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Michelangelo’s disintegrating frescoes

As we predicted at the time of the last restoration of the Sistine chapel ceiling, by removing all of the glue-painting applied by Michelangelo to finish off and heighten the effects of his frescoes, the Vatican’s restorers exposed the bare fresco remains for the first time in their history to new dangers from the atmospheric pollution that is exacerbated by huge numbers of paying visitors.

Then, 2 million visitors entered the chapel every year. Now, that figure is 6 million.The Vatican has been carrying out secret attempts to remove disfiguring calcium deposits building up over the remains of Michelangelo’s painting. These deposits are caused when moisture given off by tourists and air-borne pollutants are absorbed by the plaster. This now-acknowledged process will also activate, as we specifically contended, the remnants of the cleaning agents (sodium and ammonia) that were washed into the frescoes during the rinse cycles of their last so-called restoration and conservation treatments. At the time, the use of the ferociously aggressive cleaning agent AB 57 was justified by the Vatican on the grounds that it was necessary to remove, among other things…ordinary solvent-resistant calcium deposits that had built up over the centuries in parts of the ceiling exposed to leaks in the roof.

Then, the Vatican promised that special air-conditioning systems would protect the newly exposed fresco surfaces in perpetuity. That system had failed even before the Vatican recently celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the end of the last restorations of Michelangelo’s paintings. Today, as the new physical threat is seen to be turning the frescoes white, the Vatican promises new, improved air conditioning units (from the same firm). To counter the new pale appearance, the Vatican recently installed thousands of LED lights, each individually attuned to heighten the colours in Michelangelo’s painting. Michelangelo’s now twice-injured painting has been left a colourised but still lucrative wreck – and an EU-funded (EUR 867 000) showcase (“This made the Vatican City’s Sistine Chapel the ideal venue for LED4ART”) for a company that shows in its advertisements that it has no idea what the Sistine Chapel looks like.

We said at the time that the restoration constituted a crime against art. Now, the Vatican promises to limit the numbers of visitors inside the chapel to 2,000 at any one time. But that means allowing a crowd as big as a full capacity audience at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London, to pack into the small chapel all day long. The Vatican’s administrators – who have known of the present problems since 2010 – now concede that the glue coatings (that were in truth Michelangelo’s own final painted adjustments) had served as a protective barrier against all air-borne pollutants. The tills will continue to ring. Art lovers remain weeping. Shame on the Vatican’s administrators.

For our previous coverage, see:
Misreading Visual Evidence ~ No 2: Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Ceiling;
The Sistine Chapel Restorations: Part I ~ Setting the Scene, Packing Them In;
The Sistine Chapel Restorations, Part II: How to Take a Michelangelo Sibyl Apart, from Top to Toes;
The Sistine Chapel Restorations, Part II – CODA: The Remarkable Responses to Our Evidence of Injuries; and Thomas Hoving’s Rant of Denial;
The Sistine Chapel Restorations, Part III: Cutting Michelangelo Down to Size;
The Twilight of a God: Virtual Reality in the Vatican;
Sistina Progress and Tate Transgressions;
ArtWatch Stock-taking and the Sistine Chapel Conservation Debacle;
Coming to Life: Frankenweenie – A Black and White Michelangelo for Our Times

11th November 2014. Michael Daley

UPDATE: 16 November 2014

While the Vatican now admits the hitherto concealed fact of the damage that is being caused to Michelangelo’s frescoes by the massive increase of tourist numbers, it remains in denial about the destruction during the last restoration of the final a secco adjustments that Michelangelo had made to those frescoes. That autograph last-stage painting – which was observed and described with perfect, detailed clarity by the painter Charles Heath Wilson in the 1881 (second) edition of his book Life and Works of Michelangelo Buonarroti – is characterised, preposterously, and against the evidence of all contemporary and subsequent copies of the Sistine ceiling, as consisting of “centuries of built-up candle wax, dirt and smoke”, as if such substances might somehow have disported themselves along the lines of Michelangelo’s design so as to reinforce his modelling and depict shadows cast by his figures. This latest apologia is carried in an Associated Press article “Sistine Chapel frescoes turning white ~ Humidity, tourists’ CO2 to blame”.
A paperback facsimile of a 1923 edition of Wilson’s milestone book (in which he describes his close examination of the ceiling on a special portable scaffold) is now available. It is time for the Vatican to acknowledge that Michelangelo had indeed finished his frescoes with secco painting, and that its curators, restorers and conservation scientists had blundered badly and inexplicably when, having judged Michelangelo’s specific, purposive pictorial enhancements and modifications to be nothing other than arbitrary accumulations of polluting material, removed it – and, thereby, exposed the lime plaster surfaces of the frescoes to their present dangers. That initial error and the subsequent falsification of art history that was made on its back, have both now been maintained for two decades.


How the Metropolitan Museum of Art gets hold of the world’s most precious and vulnerable treasures

13 April 2014

An exhibition of stained glass that has been removed from “England’s historic Canterbury Cathedral” has arrived at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, after being shown at the Getty Museum in California. The show (“Radiant Light: Stained Glass from Canterbury Cathedral at the Cloisters”) is comprised of six whole windows from the clerestory of the cathedral’s choir, east transepts, and Trinity Chapel. These single monumental seated figures anticipate in their grandeur and gravity the prophets depicted by Michelangelo on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. They are the only surviving parts of an original cycle of eighty-six ancestors of Christ, once one of the most comprehensive stained-glass cycles known in art history. (See Figs. 1 – 5.)

The Met boasts that this exhibition of “Masterpieces of Romanesque art…represents the first time they have left the cathedral precincts since their creation in 1178-80”. Who, then, gave permission for the loan of such fragile, precious and architecturally integral material?

The New York Times says of the exhibition that it “Seemed to have been beamed down from on high”, when it undoubtedly had been flown and vibrated down from on high in an aeroplane. The museum world repeatedly offers assurances that modern air transport is perfectly safe for moving treasures around, even though, as the world now well appreciates, aeroplanes do sometimes crash or disappear. Aside from in-flight hazards, works of art get taken by roads to and from airports where they disappear from curatorial view and supervision into high-security cargo depots, sometimes being injured by forklift trucks, and the like, in the process.

The bureaucrats of “Glasgow Life” who administer Glasgow’s museums recently argued (successfully) in Scotland’s Parliament that, as Sir William Burrell had permitted loans from his bequeathed collection within Britain, and as the most dangerous part of lending works is dismantling them in one place and reassembling them in another, overturning his prohibition on foreign travels would be no more dangerous than moving works within Britain. The bureaucrats were similarly successful in overturning Burrell’s prohibition on lending certain categories of fragile works at all, within or outside Britain, such as glass, tapestries and pastels, by arguing that advances in modern packaging skills meant that even the most fragile work could now safely be moved subject to prior conservation examinations.

With the Burrell Collection we know precisely who will carry responsibility for any future travel injuries or losses but with the Canterbury treasures, who at the Cathedral (or in the Church) would take responsibility were these windows to be harmed or lost during their trans-Atlantic travels?

Were these windows insured for their travels, and, if so, what price was put on them?

Has the Church received any payment for this loan, and, if so, how much?

Were the six windows which travelled from London to California and from California to New York flown in separate aeroplanes – as were the three (of ten) gilded panels from Ghiberti’s Florence Baptistery doors (dubbed “The Gates of Paradise” by Michelangelo) when they were sent from Florence to Atlanta; from Atlanta to Chicago; from Chicago to the Metropolitan Museum, New York; from New York to Seattle; and, finally, from Seattle back to Florence? (See Figs. 6 and 7.)

The Metropolitan Museum seems to be a common destination point on many of the most ambitious and hazardous inter-continental tours of art (it will receive the current Tate show of Matisse’s monumental, previously too-fragile to loan, cut-out paper works). In the case of the Burrell Collection even before the Scottish Parliament had heard all the evidence arrangements for an international tour of works were in motion. On 10 September 2013, Joan McAlpine, SNP, the Chair (“Convener”) of the scrutinising Parliamentary committee, disclosed in The Scotsman that “Sir Angus Grossart was giving some hints [the day before, during evidence to the committee’s first session] of the kind of people he’s been speaking to in terms of a world tour…I know they’re talking to the Met in New York, and from the point of view of the people at Glasgow Life, that’s an opportunity to enhance the reputation of the collection, the city and Scotland.”

Crucially, Grossart’s moves were not being made under the aegis of the Burrell Trustees, who are charged with protecting the collection according to the terms of Burrell’s fabulously generous bequest (the 8,000 bequeathed works still constitute the largest gift ever made to a city), but by “Glasgow Renaissance”, an interceding body set up by Glasgow Life expressly to “oversee the Burrell Collection’s immediate future”, advise on the refurbishment of the leaking building which has suffered decades of neglect, and to facilitate the fund-raising, profile-heightening international tour of key works. Sir Angus Grossart, a member of Glasgow Life’s board of directors is the appointed chair of Burrell Renaissance.

In January 2013 it was reported (Herald Scotland) that the first, six months-long stop of the tour would be at the British Museum, whose director, Neil MacGregor, had been co-opted by Glasgow Life to serve on Burrell Renaissance (– as had been his fellow Glaswegian, Lord Kerr, the deputy chairman of Scottish Power). Grossart claimed in evidence given to the Scottish Parliament’s Burrell committee that no conflict of interest existed because no other venue in London had been thought appropriate to receive Burrell works – which is to say, not the Victoria and Albert Museum; not the Royal Academy; nor even the Hayward Gallery where an exhibition “Treasures from the Burrell Collection” was mounted in 1975.

When we appeared for ArtWatch UK as one of only two opposing witnesses before the Scottish Parliamentary committee (the other being Jeremy Warren of the Wallace Collection), we pointed out that the Metropolitan Museum’s present director, Thomas Campbell, had said of a major exhibition he had organised, “No one but the Met could have pulled off the exhibition of Renaissance tapestries we had a few years ago…We bribed and cajoled and twisted the arms of institutions around the world – well, we didn’t bribe of course – but politically it was very complicated negotiating the loan of these objects, which came from the British Royal Collection, the Louvre, the Hermitage, the Vatican and were just all absolute masterpieces.” (“Museum: Behind the Scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art”, Danny Danziger, 2007, p.40.)

It will now be greatly less complicated for Burrell’s fragile glass, tapestries, lace and pastels to be sent to the Metropolitan Museum – or anywhere else. Where Jeremy Warren of the Wallace Collection had testified “It is disingenuous to suggest that when one moves a 500-year-old tapestry from one country to another – perhaps taking it across the Atlantic – one is not shortening its life”, Councillor Archie Graham, Glasgow Council’s deputy Leader and the chairperson of Glasgow Life, thrilled at the prospect of “unlock[ing] the potential of this outstanding collection” and of being able thereby to “realise the full benefits of his gift.” We were not surprised to read Jackie Wullschlager’s report in the Financial Times (“Scottish independence”, 5/6 April 2014) that within months of overturning Burrell’s terms of bequest, a themed exhibition of works from within the collection (“Bellini to Boudin: Five Centuries of Painting in the Burrell Collection”) should open with all of Degas’s “glorious, delicate, light-sensitive” pastels shown in their entirety for the first time in a gallery in which water was dripping from the still unfixed roof “the day before” the show opened – that is to say, opened while on the watch of co-opted art world big-wig guarantors, the likes of Sir Angus Grossart and Mr Neil MacGregor. We did not, however, expect, when opposing the attempt to harvest the benefits of a collection bequeathed to the city of Glasgow, so soon to see the Church of England recklessly playing the same value-harvesting game with an irreplaceable part of the fabric of a cathedral and of our national heritage.

Michael Daley

Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com

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Above, Figs. 1-5: Windows removed from Canterbury Cathedral that depict the Ancestors of Christ and are presently on show at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, after an earlier exhibition at the Getty Museum, California. The Ancestors shown here are, successively from the top, Lamech (detail), Jareth, Lamech, Noah and Abraham.
Above, Figs. 6 and 7: Top, one of Lorenzo Ghiberti’s monumental gilded bronze doors (“The Gates of Paradise”) for the Baptistery in the Piazza del Duomo in Florence during restoration. Above, one of the three (of ten) panels that were unveiled in Florence in 1452 and were sent on tour to Atlanta, Chicago, New York and Seattle in the United States during 2007 and 2008. This panel is Ghiberti’s famous perspectival tour de force depiction of Jacob and Esau. It was said that the purpose of the exhibition was as a way of saying thank you to the young Americans who helped in Florence after the damaging floods of 1966, and, as “a way of allowing a wider audience to view the impressive abilities of the Italian restorers who have returned Ghiberti’s masterpiece to its original [sic] splendor through more than twenty-five years of painstaking and careful work.”


The Twilight of a God: Virtual Reality in the Vatican

12 December 2013

It seems that there is to be yet another make-over at the Sistine Chapel. It seems that, for the Vatican, you can never have too much colour, or too bright a supply of lights – or too many paying visitors – in the Pope’s private chapel. It seems that aesthetics are now under the control of technicians and bean-counters. Michelangelo is to suffer further indignities. The recent falsification of his work by “restoration” is now to be artfully compounded by bespoke hi-tech boutique lighting.

On 7 November, the Times’ business section broke the news that the Sistine Chapel is about to be illuminated by no fewer than 7,000 new LED lights (by courtesy of technical wizards at Osram and EU Research funding). Their purpose is to “enhance” the experience for visitors (see Fig. 1, “Judgement day for a bright idea”). In the FT Weekend Magazine it is claimed that the 5m tourists who now pack into the chapel each year will “have a far better view” (Mind/Science: “Illumination: New Light on Michelangelo”, 30 November 2013). This is on the grounds that, while the present lighting creates a “low-contrast twilight that fails to bring out the colours in Michelangelo’s masterpiece”, the replacement will facilitate “a completely new diversity of colour”. This diversity is to be the product of artificially selective sources of lighting, quite unlike anything found in nature and unlike previous systems of artificial light used in churches and chapels.

There are two things wrong here. The first is that Michelangelo’s colours have already been forced chemically into a false chromatic intensity by the misconceived and radically intrusive restorations of the 1980s and early 1990s. As we have repeatedly demonstrated (see bottom right), the homogenised applications of solvents-saturated cleaning gels stripped away the artist’s own tonal modifications of colour and intensification of shadows, even though there was abundant evidence that this part of the frescoes was original work that had been recorded during the artist’s own lifetime and throughout the frescoes’ history. (On the aesthetically destructive impact of the cleaning method, see Figs. 3 and 4.) Second, this proposed attempt to flood the Chapel with artificial light constitutes a bizarre “own-goal” act of revisionism on the part of the Vatican.

That is, the defence offered at the time of the controversial restoration was that the new and startling colour effects (which many critics likened to Disney animation stills) had been calculated by Michelangelo himself so that his images would cut through the gloom of a smokey chapel. On that initial rationale there can be no aesthetic or historical justification today for flooding the Chapel with artificial stage-lighting that is to be ten times more powerful than the existing artificial lights.

In the December 1987 Apollo, the Vatican’s official spokesman/consultant on art historical matters, Prof. Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt, conceded that the “transformation of Michelangelo’s mysterious dark frescoes, half visible but so familiar (at least from reproductions), into blazing, colouristic pyrotechnics… is attracting the most public attention and controversy.” Nonetheless, she insisted that Michelangelo had “modelled his forms by means of colour” – this, despite the fact that his contemporaries had been united in the contrary conviction that he had done so by his unprecedented powers of light and shade. One apologist declared in December 1987 that all previous Michelangelo scholarship had been prey to what he dubbed “the Darkness Fallacy and the Sculptural Fallacy”. It was further claimed that the revolutionary chemical excavation of the “New Michelangelo” was “one of the great revelations of our time” and that it required nothing less than the rewriting of art history.

Given this recent history, might Prof. Brandt – or any of the restoration’s supporters at that time – ever have imagined that within a couple of decades the Vatican would conclude that the chromatically brilliant “New Michelangelo” would require artificial lighting ten times more powerful than that installed at the time of the restoration? If that seems inconceivable, let us turn the question round. Has there been in recent years any loss of chromatic intensity in the bare, stripped-down fresco surfaces that were left exposed for the first time in their history to the air-borne pollution of Rome? If not, why, as the FT reports, was it thought necessary to analyse Michelangelo’s surviving pigments so that each one of the 7,000 new lights might be individually attuned to a spectrum that suits the said, specific pigments precisely as and where they are encountered on the present ceiling – and in the present “twilight that fails to bring out the colours in Michelangelo’s masterpiece”?

This proposed adjustment of lights for the purpose of chromatic enhancement rather creepily resembles the use of projected light to simulate the original condition of colours that had faded in Rothko’s Harvard murals. The authors of a paper delivered at the 2011 Lisbon ICOM conference on this particular usage on modern paintings, concluded that theirs is: “A novel restoration technique that uses colored light from a digital projector to compensate for color alteration… To the authors’ knowledge, this approach has not been used previously for the restoration of paintings.” So we ask again: Has the Vatican been monitoring the colours of Michelangelo’s frescoes since the last restoration? If it has, have any changes and deteriorations been detected – and is this lighting system designed to compensate for them? Could the Vatican be attempting to launch by stealth what will be the world’s first non-secular virtual restoration?

Michael Daley

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Above, Fig. 1: The announcement of the new Sistine Chapel lighting system, in the Times’ Business section of 7 November 2013. (Photo: Gonzalo Azumendi/Getty.)
Above, Fig. 2: The section of ceiling illustrating the Financial Times Magazine’s coverage of the Sistine Chapel’s new lighting.
Above, Fig. 3 and below, Fig. 4: the splendid photograph by Victor R. Boswell, Jr. of the last moments of the Sistine Chapel ceiling as finished by Michelangelo, as published in the December 1989 National Geographic and, as discussed here in our post of 4 March 2013. (See “How to Take a Michelangelo Sibyl Apart, from Top to Toes”.)
Below, Fig. 5: Tourists in the Chapel, as shown in the 21 December 2012 Guardian. Photograph: Oote Boe Ph/Alamy. (See our post of 21 January 2013, “Setting the Scene, Packing Them In“.)
ON THE RESTORATION INJURIES TO MICHELANGELO’S SISTINE CHAPEL FRESCOES, SEE:
“Art Restoration, The Culture, the Business and the Scandal”, by James Beck and Michael Daley, London, 1993, Chapters III and IV, and the following posts on this site:.
Click on the images above for larger versions. NOTE: zooming requires the Adobe Flash Plug-in.


The “World’s worst restoration” and the Death of Authenticity

30 August 2012

When news broke of the 81 years old painter Cecilia Gimenez’s disastrous restoration of a painting of Christ in her local church, the world fell about laughing (see Figs. 2 to 5). The distressed restorer has taken to her bed as people queue to see the now infamous monkey-faced Christ and, wishing to preserve the hilarity, over 5,000 wags have signed a petition to block attempts to “return the painting to its pre-restoration glory” – as if such an outcome might credibly be in prospect.

With one honourable exception (Fig. 1) commentators failed to grasp that while this debacle is an extreme case it is not an aberration within modern art restoration practices. To the contrary, adulterations of major works of art are commonplace, seemingly systemic products of a booming, insufficiently monitored international art conservation nexus. In our previous post it was shown both how a steamboat painted by Turner sank without trace during two top-flight restorations at the US Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, and, how Renoir’s oeuvre is being traduced across museums. Here, to show that it is not just in sleepy Spanish churches that paintings are risk, we reprise a few of the professional art world’s own most radically controversial – and officially sanctioned – restorations.

The Observer columnist, Barbara Ellen, having good sport with the Spanish Incident (see Fig. 2), hoped a wave of copycat vigilante restorations (“Let’s nip into the Louvre and give the Mona Lisa something to smirk about”) would not ensue. Her nightmare has been “virtually” realised – Fig. 3. When saying that Ms Gimenez perhaps had not realised “that, as a rule, professional art restorers don’t start work with a bucket of Flash and some Brillo pads”, she assumed too much. While Brillo pads were skipped at the Sistine Chapel, bucket loads of oven-cleaner-like substances were repeatedly brushed onto and washed from Michelangelo’s Ceiling frescoes to the artistically injurious consequences described below and at Fig. 23. As we reported on April 1st 2011 – and that was no joke – the Vatican’s restorers’ own account of their experimental fresco cleaning method read as follows:

…Removal of retouchings and repaintings with a mixed gelatinous solvent, consisting of ammonium bicarbonate, sodium bicarbonate, Desogen (a surf-actant and anti-fungal agent), carboxymethylcellulose (a thixotropic agent), dissolved in distilled water. Mixture acts on contact. The times of application, rigorously measured, were: “First application: 3 minutes, followed by removal, washing with water. Left to dry for 24 hours. “Second application: 3 minutes, followed by removal, washing and leaving to dry as before. If necessary, and locally only, small applications, followed by plentiful final washing. “In the case of salt efflorescences consisting of calcium carbonate, there was added to the solvent mixture a saturated solution of dimethylformamide… “Final treatment: the thorough, complete and overall application of a solution of Paraloid B72 diluted to 3% in organic solvent, removed from the surface of the pictorial skin by the combined action almost simultaneously of organic solvent and distilled water, which coagulates the surface acrylic resin dissolved by the solvent.”

A quick rinse with Flash might have been kinder.

There are three component parts in the professional restoration armoury: taking material off; putting material on; and, defending and promoting the said removals and additions with techno/aesthetic reassurances. Notwithstanding all supposedly science-validated self-justifications (reports on restorations are invariably written by the restorers themselves), the proper and appropriate test of a restoration is aesthetic appraisal of the resulting changes. It is reassuring that so many recognise that the transformation made to the Spanish painting shown at Fig. 5 constitutes a gross artistic injury. Perhaps the less extreme but also gratuitous injuries recently inflicted by restorers at the Louvre on the Veronese figure and face shown at Figs. 6 to 10 (and here reported on December 28th 2010) might also be acknowledged as the very crime against art and history that they constitute.

As shown at Fig. 10, even when the Louvre’s restorers were caught having secretly re-repainted the already repainted and publicly criticised Veronese face, the museum maintained a brazen official insouciance. The authorities do these things because they can and, presumably, because they do not know better. They ignore criticisms because they can and again, presumably, because they do not comprehend their force and their gravity.

In Figs. 11 to 26 we show the variously unfortunate consequences of restorers taking off and putting on material. (Like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, every unhappy restoration is so in its own way.) It is widely recognised in the art trade that pictures untouched or rarely touched by restorers enjoy better conditions than many-times restored works. For that reason, a high premium is placed on such rare but fortunate works. This reality notwithstanding, nothing seems capable of restraining the tide of restorations.

In Figs. 11 and 13 we see two successive restorers at work on the same figure in the same mural, Leonardo’s “Last Supper”, in Milan. It is a long-standing complaint that restorers thrive by undoing and redoing each others’ handiwork. In Fig. 11 the restorer Mauro Pelliccioli is removing paint with a knife. His restoration, the first post war intervention on the notoriously unstable mural, was highly acclaimed at the time. His philosophy had been to remove earlier restorers’ repaint where it concealed original paint-work by Leonardo, but to leave it in place when covering only bare wall (- see our post of February 8th 2012). In Figure 13 Pelliccioli’s former student and assistant, Pinin Brambilla Barcilon, is seen repainting Leonardo’s mural (- or, as restorers prefer, “reintegrating” the remains of original paint with fresh additional paint). Given that an estimated 80 per cent of Leonardo’s work had been lost and that Barcilon had aimed to remove all previous restorers’ handiwork regardless of whether or not original Leonardo paint survived underneath, she had to do massive amounts of repainting during her agonising two decades long restoration (see our post of March 14th 2012).

In Figs. 12 and 14 we see how dramatically differently two professionally linked Italian restorers, working just one generation apart, left the very same principal figure in Leonardo’s “Last Supper”. (What might be expected to survive or emerge from the next two restorations?) Like the 81 years old Cecilia Gimenez, Barcilon exercised artistic licence – albeit to a far lesser degree – during her painterly interventions on Leonardo’s remains. Where the cuff of Christ’s right sleeve had originally hung below and behind the table, for example, she painted it resting upon the table. To Christ, she too gave a new face and expression. The sole commentator to have recognised such continuums between extreme and lesser restoration injuries, the Sunday Telegraph columnist, Alasdair Palmer, wrote: while the gulf between what modern restorers do and the dreadful hatchet-job done by Cecilia Gimenez is large, it is not always as vast as restorers would like us to believe”. He noted that while Pinin Brambilla Barcilon had done some magnificent work in recreating what she took to be Leonardo’s original picture, “it wasn’t a restoration because most of the paint applied by Leonardo had long ago disappeared”, and he cited an art historian who holds precisely that “The Last Supper is now a first-rate example of Barcilon’s work. It is not a Leonardo”. Palmer further notes that some of the most severe critics of recent restorations are other restorers:

‘A great deal of restoration is incompetent,’ maintains Bruno Zanardi, professor of the theory and practice of restoration at the University of Urbino, and one of Italy’s most distinguished restorers. ‘Many of those who are let loose on great works of art do not know what they are doing: they have not been properly trained, and do not understand how fragile old pictures are.'”

To French and Italian transgressions many British and American ones might be added. At the National Gallery, London, it has been officially acknowledged that changes are made to pictures “primarily for aesthetic reasons”, and that while these aesthetic changes rest on the judgements of individual restorers whose “different aesthetic decisions” may result in pictures which “look very different”, all such results are considered “equally valid” (see “The New Relativisms and the Death of ‘Authenticity'”). In Figs. 15 and 16 we show a detail of the National Gallery’s Holbein, “The Ambassadors”. During its restoration (which, like that of Michelangelo’s Sistine Capel Ceiling, was a televised and sponsored event) the then head of conservation, Martin Wyld, took the opportunity to improve and, on “experts” advice, to change the surviving design of the Turkish carpet. In doing so, he paid scant regard to the aerial perspective that had previously been found in the picture. Ignoring the shadows that had previously been cast on the carpet, Wyld introduced a crisper, cleaner, flatter, more “on the picture surface”, altogether more abstract, modernist and, therefore, ahistorical version of Holbein’s original depiction.

More egregious were the changes made to Holbein’s anamorphic skull (Figs. 17 and 18). The cleaning exposed many losses of paint on the skull which bewildered the restorers and caused them to introduce – for the first time, to our knowledge – a piece of painted “virtual reality”. As we put it in a letter to the Independent (“Virtual reality art”, 29 January 2000):

When the National Gallery recently restored Holbein’s The Ambassadors, the famous skull in the foreground was repainted to a new design not according to the laws of perspective by which it had been produced but after a computer-generated distortion of a photograph of an actual skull. “This bizarre imposition of ‘virtual reality’ on to an old master painting is defended by the gallery on the grounds that ‘modern imaging techniques’ offer ‘more scope for exploring possible reconstructions’ than do the 16th century perspectival conventions by which the artist’s image had originally been generated. “The difference between the original and the new parts has been concealed from the general public by the restorer’s attempt to integrate the handiwork of his own ‘tentative reconstruction’ with surrounding old paint by painting fake lines of cracking to match the old, actual cracks.”

In Figs. 19 and 20 we see the liberties taken by Wyld’s predecessor, Arthur Lucas, on Titian’s “Bacchus and Ariadne”. Lucas boasted to art students at the Slade School of Art that “there is more of me than Titian in that sky”. In thrall to new technologies and materials, Lucas took the trustees’ permission to reline the canvas, as authority for ironing the picture on to a double board of compressed paper. Such boards are today found to be unstable and will doubtless serve to licence further “urgent” conservation treatments.

In Figs. 21 and 22 we again show the startling changes made to a painting at the National Gallery of Art in Washington during the course of two restorations. During the first, as seen on the right of Fig. 21, a general weakening of values occurred. The woman’s necklace, for example, was dimished. As seen on the left in Fig. 22 , during a further restoration, part of the necklace disappeared. Rather than paint it back in, the restorer painted out the surviving section, as can be seen on the right.

When specific bits of paintings disappear restorers often claim that they were only additions made by earlier restorers. If such claims sometimes provoke scepticism, in the case of overall losses and degradations restorers usually offer no defences, seemingly hoping that curators, trustees, art critics, scholars and members of the public will be delighted or distracted by brightened colours and lightened tonalities. In Fig. 23, on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, we see both the general lightening and brightening that attends an aggressive cleaning and losses of specific features and pictorially strategic values. Michelangelo had finished off his frescoes with additional glue or size-based painting but because the Vatican’s restorers held this to be either dirt or earlier restorations, it was all removed. Michelangelo had redrawn and remodelled the drapery seen on the left hanging from the figure’s right shoulder. It was washed off. The removal is shown to be an error by the testimony of earlier copies of the ceiling. (Rubens had copied the drapery as it was found before the recent cleaning.) Michelangelo sought to enhance sculptural effects to his painted figures by adding shadows that were seemingly cast by the three dimensional bodies he had depicted with contrasting brightly lit forms and dark, shadowy recesses and nooks. The latter, too, were lost.

Back at the National Gallery in London, we see in Fig. 24 similarly catastrophic general losses (in the course of another single restoration) of tonal gradations and modelling. In the case of the horse’s right nostril, we see the loss of the very aperture which formerly had carried air to the creature’s lungs. Alasdair Palmer points out that a comparison of the National Gallery picture with its sister panel in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence is shocking to behold. It is the more unforgivable because the National Gallery restoration was prompted by an earlier one of the Florence picture that had not flattened and weakened the horses.

The National Gallery’s great Velazquez, “The Rokeby Venus”, suffered dreadful injuries in 1914 at the hands of a suffragette (Fig. 25). That damage was as nothing when compared with subsequent injuries inflicted by restorers who here too (Fig. 26) were blind to artists’ manipulation of space; creation of atmosphere; rendering of form through calibrated tonal gradations. Before the gallery’s restorers had done their Cecilia Gimenez-esque worst, there existed a parity of brilliance in the two figures, with both displaying the seeming self-illumination of divinities. What sense of that miraculous evocation survives today? Little wonder that the previous owner of the picture made a scene at the National Gallery on sight of its “restoration” and protested that, had he known how it would be treated, he would never have sold it. His grievous personal loss-through-restoration was of a single picture. What price the world’s continuing collective losses at the hands of restorers?

Michael Daley

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Above, Fig. 1: The notice of and the introduction to Alasdair Palmer’s August 26th 2012 Sunday Telegraph discussion (“Restoration Tragedies”) of a botched restoration in a church in Borja, Spain.
Above, Fig. 2: Barbara Ellen’s August 26th riff in The Observer on Cecilia Gimenez’s attempted restoration of Ellas Garcia Martinez’s painting of Christ.
Above, Fig. 3: Upi.com (“Spanish grandmother’s restoration fail gets an unlikely fan following”) carried this spoof of a restored “Mona Lisa” – as if in answer to Barbara Ellen’s suggestion above, and at a time when agitation is already taking place in some art world quarters to have the painting restored…
Above, Fig. 4: The Daily News (“Botched restoration of 19th century Spanish fresco becomes overnight tourist sensation”) carried this spoof on Leonardo’s recently restored “Last Supper” in Milan. For the real consequences of that restoration, see Figs. 11 to 14 below.
Above, Fig. 5: Ellas Garcia Martinez’s painting of Christ before (left) Cecilia Gimenez’s attempted restoration (right) of the deteriorating work.
Above (left), Fig. 6: A detail of the Louvre’s c. 1560 Veronese “The Pilgrims of Emmaüs”, showing the Mother and Child before the picture’s recent restoration.
Above (right), Fig. 7: Veronese’s Mother and Child after the recent Louvre restoration.
Above, Fig. 8: Veronese’s Mother before restoration at the Louvre.
Above, Fig. 9: Veronese’s Mother after restoration at the Louvre.
Above, Fig. 10: The Week’s summary of Dalya Alberge’s June 13th 2010 Observer article “Louvre masterpiece by Veronese ‘mutilated’ by botched nose jobs”.
Above (left), Fig. 11: The restorer Mauro Pelliccioli scraping paint off Leonardo’s “Last Supper” in Milan during 1953.
Above (right), Fig. 12: The Figure of Christ in Leonardo’s Last Supper” after restoration by Mauro Pelliccioli.
Above (left), Fig. 13: The restorer Pinin Brambilla Barcilon retouching part of Leonardo’s “Last Supper” during the early stages of her $8m Olivetti-sponsored 1977-1999 restoration.
Above (right), Fig. 14: The figure of Christ in Leonardo’s Last Supper” after its restoration by Barcilon.
Above (left), Fig. 15: A detail of the National Gallery’s Holbein, “The Ambassadors” before its BBC-televised, Esso-sponsored restoration of 1993-96.
Above (right), Fig. 16: A detail of the National Gallery’s restored Holbein showing the extensive repainting of the Turkish carpet.
Above (top), Fig. 17: The anamorphic skull in Holbein’s “The Ambassadors”, before cleaning and repainting.
Above (bottom) Fig. 18: The anamorphic skull in Holbein’s “The Ambassadors”, after cleaning and the repainting during which the jaw bone was lengthened and carried over the border at the bottom of the picture.
Above (top), Fig. 19: A detail of the National Gallery’s Titian “Bacchus and Ariadne” before its restoration began in 1967.
Above (bottom) Fig. 20: A detail of the National Gallery’s Titian “Bacchus and Ariadne” after restoration.
Above (top), Fig. 21: Left, the then privately owned Vermeer “Girl with a Flute” before 1941; right, the picture as seen in 1958 after its acquisition by the National Gallery of Art Washington and subsequent restoration.
Above (bottom), Fig. 22: left, Vermeer’s “Girl with a Flute” in 1994 during restoration at the National Gallery of Art Washington; right, the (now circle of Vermeer) “Girl with a Flute” after the restoration in which the necklace finally disappeared without comment or explanation.
Above, Fig. 23: Left, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Ceiling depiction of the prophet Daniel, before cleaning; right, the Daniel after the cleaning during which the drapery was changed and much sculpturally enhancing shading was lost, in both cases against clear historical testimony.
Above, Fig. 24: Top, a detail of the National Gallery’s Uccello “The Rout of San Romano” before cleaning; below, the same detail after cleaning and restoration.
Above (top), Fig. 25: The National Gallery’s Velazquez, “The Rokeby Venus”, immediately after its attack by a suffragette in 1914.
Above (bottom), Fig. 26: The National Gallery’s restored Velazquez, “The Rokeby Venus” today.
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Misreading Visual Evidence ~ No 1: David Hockney, an art historian and an x-ray photograph

26th March 2011

It was recently claimed that “fresh insight” gained on Caravaggio’s painting technique supports David Hockney’s theory that the artist used a primitive form of photography to create his paintings (“Exhibition sheds new light on the art of Caravaggio”, Daily Telegraph report, March 11th). Diagrams, mirrors and light boxes displayed in an exhibition at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, were said to “show” that Caravaggio “may indeed have” used a camera obscura to project figures on to a canvas so that they might be painted directly, with “extraordinary realism” and without any need for designs or preliminary studies. Showing that someone may have done something cuts no ice when logic, logistics and the laws of art all combine to testify against the Hockney hypothesis.

“Insight” itself is a weasel term and is not the same thing as evidence. The art historian supporting Hockney’s thesis, Dr John Spike, offered the observation that “Gallileo was developing the telescope and they [artists] were all fascinated by optics” as if by way of some circumstantial corroboration. Whether or not they were so fascinated, we should note the absence of evidence and consider the logistical difficulties that they would have faced if attempting to work on the basis of the Hockney Hypothesis.

Are we really to suppose that all the figures and animals, and babies, and flying angels, writhing serpents, crucified men and beheaded victims depicted in Caravaggio’s paintings in arrested moments of extremis, were actually copied directly, literally, from life? More specifically, are we to suppose that various combinations of human, bestial and divine creatures were first assembled and then simultaneously posed in full costume for as long as it took the artist to convert their projected photographic image into his painted pictures? (See illustrations on the right.)

Or should we believe that each figure was individually copied down, in full costume, exactly as seen when projected through a pinhole onto a wall in a darkened room? If so, was each painted figure subsequently “overlapped” and partly obliterated by the next in the sequence? Is there any material evidence of such overlaps? If not, we would have to assume that Caravaggio painted directly onto only that part of the projected image that would remain visible when the next figure was copied in. Timing is an important separate consideration: whether the models were depicted in entire groups or individually, how long would they have been expected to hold their usually animated and dramatically expressive poses (see right) in a compositionally perfect position in relation to other figures not yet posed or painted?

There is another crucial consideration: were Caravaggio’s famously dramatic and theatrical lighting effects copied directly from nature onto the canvas via an image of a multi-figure tableau projected through a pinhole? Consider the exponentially increasing practical difficulties an artist would have to overcome when attempting to work in such fashion. Caravaggio would not only have had to paint at speed to avoid his models wearying and slipping out of pose, he would have had to have done so at a speed that would not allow the brilliant light source illuminating his figures to move – and to have done so when working not in front of his painting but to the side of the image projected upon it so as not to block it with his own shadow. Has any artist in history so handicapped his own labours?

Would the light source deployed on Caravaggio’s frozen models have been the sun? If so, at what time of the day did he work? At noon, with the sun’s all-bleaching brilliant light at its zenith, producing unhelpfully top-lit figures? Or in the mornings and evenings when low, acutely angled, less bright but faster moving and changing? Did Caravaggio not only anticipate photography, but Impressionism too? Or, would his groups have been lit for long periods by a fixed battery of brilliant theatrical lamps?

When it is claimed that Caravaggio had achieved the extraordinary realism of his paintings 200 years in advance of the invention of the camera, on the same logic it should further be claimed that he anticipated and emulated the achievements of the cinema. It took the full resources of modern cinema and means of lighting for Luis Bunuel to be able to compose and momentarily arrest a multi-figured tableau in mimicry of Leonardo’s The Last Supper in his film Viridiana. Is there any evidence that such human and technical resources were available to Caravaggio? Is it believed that Caravaggio had invariably worked in this manner? Or that he did so on some occasions but not others? Has any material evidence been found in Caravaggio’s paintings that reflects such radically different patterns of working methods?

The real problem with the Hockney thesis, however, is not the absence of supporting evidence but the existence of contra-evidence. The Telegraph report is illustrated by a photograph of Caravaggio’s The Calling of St Matthew, and by an x-ray photograph of the two figures at the picture’s right-hand side. Those photographs (see above right) constitute a material record of both the paint that is visible to the human eye and the hidden earlier underlying painting. The caption claims that “x-ray analysis shows the style of the artist and supports the idea that he used a primitive form of photography in his work”. It is hard to see how this might be so. X-rays are notoriously difficult images to read with confidence because while they show all the successive states of a painting simultaneously they do not pick up all pigments and materials equally.

Nonetheless, the x-ray photograph that is shown adjacent to the two figures helpfully permits direct visual comparisons. The most striking feature is that the underlying paintwork exposed in the x-ray is not identical with the paintwork that is visible to the human eye. Had Caravaggio worked in the manner being claimed, an x-ray would reveal no differences – no revisions, no “pentimenti”, nothing other than what was already visible on the picture’s surface. But the x-ray evidence here is doubly injurious. Firstly, it shows major changes to the pose of the figures – Christ’s raised arm is higher in the x-ray than in the painting while, conversely, his hand droops dramatically. Secondly, the image is sufficiently intelligible to establish major discrepancies of artistic style.

In the space of the figure (St Peter) standing in front of Christ, the type of drapery seen in the x-ray photograph is manifestly different from that now seen in the visible paint above it. One observer (Giorgio Bonsanti) attributed the underlying drapery, on the basis of an earlier x-ray, to the figure of Christ – see right. Certainly as drapery it is greatly more accomplished artistically – more “Raphael-esque” – than the comparatively stiff, angular, “bent-tin” draped material seen on the St Peter. Most damagingly of all, this underlying painted drapery is not just finer it is of a type found only in art and never in nature. It is not some literal mechanical transcription of an actual draped garment, but a conjuring of spirited flowing, wind-filled forms that arc around the body and derive from the laws of drapery that were first understood and devised by the God-like artists of antiquity and then later rediscovered and emulated by the greatest artists of the Italian Renaissance. The living sculpture drapery revealed by the x-ray could not have been taken down from a static figure because it was an invention, a product of art and imagination that served the great powers of composition, design and expression – it conferred grandeur, grace and dynamism to the theatrical stage-right entrance of Christ. We might reasonably agree with Giorgio Bonsanti (see right) that Caravaggio, having first created this great glory, then opted to suppress his own magnificence of drapery so as to have the secondary, Christ-obscuring figure of St Peter serve as a dull mundanely reproachful foil to the wealthily and vibrantly attired group of figures to his left. On the basis of this clear hard embodiment of artistically purposive thought and revision – to the point of artistic sacrifice – it can hardly be concluded other than that Caravaggio was a great inventive, self-critical self-revising showman of an artist and not some secretive shortcut-taking literalist.

Michael Daley

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Above: the illustrations to the Daily Telegraph report “Exhibition sheds new light on the art of Caravaggio”, March 12th 2011.
Above: a comparative detail of Caravaggio’s The Calling of St Matthew, seen in the painting itself (left) and in the x-ray (right). Note Caravaggio’s radical revisions of anatomy and treatment of drapery that can be seen in the x-ray photograph on the right.
Above: a group of illustrations seen in Giorgio Bonsanti’s Caravaggio, London, 1984. In a passage that is highly pertinent to current discussions, Giorgio Bonsanti observed on the basis of an early x-ray of the figures of Christ and St Peter:

Caravaggio did not arrive at the final version right away, and it is important to remember that even compositions that appear to have been born in an instant are the fruit of a long preparatory study. X-ray analysis has proven absolutely indispensable in revealing to our later vision forms and figures that the artist, after sketching them on the canvas, believed would remain concealed from all eyes, including his own, beneath the final version. Thus, in an early version of the Calling of St Matthew, the figure of Christ stood alone and was not covered, as in the final version, by that of St Peter. The latter’s presence involved the accentuation, in the final version, of his role as mediator (he would be the first pope) between man and God. Indeed, we see a sort of division of Christ into two parts, as though two persons have germinated and branched off from the same trunk. This already emphasized Christ’s human and divine nature. Peter laboriously and almost stiffly repeats the gesture of Christ, which in comparison is handled with the greatest eloquence. In addition, we immediately notice the painting’s total independence from the designs of earlier religious painting. From this we may conclude that the artist is not interested in instructing, admonishing or stirring his audience to religious feeling, as the Counter reformation expected art to do. He felt it was not his task. He seems to say, this is what happened. Christ and Peter suddenly came in and made it clear that they wanted to talk to Matthew, while the two youths, taken by surprise, prepared to face an intrusion whose nature they were unaware of; and indeed two other figures, unaware of what was going on, continued counting the money. Matthew brought his hand to his chest, as though to ask if it were he that they wanted. An instant before, the scene had been different; an instant later, it would no longer be the same. If a scene is to be instructive, it must be prepared, planned, and arranged. If it is devoid of this kind of orientation towards a specific end, then the artist is virtually free to shape it as he likes and to change it from one moment to the next, not preparing it, but taking note of it.

Above; a detail from the Galleria Doria Pamphilj’s Caravaggio Rest during the Flight into Egypt. It would seem self evident that the figure of an angel is an item of artistic invention and not a rendering made on top of a photographically projected image of a posed model. In 1993 Eduard A. Safarik wrote of this arresting figure:

Caravaggio, who broke with tradition in his representation of this theme, was an unusual exegetist and his imagination produced revolutionary iconographic results. As protagonist of the scene, the painter inserts an angel seen from behind, placing the figure in a prominent position, in the golden section that splits the composition into two parts: the left-hand one, with St Joseph, the donkey, and stones, is dedicated to earthly life, while the right-hand area, which includes the Madonna and Child among living plants, is devoted to the divine world. Even the half-clad angel, for which ambiguous interpretations have forcedly been proposed, corresponds very precisely to the contemporary views put forward by Constantino Ghini in 1595 (the picture, painted at the same time as as the Mary Magdalen, dates from somewhere between 1595 and 1597) and Federico Borromeo, who held that the nudity of angels is a sign of their immunity from any contamination by human misery, just as the bare feet indicate that they are untouched by earthly things…The principal motif of Caravaggio’s Flight into Egypt is that of the music that can be heard on earth, considered by the Fathers of the church to be a copy of music in heaven. The intermediary between these two worlds is the invisible sound, which in art takes the form of an Angel playing music, a divine messenger that stands at the border between material and spirirtual reality. God communicates with men through Angels, who are his go-betweens:'[it is the] Angel who spoke to me,’ says Zachariah and for Ezekiel, the Angel is ‘man dressed in linen,’ just as Caravaggio depicts him.

Above: Caravaggio’s Deposition, the Vatican, Pinacoteca. A depicted ensemble of figures that could not be held for longer than seconds by any group of living models.
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wibble!