ArtWatch is entering its twenty-first campaigning year with strengthening critical bite. The new ArtWatch UK website greatly extended the published reach of our Journal (see Figs. 1-4), attracting 22,000 visits in its first year and 52,000 visits last year, half coming from the UK and the USA and the rest from 139 other countries. With this post our archive comprises 59 articles by 8 authors. In New York the ArtWatch International site has been revivified under its new director, Einav Zamir. In France our colleagues in the Association Internationale pour le Respect de l’Intégrité du Patrimoine Artistique (ARIPA) have re-structured their website which now carries much of the contents of their excellent, rigorous journal, Nuances. Our efforts now attract fewer hostile and more respectful responses. We enjoy (sotto voce) support at high levels in many quarters – including among some conservators – and we sometimes earn outright vindication, as shown below. International and national press interest in our campaigns remains high. Unfortunately, in the art world itself many players remain in official denial on the subject of restoration injuries. They can see and admit that this is wrong and that that is wrong, but not that pictures are still being injured in restoration.
Our debut post on 12 December 2010, “The New Relativisms and the Death of ‘Authenticity’”, contrasted the consequences of musical and pictorial reconstructions. Last May, in a fascinating talk (“The Pursuit of Excellence: A Call to Arms”) at the 4th annual Lufthansa Lecture, at St John’s Smith Square, London, Andrew Manze, a former baroque violinist and Artistic Director of the English Concert and now Principal Conductor and Artistic Director of the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra, noted: “Musicians are lucky that they can do no permanent harm to their material compared to the irreversible damage inflicted on the plastic arts, as reported by the ArtWatch organization for example…”
Our second post on the 13 December 2010 (“An Appeal from Poland”) drew an immediate response. Distinguished scholars, curators and conservators in Poland had asked ArtWatch UK to support their opposition to a proposed loan of Leonardo’s “Lady with an Ermine” to the National Gallery (see “The National Gallery’s £1.5bn Leonardo restoration”). We were then attacked in Poland – abusively – by Count Adam Zamoyski, chairman of the Princes Czartoryski Foundation which had agreed to loan the many-times borrowed Leonardo for a substantial fee. It was later reported from Poland that: “In order to improve the functioning of the Foundation of the Czartoryski Princes and to assure the correct collaboration with the National Museum in Krakow”, Prince Adam Karol Czartoryski of the Czartoryski Museum had dismissed the entire board and its chairman, his cousin, Count Adam Zamoyski. Although the contracted loan went ahead it was announced that the fragile panel painting would not travel again for at least a decade.
Our posts of 8 February and 14 March 2012 produced evidence of a mis-reconstructed sleeve of Christ in Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper”. This was reported in the Independent of 14 March 2012. In the National Geographic special issue “Exploring History” it is said that: “Generally lauded by art historians and appreciators, the restored work has aroused controversy. Some say too little of Leonardo’s paint is left, or cavil about the mural’s altered forms…As the debate wears on, we at least – and at last – have a legible ‘Last Supper’ to savor.” “Legible-but-false” could stand as a motto in those museum conservation departments where restorers paint photographically manipulated “virtual realities” onto old master pictures.
Last week our November 12 post on a Black and White Michelangelo drew an artistically perceptive endorsement from the painter and art critic, Gerry Bell. ArtWatch’s genesis was rooted in the tumultuous battles over the 1980-1990s Sistine Chapel restoration battles. That controversy has recently re-combusted – and in precisely the manner we had anticipated two decades ago in the 1993 James Beck/Michael Daley book “Art Restoration: The Culture, the Business and the Scandal”. It is now clear that having first engineered a needless artistic calamity, the Vatican authorities have additionally contrived a situation in which the already adulterated remains of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes are also presently in grave physical peril. On January 2nd 2012 Art Daily carried an Agence France-Presse report on the panic that has beset the Vatican authorities over the present and worsening environmental threat to the Chapel’s frescoes:
“The Vatican Museums chief warned that dust and polluting agents brought into the Sistine Chapel by thousands of tourists every day risk one day endangering its priceless artworks. Antonio Paolucci told the newspaper La Repubblica in comments published Thursday that in order to preserve Michelangelo’s Last Judgment and the other treasures in the Sistine Chapel, new tools to control temperature and humidity must be studied and implemented. Between 15,000 and 20,000 people a day, or over 4 million a year, visit the chapel where popes get elected, to admire its frescoes, floor mosaics and paintings. ‘In this chapel people often invoke the Holy Spirit. But the people who fill this room every day aren’t pure spirits,’ Paolucci told the newspaper. ‘Such a crowd … emanates sweat, breath, carbon dioxide, all sorts of dust,’ he said. ‘This deadly combination is moved around by winds and ends up on the walls, meaning on the artwork.’ Paolucci said better tools were necessary to avoid ‘serious damage’ to the chapel. Visitors who want to see Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” in Milan must go through a filtration system to help reduce the work’s exposure to dust and pollutants. This has made seeing da Vinci’s masterpiece more difficult: 25 visitors are admitted every 15 minutes. The Sistine Chapel, featuring works by Michelangelo, Botticelli and Perugino, underwent a massive restoration that ended in the late 1990s. The restoration was controversial because some critics said the refurbishing made the colors brighter than originally intended.”
In our next post we examine the consequences of the last restoration and its contributory role in the present crisis – a crisis for which the blame is brazenly being shifted by the authorities from the authorities and on to the (paying) visitors.
Michael Daley
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