the proceedings in a lecture at the Cultural Institute in Haifa.  The workshop was conducted in the usual Center community-participation manner, hosting Father Quirico Calella from Acre’s Fransiscan Church and local women residents who provided the catering of traditional Acre delicacies.

Mr. Ranzo Ravagnan, Director of the Istituto Veneto per Beni Culturali and Mrs. Shelley-Anne Peleg, Director of the International Conservation Center, both expressed their delight with this form of cooperation between the institutions they lead. Future cooperation programs will include additional open workshops as well as students and experts exchange programs.

 

[WASHINGTON, DC] Conservation began in October 2011 on a rare work of wax, seashells, silk, printed papers, and exotic wood created for Martha and George Washington in the early 1780s by Samuel Fraunces, owner of New York’s legendary Queen Charlotte’s Head Tavern, known today as Fraunces Tavern. Fraunces was an ambitious entrepreneur and served as steward of the Washingtons’ presidential household in Philadelphia.

Conservators, curators, and art handlers will meticulously crate the rare and intricate tableau for transport from its home at Tudor Place Historic House and Garden to the studio of a waxworks conservator. The $37,400 restoration, funded by The Richard C. von Hess Foundation of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, will take conservation specialists two years to complete. The conservation project will entail light cleaning of the all the materials in the tableau. The delicate original figures will be removed from the case and preserved for future study, while exact reproductions of the figures and their elegant costumes will be installed in the tableau when it is returned for exhibition.

“Without this conservation, it would soon have been too late to save the tableau,” said Tudor Place Executive Director Leslie Buhler. After 230 years of fluctuating temperatures and humidity, some rough handling during the Civil War, and a 20th-century home-repair effort, it suffered irreparable deterioration.”

The intricate tableau depicts a famous classical scene almost certainly chosen to reflect the first president’s long years of service in the Revolutionary War: the parting of the Trojan warrior, Hector, from his wife, Andromache, and their infant son, Astyanax.

“It stands out not just for its famous provenance and association with historic events, but for its construction and materials, its figures’ elaborate silk costumes, and its connection to 18th-century theater, literature, and entertainment,” noted Tudor Place Curator Erin Kuykendall. Fraunces crafted the gift for Mrs. Washington and presented it to her husband in 1783 at the general’s formal farewell to his Revolutionary War officers. It took 15 months of transport by ship and carriage for the piece to safely reach Mount Vernon.

Fraunces dressed his figures in elaborate 18th-century silk costumes embellished with silver threads. Hector, Andromache, the nursemaid and Astyanax, are set in front of an elaborate grotto; an architectural temple portico, domestic animals and large flowers made from wax, shells, fabrics, mica, and paper fill the case and frame the theatrical scene. All are housed in the original hand-built box of pine with mahogany veneers and glass panes on the front and sides. Fraunces dressed his figures in embroidered silk and gold thread. Here, Hector’s elaborate tunic.

Also noteworthy is that the Tudor Place piece is the only waxwork known to have been made by a man. Crafting miniature wax figures and dressing them in contemporary costume was a popular ladies’ pastime in 18th-century England and France and the American colonies. Fraunces’ interest in the material is also evident from the life-sized wax figures he exhibited at his popular Vaux-Hall Gardens, a fashionable pleasure garden along the Hudson River.

At Mount Vernon, the Washingtons placed the scene in their bed chamber atop a chest-on-chest that, like the waxwork, came to Tudor Place after Martha Washington’s death. Fraunces’s only failing as a servant, according to an account by Martha Washington’s grandson George Washington Parke Custis, was being too “ambitious, fond of display, and regardless of expense”-traits clearly reflected in this ornate grotto-work he created for the family he adulated.

Tudor Place Historic House and Garden, a National Historic Landmark in Georgetown’s Historic District, is a house museum distinguished for its neoclassical architecture, decorative arts collection and 5.5-acre garden.  Built in 1816, it was home to Thomas Peter and his wife, Martha Custis Peter, granddaughter of Martha Washington, and housed six generations of the Peter family over the course of 180 years. Open to the public since 1988, the historic home is one of our nation’s historic gems.

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?

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?

“I can tell you where almost every monument is. There’s over 200. It’s kind of all in my head, but we also have a database. It includes all of the structures, both monuments and architectural features, buildings — anything that’s a built feature. That gets reviewed every five or six years to determine the condition of something. And if we find that the condition is fair, that becomes a priority to work on it to make it good…”

Read more at www.washingtonpost.com.

Excerpts from The Oregonian.

After a lifetime in Italy (except for 15 years at the Louvre in Paris, where she was taken in 1800 as booty from the Napoleonic Wars), [Titian’s “La Bella” has] crossed the ocean from her luxuriant quarters in the Galleria Palatina of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence for a brief tour. Following stops at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, she’s taken up lodging through Jan. 29 at the Portland Art Museum, in a second-floor gallery that is ordinarily given over to the display of ancient and classical objects and art.

In the 16th century or the 21st, La Bella is beautiful. For many visitors, that will be enough. For historians and other scholars, who want to know everything about the past and are dauntingly aware that much, probably most, of it will forever be a mystery, the stakes seem higher.

… Titian used this model, or this invented idea of beauty, in several paintings. The face of “La Bella” is also recognizable in his famous reclining nude, “Venus of Urbino,” at the Uffizi in Florence, from 1538; in the bare-shouldered and bare-breasted “Woman in a Fur Coat,” at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, from 1536; and in the same year’s “Woman With a Plumed Hat,” at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.

One of the reasons “La Bella” is visiting the United States for the first time is to show off her most recent conservation, which has literally put the blush back in her cheeks.

Titian’s portrait has had the good fortune over the centuries to be cleaned both regularly and carefully — “rather than being subjected to complicated and invasive restorations, the painting has instead been the object of constant maintenance,” Gabriella Incerpi writes in the exhibition catalog — and that meticulousness has made things easier for modern conservators, who seek the least obtrusive ways to strip away the dulling effects of decades of varnish and restore a painting’s original brightness and tones.
The process can be controversial, as the uproar over the gleaming new colors in the Sistine Chapel suggests: In cleaning an old work of art, do conservators also eliminate its history? As Ferriso puts it: “You don’t want to strip away the pigment. On the other hand, you do want to be able to see the painting.”

You can see “La Bella” — beautifully. And, despite the restored brilliance of her colors and the immediacy of her presence, in no way as if she were born yesterday.

Up close, you can glimpse the painting’s craquelure — the tiny patterns of cracking in the oil paint as it gradually shrinks on the canvas — but not overmuch. It ages but does not dilute the painting, which with its restoration has become not so much new as revivified, showing its age in the best possible light.

Whoever she was, “La Bella” has aged well. She’s still a looker.