26th January 2012

What Price a Smile? The Louvre Leonardo Mouths that are Now at Risk

There is an air of confusion, and even a whiff of crisis, in today’s international art restoration community. At the National Gallery’s CHARISMA symposium on Leonardo’s technical practices and influence (January 13-14), many fascinating and highly informative demonstrations were made of non-invasive imaging techniques. A ground-breaking paper by Ana González Mozo revealed how the Prado’s copy of the Mona Lisa had faithfully tracked Leonardo’s own revisions on the original work. Imagine – a copy not so much of the finished masterpiece but of its very genesis. The proceedings, happily, are to be published. Unfortunately, at this richly rewarding and even-handedly conducted event, two critically serious weaknesses emerged during the proceedings and discussions that seemed linked and together to constitute a wider international art conservation faultline.

That is, firstly, there are manifest deficiencies of understanding on the crucial relationship between the discoveries that are being made through advances of technical analysis, and the original painterly/artistic means by which the art-objects-under-investigation were produced by artists in the first place. This single shortcoming carries profound cultural and professional consequences and is, we believe, a root cause of many of the controversies which arise in the field. Secondly, and concerning these controversies, a number of speakers (particularly Italian speakers, as it happens) used their papers to dismiss critics of their (sometimes long-past) restorations. Such combative unrepentance suggests how hard the task remains to establish some proper and effective systems and habits of disinterested critical appraisal in what is becoming an alarmingly expanionist and self-authorising and validating field. Much might be gained if restorer/conservationists themselves would devote more energies to those fruitful knowledge-advancing studies that leave vulnerable and uniquely precious historical works of art intact and free from what too often seem injudicious or debilitating interventions.

For some speakers, “virtual” indications of changes within pictures, seemed to be taken in themselves as invitations to swabs-on interventions. Certainly it seemed tactless and provocative when, at a time of great disputation, a Louvre curator, Vincent Delieuvin, ended a talk on non-invasive examinations of the museum’s Leonardo “Virgin of the Rocks” with the bald declaration “Restoration of the painting is possible”. Possible? No doubt it is politically so today at the Louvre, but desirable even under the present controversial circumstances? And what exactly has made this hitherto untreatable picture (see caption at Figs. 2 and 3) treatable? Must every restored masterpiece immediately trigger another? Will curators and their restorers never allow decent intervals for the fumes to evaporate and for their handiwork to be evaluated with due attention and consideration after the inevitable PR media barrages that nowadays accompany all major restorations? For that matter, is no one in authority concerned by the general and wider risks that are being incurred in the current Leonardo binge in which the oeuvre itself is being speculatively “grown” even as its most secure works are being recast by today’s more adventurous generation of technicians?

Concerning the Louvre fracas, Didier Rykner, surprised and disappointed us in his Art Tribune post of January 7th by disparaging the international debate on the restoration of Leonardo’s “The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne”, that followed a Guardian report. Headed “A follow-up to the Debate…” that somewhat churlish post afforded a proxy defence of the Louvre’s current policy. Of the momentous resignations of Sègoléne Bergeon Langle, the former director for conservation at the Louvre and France’s national museums, and Jean-Pierre Cuzin, a former director of paintings at the Louvre, from the Louvre’s own international advisory committee, Rykner complains that the restoration has sparked a debate “when in fact nothing new has happened since since the month of October (see our article in French).” One thing that is new is that everyone now knows (thanks to the diligence and reach of the international press) what very few previously appreciated: a profound schism exists over picture restoration methods at one of the world’s greatest museums – in truth, the world’s greatest single museum – and, that the restoration of a major work of the world’s most famous artist is the centre of that dispute.

Rykner characterised the “Virgin and Child with St Anne” restoration as one in which only “three points had to be solved”, when, far from being some problem-solving exercise, this is a debate about the very nature and legitimacy of actions that might be made on an immensely complex, unfinished, ancient and precious masterpiece. Restorations never take place in antiseptic clinical spaces. They always reflect philosophies, interests and professional inclinations or dis-inclinations towards radical interventions. Conflicts in this arena are far from trivial and it is desirable that they should not take place in the dark.

There is great irony in the present situation. For many years after the Second World War, the Louvre occupied the virtuous conceptually elegant and restrained end of the restoration spectrum. And it did so in explicit opposition to the brutal simplistic campaign of “total cleaning” launched at the National Gallery by the restorer Helmut Ruhemann, who insisted that “important paintings should be thoroughly cleaned before we theorise about them”. Ruhemann’s influence at the National Gallery was under-written by the long-serving post-war director Philip Hendy, who wrote in the catalogue to the didactic 1947 exhibition of pictures cleaned (in secret) during the war: “The purpose of this exhibition is not only to do justice to the cleaned pictures, but, by extending the knowledge of their condition, to bring about a higher standard of criticism in this all-important subject.” By 1958 Bernard Berenson had been persuaded that “the recent restorations of pictures in the National Gallery are defended by most English people against the almost universal disapproval of continental craftsmen and critics.”

Berenson was right about the continental opposition but, perhaps being overly-reliant on the reports of Kenneth Clark (who had launched the National Gallery’s cleaning blitzkrieg in the late 1930s when he had hired “the brilliant Ruhemann”), he had quite missed the scale and the ferocity of opposition within England. In 1947 Hendy had made the self-defeating claim that: “There would not in all probability have been so much criticism of the appearance of the pictures cleaned since the war began if the public had been kept waiting until the cleaned pictures could be shown as they are shown [all together] now. Instead, they had to be scattered among the dirty pictures upon walls which there had been neither time no labour even to brush down after six years of increasing exposure to the elements.” If Hendy could not see the force of a widespread preference for “dirty” over “cleaned” pictures, by 1977 his predessor director, Kenneth Clark had quite forgotten the controversy the returned pictures had provoked: “A cleaned picture often looks very bright when first it is finished, but it loses its shine after a year or two, and I was fortunate in that the pictures I brought back for the reopening of the Gallery, all of which had been cleaned, had had time to ‘settle down’. No one complained about them.”

For a concrete example of the war-time consequences of Ruhemann-esque preludes to theorising, see Figs. 9 and 10. For a discussion of the role of the German restorer, Johan Hell, whose highly restrained work in Britain earned much support among artists and private patrons, see this author in the June, July/August and September 2006 issues of the Jackdaw. Hell’s great influence in Britain (he restored the collection of the Dulwich Picture Gallery to acclaim) was carried to the United States, albeit in dilute form, by his sometime student, John Brealey. In 1951, René Huyghe, the Louvre’s chief curator of paintings and drawings advised restorers and curators “If there is the slightest doubt, stop; for in this matter it is inadmissible to make a mistake. Excessive prudence leaves the future open without compromising it. But mistakes made by presumption are irreparable.” In the Sunday Times (15 January 2012) Bergeon Langle said “We prefer the most moderate cleaning possible. But my views weren’t taken into consideration.”

Not heeded, perhaps, but widely noted nonetheless. The debate that has been opened by the two Louvre resignations shows no sign of abating. In a recent article Bergeon Langle has further explained: “I deemed that the restoration was not being carried out in line with what I imagined was necessary for this Louvre painting. That is my firm belief.” We now learn through such increasingly frequent press reports and the assorted leaks and briefings on this schismatic dispute within the museum’s twenty members strong advisory committee, that the Louvre’s present curators, with the encouragement of certain English and Italian curator and conservator members of that committee, are resolved to pursue more radical, less precautionary treatments. What makes this dispute-among-experts so alarming is that evidence of the consequences of the shift from caution and physical restraint within the Louvre already exists – we don’t have to read the book (and the official accounts, should they ever be made available), we can simply look at the pictures: as previously shown, restorers at the museum may now change and then re-change the expressions on old master faces without even being required to record their adulterations in the museum’s dossiers. This, by any standards is an already extraordinary and indefensible position.

News of the Louvre resignations comes just seven months after the shocking disclosure of its cosmetic facial exercises and at the point where the cleaning of the “St. Anne” is completed and the perilous stage of retouching begins. It so happens that the expression of St. Anne’s mouth is interrupted by a panel join (see Fig. 1) which might provide another temptation for a little cosmetic surgery with the retouching brushes. We were not reassured when the Louvre’s present head of painting, Vincent Pomarede said recently that the retouchings would be “reversible”. “So what?”, we would ask. As shown right (Fig. 5), the Louvre recently made two egregious errors on a single Veronese face. That the second falsification – which is still in place – is theoretically as removable as the one it superseded does not mitigate the presently persisting offence and lapse of curatorial vigilance. The two members of the Louvre advisory committee from the National Gallery who have been enthusiastic supporters of the current restoration (the then curator Luke Syson, who has moved to the Metropolitan Museum, New York, and the head of conservation, Larry Keith), happen themselves to have been responsible on their own patch for another incomprehensible, initially unacknowledged (- even in the Gallery’s own Technical Bulletin report) but again “reversible” alteration to a (Leonardo) mouth – see Figs. 6, 7 and 8.

One of the more monumentally controversial restorations defended at the National Gallery symposium was that of Leonardo’s “Last Supper” by Pinin Brambilla Barcilon. Sponsored by the Olivetti corporation, the restoration had been directed by the distinguished Leonardo scholar Pietro Marani, who is a member of the Louvre’s “St. Anne” advisory committee, and like Syson and Keith an enthusiastic supporter of the present restoration. When we pointed out at the conference that the previous restoration of the “Last Supper” in the 1950s had been praised at the time by Bernard Berenson as an ultimate recovery of all the surviving authentic Leonardo paintwork, Pietro Marani countered by claiming a right for each generation’s restorers and curators to impose their own values and interpretations on historic works of art. The consequences for Leonardo’s “Last Supper” of the claimed (“Buggins’ Turn”?) right to undo and redo every great work of art, will be examined in our next post.

Michael Daley

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Above, Fig. 1: St. Anne, detail from Leonardo’s “Virgin and Child with St. Anne”. The vertical line that runs through the right-hand end of the mouth marks a split in the panel.

Above, Fig. 2: Detail of the face of the angel in the Louvre’s version of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Virgin of the Rocks”. The heavy craquelure is, in part, a likely exacerbating consequence of the paint film having been (badly) transferred from panel to canvas by restorers at the Louvre in 1806. In any event, the persisting fragility and vulnerability of this surface has hitherto protected the painting from “restorations”, of which the National Gallery version of this painting (see Figs. 6, 7 and 8) has had two since the Second World War.

It seems to be being claimed now that scientific tests have shown that the painting can safely be restored. Given a) the extremely cracked and irregular surface; and, b) the extraordinary subtlety of the modelling that attaches to the individual fragments of the paint but works artistically across them and despite their physical and optical disruptions, it is hard to imagine what assurances “scientific analyses” might offer in support of taking the sheer risk of working upon such a painting with solvents which are notoriously invasive and pentrating and love nothing better than a good crack through which to advance themselves. Would a restorer attempt to clean each item of paintwork individually or work across several at a time while attempting to preserve the immeasurably subtle artistic relationships that would be out of sight underneath the solvent-laden and abrasive swab?

Above, Fig. 3: Detail of the face of the Virgin in the Louvre’s version of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Virgin of the Rocks”.

Above, Fig. 4: The mouth of the “Mona Lisa”. Those who would restore this painting, even in its present parlous state, might first recall Leonardo’s account of painting flesh values:

“Put on the carnations with silk brushes, and while they are fresh you can make the shadows as vaporous as you will. The carnations should be painted with white, lake, and massicot; the shadow should be of black and matoric (massicot), with a little lake and black. When the picture has been sketched in lightly, let it dry and then retouch it with lake soaked in gum-water, and this should have been left some time in gum-water, because it is thus better, and will not have any lustre when it is used…”

The scholar of Leonardo’s painting techniques, Jacques Franck, has adduced that the “vaporous” subtlety of expression encountered here could only have been produced by minute touches of brushwork applied in multiple glaze layers, and has warned that with such a blur of superimposed micro-layers of vulnerable glazes, one could not be sure that the solvent used, even in the course of a very gentle cleaning, would not cause inevitable damage, whether in the ultra delicate zone of the mouth or elsewhere. As it is, any gum-bound pinks have long since faded or perished at restorers’ hands, along with the Mona Lisa’s eyebrows – which have survived on the Prado’s copy.

Above, Fig. 5: The top two images show changes made to the mouth and nose of a Titian at the Prado. Among the many solecisms introduced in this single “restoration”, the tip of the nose now terminates not in the centre of the philtrum (the groove that runs from the upper lip), as human anatomy decrees, but behind its far edge, in a quasi-cubist manner; the lower lip has been padded-out so as to swing entirely in a convex curve to the left terminus of the mouth; that terminus now sports two little creases, not one, thereby suggesting that the mouth turns both up and down.
The bottom three images show the recent changes made to a Veronese face at the Louvre that were detected and reported by Michel Favre-Felix of ARIPA.

Above, Fig. 6: Detail of the face of the angel in the National Gallery “Virgin of the Rocks”, above, after its recent cleaning but before retouching.
Below, Fig. 7, below, the angel after its recent cleaning and retouching, in which the far side of the mouth was turned down against art historical and technical (including x-ray) evidence.

Above, Fig. 8: Changes made to the mouth and nose tip of the angel in the National Gallery’s “Virgin of the Rocks” in the course of two restorations.

Above, Fig. 9, and below, Fig. 10: Details from the National Gallery’s Pontormo “Joseph with Jacob in Egypt”, before (left, and top), and after two cleanings and restorations (right, and bottom).
These images are taken from the 1938 and 1990 editions of Kenneth Clark’s book “One Hundred Details from Pictures in the National Gallery”.

In between the two photographs (the post-cleanings photographs are grey-scale conversions from the large colour plate in the 1990 edition) this painting was restored twice by the Gallery, in 1940 and in 1981-82.
It was said of the first cleaning that it had been undertaken because the picture was “much disfigured by dark spots and discoloured varnish”.

The second cleaning was undertaken because “The picture is still blistering. There are numerous old small retouchings, obvious repairs along the cracks and a large hole in the green robe lower left…[and because there was a] discoloured layer of old varnish with some blanching.”

The treatment report after the second restoration read: “The discoloured varnish and retouchings were removed with propan-2-ol and white spirit leaving a thick greyish layer of surface dirt and varnish remnants which was removed with as potassium oleate soap. The blisters were laid with gelatine and the painting restored with pigments in Paraloid B-72 and varnished with Ketone-N.”

It should be said that we are greatly indebted to the National Gallery for making its conservation records and photographs available to us. In this particular case, in setting out the post, we queried our own scanned post-cleaning photographs and re-scanned them as a precaution. The second scan was identical to the first. Thus, in so far as the (Gallery’s own published) photographs are reliable, the viewer may fairly make here an appraisal of the artistic cost (in terms of lost tonal differences; lost modelling of forms; lost details – as in curls of hair, for example) that was paid for the removal of the disfigurement represented by spots of darkened retouching. Moreover, such trade-offs, which are surprisingly common in museum restorations, are rarely strictly necessary – or necessary at all. Jean-Pierre Cuzin, the former director of paintings at the Louvre who resigned from the St Anne advisory committee, was of the opinion that the discoloured touches on the St Anne could simply have been repainted. (The varnish had been thinned, replenished and regenerated on a number of occasions since the war.) Such retouching practices are common: aside from its two major cleanings and restorations, this Pontormo had simply been retouched in 1955 – and again in 1979, just two years before its second cleaning.

Perhaps the last word should be given to
Sègoléne Bergeon Langle who has recently commented:
“As a general rule, I prefer old works to be cleaned only very lightly. You can never retrieve the original colours, what you get instead is the current state of the painting materials. Leaving a slight veil over the work makes it
more harmonious.”

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4th January 2012

The Louvre Leonardo Restoration Committee Resignations

The Great Louvre Picture Cleaning Controversy has crossed the Atlantic. Following the Guardian coverage reported in our previous post, the New York Times’ Paris Correspondent, Elaine Sciolino, today covers yesterday’s meeting (January 3rd) of the Louvre’s international advisory committee on the restoration of Leonardo’s “Virgin and Child with St Anne”. Ms Sciolino’s account likens the current internal professional crisis of confidence at the Louvre to the controversy over cleaning methods that followed in the wake of the restoration of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes in the late 1980s and the 1990s.

The departure from the Louvre’s advisory committee of two such eminent authorities as Ségolène Bergeon Langle, the former director of conservation for the Louvre and France’s national museums, and Jean-Pierre Cuzin, the former director of paintings at the Louvre, comes at the moment when the “Virgin and Child with St Anne” enters its second and (– as we have seen with the repainted angel’s face in the National Gallery’s version of Leonardo’s “The Virgin of the Rocks”) inherently perilous phase of retouching. Louvre spokesmen, in their official justifications for a provocatively radical and inescapably controversial cleaning, are seemingly in denial of the significance of the events now reverberating around their heads.

Madame Bergeon Langle’s timely and sagacious warning that “Despite great progress in our competence we need to be driven by modesty. Better and more controllable materials are yet to be discovered” can only give heart to those critics who have been horrified by the Gadarene Scramble for newsworthy restorations in which too many major museums and galleries have already participated.

Michael Daley

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“Few problems are more controversial than the problem of how to restore a painting. I have never encountered a practitioner of the craft who approved of the work of another.”

~ Bernard Berenson

Above: the Louvre’s (unfinished, c. 1508-10) Leonardo da Vinci “The Virgin and Child with St Anne”. In return for the loan of the Louvre’s version of Leonardo’s “The Virgin of the Rocks”, the National Gallery is to send its (brittle and fragile) Leonardo Cartoon (“The Virgin and Child with St Anne and the Infant St John”) to the Louvre, to accompany the unveiling, after cleaning and restoration, of the “Virgin and Child with St Anne” – so many cross-polinating risks being undertaken by so few, so insouciant, curators.

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2nd January 2012

Something Not Quite Right About Leonardo’s Mouth ~ The Rise and Rise of Cosmetically Altered Art

In the conservation of art, the impulse “to do” is the most dangerous of all. There are so many ways in which picture restorers can, through misreading or misunderstanding, injure art. Unfortunately, there are also many ways of promoting injuries as triumphs. Worst-case injuries can be spun as dramatic “discoveries” and “recoveries”. With the Sistine Chapel ceiling restoration – perhaps, an all-time worst case – the last stages of Michelangelo’s sculptural painting were washed away with oven-cleaner-like chemically-laced thixotropic pastes and copious applications of rinse-water (see Fig. 1 and our earlier post). To sanction the unexpected and unprecedented changes, a “New Michelangelo” of art history-changing, colouristic brilliance was invoked. The surprise outcome was presented, post hoc, as having demolished the “Darkness Fallacy” and the “Sculptural Fallacy” of Michelangelo’s legendary, much-copied and commented-upon work. Less technically experimental methods can also produce serious alterations during a single intervention (see Figs. 2 & 3). Not always immediately noticeable but ultimately no less invidious are the cumulative “Chinese Whispers” changes made as successive restorers undo and redo their predecessors’ work. A case in point of the latter – and of the defences that get offered – can be seen in successive treatments of the London version of Leonardo’s “Virgin of the Rocks”.

The cult of unexpected and dramatic discoveries grew out of earlier (spurious) claims of scientifically underpinned restoration methodologies. “Picture surgeon” restorers mimicked the conventions and vocabularies of medicine with its “diagnoses”, “research”, “interns” and “treatments”, and ended by believing their own easel-side manners and propaganda. In truth, they have always more closely resembled cosmetic surgeons and it makes cultural sense to consider these twin spheres together. Both promise to reverse Time’s effects. With both, adverse consequences are often slow to be recognised. With human cosmetic surgery, everyone has recently learned of the horrors of industrial-grade silicone breast implants and Trout Lips. News has recently begun to emerge of the unanticipated consequences of radically invasive attempts to put the very fabric of paintings into perpetual good health. The National Gallery now concedes that its former penchant for ironing large masterpieces (like Titian’s “Bacchus and Ariadne”, Seurat’s great “Bathers”, and Sebastiano’s “The Raising of Lazarus”) onto sheets of industrially manufactured pressed-paper (Sundeala) boards has bequeathed pictures that can no longer be moved safely.

Both zones of surgery prove prey to stylistic fashions as the distinctive nips, tucks and nose-jobs of one period swiftly become démodé. A worst-case example of multiple botched treatments occurred recently at the Louvre. It was reported in the French and British press, in our Journal (see Fig. 3) and in our post of 28 December 2010. The Louvre’s controversial restorations continue to make headlines. One of our greatest concerns is that no picture restorer ever seems able to resist undoing and redoing (Fig. 4) the painted interventions with which predecessors left their imprints on masterpieces. That there may be some cultural/pathological root to such tampering should perhaps be considered. It sometimes seems as if restorers reward or indulge themselves with a little fancy creative brushwork after the tedium of a long cleaning. In 1998, a restorer, John Dick, working on Titian’s “Diana and Callisto” at the the National Galleries of Scotland told Scotland on Sunday (29 March 1998):

“Most of the areas I will be painting are so small I will not have to invent anything. I will simply have to match the colours to the original. It will be more difficult when it comes to improving Titian’s contours, which I know I will be tempted to do, but which can be dangerous. I will consult with other conservators and with the director [Timothy Clifford]. In the end, a decision has to be taken but if it does not look good it can always be taken back off again.”

Whether restorers are taking off or putting on, restorations never take place in vacuums. There is always a context that is comprised of a singular balance of forces and interests. These forces are various and competitive, being sometimes personal, sometimes professional, sometimes institutional; sometimes local, sometimes national, sometimes international; sometimes technical, sometimes philosophical; sometimes political, sometimes financial. But if there are rival, inter-acting sociologies or cultures of restoration, these always find expression in the individual acts of restorers upon individual, unique and historical works of art. It is therefore incumbent on those who authorise or sanction restorations to permit/guarantee absolute transparency in restoration procedures and methodologies. In this respect the National Gallery has recently made enormous strides. Under the Gallery’s present director and its previous director, ArtWatch UK has been given full and generously helpful access to conservation and archival records. The Gallery publishes in its annual Technical Bulletins much material on its own workings in conservation. Nonetheless, some old habits die hard. The best-reported conservation activities in the bulletins tend to be in the most neutral areas – in technical analyses of materials, applications of imaging systems, and so forth. The least adequately reported activities are precisely the crucial hands-on physical interventions of restorers.

Over the years, we have formed an opinion on this lacuna. There is a problem for the Gallery in fully acknowledging and showing what individual restorers do, because they do different things, each according to his own inclinations and talents. Taking the recent restoration of the “Virgin of the Rocks” as our case in point, let us first look in from “the outside” at the broader context. As we have discussed before, this was a restoration whose celebration (in what was to become a £1.5 billion exhibition) was planned before the restoration itself had even begun. As we have also previously discussed, the Gallery has proudly published its policy or “philosophy” of restoration treatments. Its handbook “Conservation of Paintings” acknowledges that pictures are now “changed primarily for aesthetic reasons” (p. 53) and (p. 45) that restorations are carried out on the “aesthetic objectives of those responsible for the cleaning”. Moreover, (p. 53) although the “different aesthetic decisions” taken by individual restorers produce results that “may look very different”, all of such different outcomes are “equally valid”, provided only that they have been carried out “safely”. These are alarming claims: in matters of aesthetic and artistic integrity, the “safety” or otherwise of the cleaning materials is a red herring: if pictures end up looking different, they are different, and these differences are material and irreversible.

The proof of the National Gallery’s restoration pudding is in the eating – which is to say, in our looking. In the Gallery’s current Technical Bulletin (Vol. 32), Larry Keith, Ashok Roy, Rachel Morrison and Peter Schade, say of the restoration of the “Virgin of the Rocks” that while its practical intent was “primarily aesthetic” it also served to provide an example of the Gallery’s interdisciplinary approach:

“Whenever possible, major restorations are intended as the hub of a wide range of research activity that sees curators, scientists and restorers working together – increasingly alongside colleagues from other institutions”.

The significance of such extra-conservational purposes of restorations should not be overlooked or underestimated: much of the credit for the present historically unprecedented coralling of quite so many Leonardos in one place at one time, has been given to the international connections and diplomatic skills of Gallery staff, as seen in their increasingly close relations with other major institutions such as the Louvre. As it happens, the relationship with the Louvre is proving more problematic and embarrassing than the Gallery might have anticipated. It has recently been reported that among the membership of an international advisory committee set up by the Louvre to advise on and monitor the restoration of Leonardo’s “The Virgin and Child with St Anne”, the two members who proved the most enthusiatic advocates of a more, rather than a less, radical cleaning of the painting, have been the National Gallery’s head of conservation, Larry Keith, and the curator of the current Leonardo blockbuster, Luke Syson.

One of the calling cards that Syson and Keith will have had on the international advisory committee has been the generally ecstatic art-critical reception of the restoration of the “Virgin of the Rocks” and of the blockbuster exhibition it had kick-started. Richard Dorment’s praise for the restoration was unreserved:

“This sense of interaction is palpable too in the National Gallery’s version of the Virgin of the Rocks, which until its recent cleaning was considered to be a slightly inferior version of an altarpiece in the Louvre. But when it emerged last year from the studio of Larry Keith, the National Gallery’s director of conservation, the refinement of the detail, depth of field and exquisitely calibrated tonal harmonies made it apparent that only Leonardo could have painted it, with little or no intervention from his studio assistants.”

How remarkable, perhaps, that so many people could now see, having been told what was to be seen, what so few, unaided, had seen before – an iffy, “not-altogether-Leonardo” had not only beome an “altogether-Leonardo” but a Leonardo that was now more than a match for the previously superior Leonardo. But Dorment’s acceptance of the claimed elevation would have been sweet music to Gallery ears – as must also have been his drum roll for the blockbuster show’s creation and his apparent endorsement, even, of its terrifyingly hazardous back-scratching corrolaries:

“Earlier this week, the National Gallery in London announced a historic collaboration with the Department of Paintings at the Louvre. The French have agreed to lend their version of Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks to the eagerly awaited Leonardo da Vinci exhibition that opens at Trafalgar Square in November. A few months later, the English will repay the debt by sending Leonardo’s highly finished preparatory drawing The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and John the Baptist (the Burlington House Cartoon) to Paris, where it will hang in close proximity to the painting it was made for, which is owned by the Louvre.”

Leaving aside the risks of lending the hitherto unlendable Cartoon, with the restoration of the London “Virgin of the Rocks”, we had initially been somewhat reassured to have been told that this was not to be an aggressive restoration; that while it would greatly thin the varnish applied by Helmut Ruhemann in 1949, it would not entirely remove it. (Pace the Art Critics, it has never been made clear how a cleaning that ran from November 2008 to May 2009 and that had not removed all of the previously applied varnish, might somehow have disclosed an entirely autograph status throughout a picture that was variously painted and unevenly finished.) When it went back on show after its “moderate” cleaning, old anxieties flared: it was evident that, with its now violently assertive blues, the picture had not returned to its previous post-cleaning appearance in the 1950s and 1960s. For the latest detailed accounts of the restoration and for photographic records we turned to the current Technical Bulletin (No. 32).

Comparing the large image of the angel’s face that is carried on the cover of the present Bulletin, with the best previous images (seen at Figs. 5 – 8), it was apparent that changes had occurred in this important and sensitive area. The most dramatic of these was to the most expressive feature – the angel’s mouth. With Leonardo, of all artists, a degree of circumspection in the restoration of his mouths might be expected. (Who would lightly change the expression of the “Mona Lisa”?) Instead, we encountered a full-blooded change to the design of a mouth on a face that had been held by one scholar and former director of the National Gallery, Kenneth Clark, to be exclusively the handiwork of Leonardo himself and the section of the painting in which the artist’s finishing glazes had best survived: “this is the one part of our Virgin of the Rocks where the evidence of Leonardo’s hand seems undeniable, not only in the full, simple modelling, but in the drawing of the hair.” Where Clark had seen a clear superiority in the head of the angel over that of the Virgin, in the 1990 re-publication of his book, a note was added saying that “As a result of the cleaning of the altarpiece in 1949 the differences between the heads are rather less apparent.”

The recent redrawing and remodeling during a restoration has cast the far side of the mouth downwards and left the upper lip no longer tucking enigmatically into the cheek in the manner so frequently encountered (see photographs, right) as effectively to constitute a trademark Leonardo/Leonardo school signature. The photographic evidence raised two questions: What had been done? Why had it been done? We returned to the Technical Bulletin.

No answers were to be found. There was no explanation because there was no mention or account of any change having been made to the mouth. As so often, the Bulletin’s authors favoured the general over the particular. We learnt that “The intent of the cleaning was to effect the desired aesthetic improvement through the reduction of the old varnish, not simply to remove it, and in the main a very thin remnant of that layer…remains on the picture.” This deepened the mystery: if a thin layer of Ruhemann’s 1949 varnish had remained over the face, and if this layer had not been injured during the latest cleaning, why should any features have needed changing at all?

We asked the restorer, Larry Keith, if he had made any retouchings to the face of the angel. He replied that he had, but said that these had been confined to areas of damage and or abrasion. Specifically, he said that he had not introduced any new elements. This seemed at variance with the photographic record, insofar as we were in possession of it. That the mouth had changed was beyond doubt: we had record of its condition in photographs of 1938 (Fig. 5) and 1947 (Fig. 6). When Kenneth Clark’s 1938 book of details of paintings in the National Gallery was reissued in 1990 it was with new (this time, colour) photographs. We thus had a record (Figs. 5 & 6) of the angel’s face before the Second World War and, crucially, before Helmut Ruhemann’s 1948-9 restoration. We had a record of 1990 that showed the post-Ruhemann state (see Fig. 7). The mouth might have been weakened by Ruhemann (see Figs. 15 & 16) but its disposition – which had conformed to that seen in an x-ray photograph of 1947 (Fig. 19) – had survived. Ruhemann had, however, chiselled away the end of the nose so as to bring it inside the contour of the face (Figs. 5, 6 & 7), as is the case with the angel in the Louvre version (Figs. 9 & 10) but was seen not to be the case in the 1947 x-ray photograph of the London picture (Fig. 19). Keith has retained Ruhemann’s revision of the nose which had undermined (for reasons to be examined on another occasion) the coherence of the head’s perspective .

Clark’s book had again been re-issued in 2008, this time with distinctly superior new, digital colour photographs (see Fig. 8). At this late date, the mouth showed no change. So when, in November 2008, Larry Keith’s restoration began, the published photograph of that year effectively constituted a pre-treatment record, and the cover photograph of the angel on the current Technical Bulletin constituted a post treatment record. In between the two, the changes to the face had occurred. (To show the changes to the mouth more clearly, the painter Gareth Hawker tonally adjusted the 1938, 2008 and 2011 photographs seen at Fig. 4 so as to bring them to some tonal parity.) In view of the dramatic change to the mouth and the absence of any signs of losses or abrasions that might have preceded the repainting, we requested photographs of the angel’s face taken immediately after cleaning (but before retouching), and after retouching. These were kindly supplied. They confirmed that the mouth had been changed by retouching (see Figs. 17 and 18) but the pre-retouching photograph gave no indication of injuries or losses that might have required treatment. We therefore asked Keith, on what basis he had made his painted changes to the mouth (and elsewhere). He did not reply.

Some weeks later Luke Syson replied on Keith’s behalf, saying that as the curator of the work, he had been responsible for monitoring and advising on all aspects of the restoration and was therefore the person carrying the responsibility for answering all questions, including our own, about the restoration. Unfortunately, in this professional capacity, the curator, too, preferred to talk in the generality and to explain the restorer’s approach to the painting “as a whole”. I replied that, on the evidence of the Gallery’s two photographs, it was clear that features in the angel’s mouth which had survived both the Ruhemann cleaning and Keith’s own cleaning had been painted out. Would he explain, I asked, the thinking behind the alterations, and why changes to so sensitive and highly expressive a feature had not been discussed or acknowledged. I added that in my examination of the Gallery’s conservation dossiers I had encountered other instances of un-discussed and un-acknowledged changes made by restorers – including a major change to the Leonardo Cartoon.

In replying, Syson first said that he had reviewed the photographic evidence but could see no evidence of any deviation in Keith’s retouching from the procedure that he (Syson) had previously described. This was a depressingly circular bureaucratic response. Our concern had not been over command and management procedures at the Gallery, but over actual changes to specific and crucial features of a major and unique historical painting. Syson then claimed that the photographs showed that a single small damage had been revealed in Ruhemann’s 1949 cleaning and that he had retouched it. Keith, Syson added, had removed that single retouch to a small damage, in order to retouch it himself on the evidence provided by the surrounding undamaged paint. But this simply conjures a fresh mystery: how can noe restorer’s substitution of one small retouch of a single small loss by another restorer, have caused a mouth that formerly turned upwards at its extremity and tucked into a cheek, to turn downwards and cease to tuck into the cheek? However this might have happened – and clearly, something happened – where is the record of it?

As if in anticipation of such a question, Syson adds in conclusion, and in returning to his homebase circular bureaucratese explanations:

“Since this, as I’ve stated, is entirely in line with the approach taken elsewhere in the picture, there has been no need separately to document this part of the work.”

Between 1945 and 1994, Vermeer’s poor “Lady Seated at the Virginal” received no fewer than nine bouts of “treatment” – including being lined twice within three years. The last treatment (in 1994) was entered into the conservation dossier as “Retouching in face and neck corrected (Bomford) Surface cleaned, revarnished“. No photographic record of this intervention was to be found. When asked, the restorer, David Bomford, said that this was because: “there were no real changes – it was simply a matter of glazing a few small sections of the previous retouching which had discoloured slightly.” When our colleague, Michel Favre Favre-Felix, of ARIPA, noticed the second repainting in 5 years of the Veronese mouth shown in Fig. 3, and asked to see the Louvre’s documentation on it, he was told there was none because the repainting was but a “localised intervention“. A Louvre spokeswoman later described it as a simple sprucing-up (“bichonnée”) and added triumphantly: “That’s why you cannot find it in the painting’s dossier“.

Michael Daley

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Above, Fig. 1: Detail of Michelangelo’s “Erithraean Sibyl” on the Sistine Chapel celing, before cleaning (left), after cleaning (right).

Above, Fig. 2: Cleanings at the Metropolitan Museum (top) and the National Gallery (bottom), as shown in the programme to the 2001 ArtWatch UK lecture, “Light for Art’s Sake”, by (the late cinematographer) Jack Cardiff.

Above, Fig 3: ArtWatch UK coverage of “restoration” changes made to major Titian and Veronese paintings at the Prado and the Louvre.

Above, Fig. 4: Changes made to the mouth and nose tip of the angel in the National Gallery’s “Virgin of the Rocks” in the course of two restorations (see left and below).

Above, Fig. 5: The face of the angel in the National Gallery’s version of Leonardo’s “Virgin of the Rocks”, as published in 1938 (before either of its two post-war restorations) in Kenneth Clark’s book “One Hundred Details from Pictures in the National Gallery”. For a comparable detail of the angel in the Louvre’s version of the painting, see Figs. 9 & 10.

Above, Fig. 6: The face of the angel in the National Gallery’s “Virgin of the Rocks”, as published (on glossy paper) in the gallery’s 1947 account by Martin Davies of the documentary evidence concerning the picture. That account, and its 16 large plates (see Fig. 19), shortly preceded the restoration of the painting, by Helmut Ruhemann, in 1949. Note how clearly the nose touches the contour of the face. Compare this with the x-ray photograph in Fig. 19 and the nose/contour relationship after Ruhemann’s restoration seen in Figs. 7 & 8.

Above, Fig. 7: The face of the National Gallery’s angel, as shown in the gallery’s 1990 re-publishing of Kenneth Clark’s 1938 book of details, with later corresponding colour photographs. Those later photographs, taken together with original 1938 plates, enable the reader to gauge the effects and consequences of many post-war restorations within the gallery. For a discussion of how those results were viewed within the National Gallery itself, see our post of 24 November 2011.

Above, Fig. 8: The face of the National Gallery’s angel, as shown in the 2008, second re-publication of Kenneth Clark’s 1938 book of details. For this edition, clearly superior digital photographs were taken at the Gallery. For a discussion of the differences between the two editions, see left. For a discussion of the Gallery’s present, high photographic standards, see Gareth Hawker.

Above, Fig. 9: The face of the angel in the Louvre’s version of Leonardo’s “Virgin of the Rocks”.

Above, Fig. 10: A detail of the face of the Louvre angel, showing heavy craquelure. This cracking was almost certainly a consequence of the painting having been transferred, by restorers at the Louvre, from its original panel to a canvas in 1806. The fragilty of its surface may, however, have helped protect the painting from campaigns of cleaning and “restoration”.

Above, Fig. 11: Leonardo da Vinci’s c. 1510-15 black chalk study “The Head of St Anne” (reversed) from the Royal Collection, Windsor.

Above, Fig. 12: Detail (reversed), of Leonardo’s study “The Head of St Anne”. Note the distinctive Leonardo treatment of the (viewer’s) left side of the mouth. This drawing – a later Leonardo chalk study – was made long after the painting of the Louvre version of the “Virgin of the Rocks” and after the London version. The upwards zig-zagging design of the foreshortened far side of mouth as it tucks into the forms of the cheek, is effectively a life-long Leonardo/Leonardo School trademark signature. It is, for example, also seen below (albeit in slightly less pronounced manner) in a much earlier study that was made before the Louvre painting and, specifically, for it.

Above, Fig. 13: Leonardo’s “Study for the Angel’s Head in the Virgin of the Rocks”, the Louvre. This drawing of 1483, in the Turin Royal Library, was made in silverpoint on a light brown prepared paper, for the final painted head seen here at Fig. 9.

Above, Fig. 14: A detail of Fig. 13. Note the number and the various permutations of lines defining the shape and positioning of the cheek/chin profile contours; the nose; and the mouth. Those variations and explorations might be compared with the final painted version of the face seen in Figs. 9 & 10.

Above, Fig. 15: A detail of the plate of the National Gallery angel’s head as published by Kenneth Clark in 1938 and showing the then configuration of the mouth.

Above, Fig. 16: A detail of the updated 2008 photograph of the National Gallery angel’s head, as shown in the second re-issue of Kenneth Clark’s book of details. This photograph shows the painting after its restoration by Helmut Ruhemann in 1948.

Above, Fig. 17: A detail of the the National Gallery angel’s head, as supplied by the Gallery and showing the painting as seen after its latest restoration (which began in 2008) when the picture had been cleaned but before it had been retouched.

Above, Fig. 18: A detail of the the National Gallery angel’s head, as supplied by the Gallery and showing the painting as seen after its latest cleaning and after the subsequent retouching. Notice the changes introduced to the far side (on our left) of the mouth, on the upper lip and, particularly, its new relationship to the forms of the cheek.

Above, Fig. 19: An x-ray photograph of the National Gallery angel’s head, as published by the gallery in its 1947 account of the documentary evidence concerning the picture by Martin Davies. (In the current Technical Bulletin there is another, perhaps more recent, x-ray photograph that clearly shows the cradle at the back of the panel. In a second version, the visual “interference” of the cradle has been digitally suppressed.) See Fig. 6 for the appearance of the face before either of the last two restorations and notice here the consistent design of the mouth, as seen right-through all the paint layers, and the clear upward tilt of the far side (to our left) of the mouth.

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19th December 2011

Two “As Good as New”, Colour Contrasting Velazquezs ~ Thanks to the Fundación Iberdrola

Following the recent National Gallery restoration that launched a £1.5 billion Leonardo blockbuster, comes news of a brace of corporately funded restorations (- two pictures and a classical sculpture) at the Prado. The energy corporation Iberdrola is acting through its cultural off-shoot, “Fundación Iberdrola”, to “Raise awareness about the contribution of the IBERDROLA Group to society” by allocations of pre-tax profits dedicated “decisively to the promotion and dissemination of art and culture in the territories where IBERDROLA operates”. As part of its green image-building campaign of Good Works (which includes illuminating buildings at night and training young researchers in the energy field) the foundation has made itself “Protector Member” of the Prado’s “Restoration Programme” which encourages restoration research and trains restorers within the museum to the tune of 300,000 euros per annum.

Our prime fear with Art/Business relationships in the treatment of unique, historic and irreplaceable works of art has always been that the commercial tail might wag the custodial dog; might press for excitement and drama over minimalist judicious and restrained intervention; for more frequent rather than less frequent interventions – in effect, might expect big bangs for big bucks. A second concern is that corporate restorations receive over-hyped and propagandistic “Good News” promotion as instruments of miraculous “recoveries” and “discoveries”. This last practice compounds the problem of chronic unaccountability in art restoration. Restorers who work in-house at museums are, for obvious reasons, given full political protection for their actions however controversial or demonstrably harmful they might be. Museums rarely concede that even long-past restorations were harmful and almost never admit to recent – let alone current – injuries.

When reporting the Prado’s latest restorations, the online Artdaily.org, echoes Iberdrola’s own website account of the treatment of the monumental, paired paintings “Philip III on Horseback” and “Margaret of Austria on Horseback”. As the proselytising global energy giant puts it: “These paintings have been rehabilitated by the art gallery’s team of technicians with the backing of Fundación IBERDROLA as a supporting member of its restoration activity. The labour of specialists has allowed for recovering the original values of both portraits, which were significantly affected by the accumulation of dirt and the alteration of the varnish that had buffered the contrasts of colour”. Both accounts fail to appraise the Prado’s own before and after cleaning photographs which show changes that seem arbitrary and artistically injurious (see Figs. 1, 4 & 5). Such preparedness to accept on trust that the latest photographically recorded states are the best, most “advanced”, most reliably truthful – and even “original” – conditions of historic works of art reflects a wider and dangerous absence of properly critical appraisals of restorations. It would seem axiomatic that if works of art are to be altered (and then re-altered by the next generation) the processes concerned should be absolutely transparent and freely discussed. Artdaily trills that the paintings have been “fully restored to their original appearance” by the removal of a “veil” of dirt and “altered” varnish; and, that the restorers “allowed for the recuperation of [the pictures'] original values”. This is naive and illogical: if removing the “veil” had revealed the original paintwork, what would need to be recuperated?

The over-selling of restorations can distort scholarship itself. Where Artdaily describes the two pictures as having been painted by Velazquez with the help of assistants, Iberdrola speaks with possessive proprietary pride of “emblematic works of Diego Velazquez” now rightfully displayed in the same gallery as “Las Meninas” and “the other three renowned equestrian portraits of the artist”. This inflation traduces the labours of scholars. In her 1948 book “Velazquez”, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier (a member of the Hispanic Society of America) said of the Philip III that it is:

“by an unknown artist, or according to Beruete by Bartolomé González, retouched by Velázquez…Beruete wrote of Philip III’s portrait: ‘The greater part of the horse, the retouches of the armour, the horseman’s right arm, leg and foot; the stirrup, bit, the ornaments which hang from the horse’s croup, and the retouching of some parts of the sea-scape in the distance, are undoubtedly by his hand; one feels in them the lightness of his touch and his habitual precision and vigour. On the other hand, the forehead and the nostrils of the horse, as well as a great part of the background, were doubtless executed by the pupil Mazo.’ Beruete thought that Veláquez left the head of the King in its original state; others are of the opinion that he repainted it.”

More recently, in his posthumously republished Catalogue Raisonné (Taschen/Wildenstein, 1996), José Lopez-Rey describes a bewildering array of attributions and summarises that most scholars are agreed “on the strength of visual evidence that this equestrian portrait […had been] executed by a lesser hand and later reworked by Velázquez or under his direction”. Lopez-Rey adds that “Whoever the original painter of Philip III on Horseback, the painting has been visibly repainted, mainly the head, chest, forelegs and tail of the horse, possibly by Velázquez or an assistant in about 1634-35” and that by 1772 both Philip III and Queen Margaret had been extended from vertical to roughly square formats by additional vertical strips of canvas on both sides. Re Iberdrola’s hyperbole, Lopez-Rey draws distinctions between the entirely autograph Velazquezs “The Surrender of Breda” and the equestrian portraits of Philip IV and Prince Balthasar Carlos; the equestrian portrait of Queen Isabel, where Velazquez’s hand is “recognisable”, and the two recently restored works under consideration here, where that authorial hand is present only to a “lesser degree” in pictures “which were mostly executed by other painters”.

Given this consensus of uncertain authorial contributions, Iberdrola’s attempt to spin authentic Velazquez silk seems brazen when the Prado’s own before and after restoration photographs of the Philip III show so many artistically disturbing changes. During their latest restoration/recuperation, the sections of canvas that had been added to the sides of both paintings during the 18th century were cut off. Artdaily says that these additions had been made to make the paintings compositionally compatible with other works when installed in a new room in the Royal Palace in Madrid. The Fundación Iberdrola justifies stripping these historical extensions on the grounds that their removal has created a greater compositional contrast between the two pictures and the three great autograph Velazquez equestrian portraits of Philp IV, Isabel of Bourbon and Prince Baltasar Carlos. Artdaily describes the cleaning and the cropping together as having achieved the greatest possible recuperation of the “original perceptual conditions“. What is not acknowledged by either party is that this removal of historically resonant material has served to eliminate possibly discomfiting visual testimony to the original condition of the paintings (- at least insofar as it had survived into the 18th century) and made the task of gauging the effects of successive restorations almost impossible.

It can be assumed that when those strips were added, their values matched and seamlessly extended the then extant values of the two pictures (as with the repair to Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes discussed in our April 1st 2011 post). What, therefore, might account for the mismatched values that had emerged and persisted (see right) until the recent twin restoration? The strips would likely have been painted by a single artist, in a single campaign and without need for making the numerous revisions and re-revisions by the assorted, variously attributed hands that are evident in the paintings themselves. It is unlikley that any paint layers in the extensions would have been made over already varnished paintwork and therefore be at risk of floating off during cleaning. Conspicuously, the most obviously exculpatory explanation for the mismatch of tones – that the additions had matched the values of the picture when under an old darkened varnish – has not been offered. The restorers reportedly attribute the mismatches solely to the technical fact that the bordering strips had been painted over darker ground colours than those in the paintings, and that this had somehow caused “the pigments in the two areas [to have] behaved differently over the course of the centuries”. This does not hold water: while darker grounds would certainly come to influence the values of the extensions as the overlying paint became translucent with age (as can most clearly be seen in the “see-through” of the first state of Philip III’s horse), it could not alone have done so to such striking (and varying) extents as have occurred in the two paintings. Whereas, the fact that darker grounds were used on the extensions would itself suggest an initial perceived need to match the then darker values of the paintings.

There is another reason for disregarding the current restorers’ explanation. If the dark ground theory were correct, the mismatch phenomenon would have arisen very slowly over time and not have – as the photographic record shows – lurched into being on successive restorations (see Figs. 2, 6 & 7). Artdaily has not shown before and after photographs of the Queen Margaret, which painting Lopez-Rey describes in the 1996 edition of his catalogue raisonné as having been restored in 1968. His post-1968 illustration is shown here in Fig. 2. However, in the 1978 edition of the book an apparently earlier (and presumably pre-1968 restoration) state is reproduced (see Figs. 6 & 7 for details of that state). At that date, the left-hand extension read only fractionally darker than the painting, and although the right-hand extension was appreciably darker it was less obtrusively so than was the case after the 1968 restoration. As described opposite, and as can clearly be seen in Fig. 7, the impact of the dark ground was neglible at the brightest part of the sky, on the horizon, where it might have been expected to be most evident. The original dramatically escalating darkness in the sky above those points should, therefore, properly be taken as part of the original tonal schema – and not as either accumulated filth or ground paint see-through. The similarity of the states in both paintings, as seen in Fig. 2, might suggest that the Philip too had been restored around the late 1960s. The differences between the pre and the post 1968 restoration states of the Margaret speak of massive changes of value being made during a single “treatment”. The horse, for example, was reduced from a deep rich chestnut to a tan colouring. That the earlier chestnut appearance had not been a by-product of some filthy misleading “veil” is demonstrable: the whites on the horse’s muzzle and upper left leg read as white not yellow or grey or brown. Whatever might account for the radical changes, it was not consistent with the removal of some overall disfiguring layer.

Characterising the surgical elimination of material that bears awkward testimony of an earlier, now irrecoverably lost state, as a recuperation of a painting’s “ original conditions” is naive and seriously misleading. With every restoration – however funded – the most urgent critical question must always be: “did it do any harm?” To answer it, we must begin by using our eyes and, perhaps, by heeding the advice of artists, one of whom reportedly asked “What’s that dirt called that the restorers clean off? Oh, that’s right – burnt umber.”

Michael Daley

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Above, Fig. 1: “Philip III on Horseback”, before (left) and after (right) its recent restoration as shown in artdaily.org, with photographs by courtesy of the Prado. Consider this: if restorations did no more than simply remove dirt and discoloured varnish, then with each restoration a work would be returned to its condition when last cleaned. This does not happen – every restoration produces a new, different work – but were it to occur, there could be no news-grabbing claims about miraculously recovered original conditions. Were it to occur it would also be possible, by placing photographs of today’s restored works against photographs of the works when last restored, to reassure art lovers that nothing untoward happened during restoration. Such photographic comparisons are not volunteered because they cannot be; because, as frank curators admit, in every restoration there are losses as well as gains; there is always a trade-off between improved legibility and losses or corruptions of artistic content.

Above, Fig. 2: “Philip III on Horseback” (left) and “Margaret of Austria” (right) as shown in the 1996 Taschen/Wildenstein edition of José Lopez-Rey’s “Velazquez ~ Painter of Painters”. With regard to the reliability of these photographs, unless otherwise established, we take them to have been judged by the authors and publishers to have derived from reliable sources and to constitute fair depictions. Concerning the testimony of photographs generally, they do not need to be absolutely accurate and truthful (although that is, of course, a desirable goal – see Gareth Hawker). In two respects their testimonial value is essentially relative. That is, it is the patterns of values within a photograph that are crucial – the linked ratios of tone/hue values. (If a tone which goes into a restoration darker than its neighbours emerges lighter then there is, ipso facto, cause for investigation and explanation.) Similarly, much of the testimony of individual photographs lies in their appearance vis-a-vis earlier and later photographs. Both of the two photographs above are markedly different – and in the same way – from their earlier counterparts in the 1978 Italian edition of Lopez-Rey’s book. Both of the paintings then were much darker (and handsomer – see Figs. 6 & 7), and in both cases the discrepancies between the original paintings and their 18th century extensions were then less pronounced and artistically disruptive. In the photographs above we can see that although the extensions are now markedly darker than the centre sections, they are not uniformly so. The darkest passages occur in all of the corners of the Philip and in three of the corners in the Queen Margaret picture. At that date artists worked hierarchically, with figures – especially monarchs – pre-eminent, and backgrounds (landscapes, seascapes, skies) subservient. The lighter tones of heads and their fineries were commonly thrown into relief and pictorial promininence by conveniently dark clouds or foliage (see Fig. 6). Artists did not transcribe their values from camera obscuros, they manipulated them to suit their own purposes. Had the darkness of the extensions been a consequence of underpaint show-through, its disfiguring presence would have been most apparent where the lightest values fall, which is in the bottom of the sky at the horizon. In fact, any see-through distortion is least apparent at those points (see below). It seems safe to conclude, therefore, that paint, previously present elsewhere, has been lost. By an accident of chemistry, it is the darker pigments, such as burnt umber, that are most vulnerable to cleaning solvents.

Above, Fig. 3: “Philip III on Horseback”, attributed to Velazquez and others, as shown in the 1996 Lopez-Rey. To appreciate the scale of changes that restorers’ make, the photograph above, which predates 1996, has been cropped to the format shown in the before and after photographs shown above and below (Figs. 1, 4 & 5) which record the effects of the painting’s recent treatment and surgery. The shifts of value are enormous. The surgery was radical – the 18th century additions were removed. The claims made by the restorers’ are matchingly enormous. These paintings are said to be “fully restored to their original appearance”. It is claimed that “While it was previously difficult to appreciate the merit of these works within the group (other than for their purely iconographic merits) , these are now absolutely evident.” It is specifically claimed that a new dynamism has emerged in the Philip III and that this has been transmitted “through the foreshortening of the horse and the luminous sky behind the figure“. The foreshortening of the horse was a done deal before this restoration began. As can be seen in Fig. 5, however, the painting has acquired an overall, florid colouring. The sky may be a cooler more uniform blue but it has lost its previous theatre and differentiations. The lights in the painting came from two sources. There was a brilliant, off stage-right “spotlight” that lit the front of the horse and the monarch, whose own brilliantly illuminated and modelled leg bisected the horse’s primary lights and shades. Additionally, there was a raking general light from the horizon that reflected in the water, throwing the horse’s darker tones into relief. These effects, as they survived in Figs. 3 & 4, have not been enhanced by restoration or recuperation, they have been weakened. By liberating blueness at the expense of tonality, the sky, instead of receding and throwing the horse and rider into relief, now simply obtrudes.

Above, Fig. 4: “Philip III on Horseback”, before the recent restoration, as shown in artdaily.org. One the hardest things to establish in restorations is the extent to which restorers wield their own brushes. To spot their tiniest but often crucial interventions (on the most sensitive and expressive parts of faces, for example) requires the provision of detailed photographs recording after-cleaning and after-cleaning-and-retouching states. The two artdaily photographs are sufficient, however, to show that massive retouching (“recuperation”?) occurred in one zone. Before this last intervention, the originally positioned baton carrying arm of Philip showed through the painting of the sky. Now (as seen below) it does not. What other additions were made? What proportion of this now “fully restored to… original appearance” painting is a product of the 21st century?

Above, Fig. 5: “Philip III on Horseback”, after the recent restoration, as shown in artdaily.org. One noteworthy injury in this painting can be seen at the horse’s left knee. Previously, as seen in Figs. 3 & 4, the contour of the leg was articulated by the contrast between the light upper surface of the leg and the adjacent dark of the distant town across the water. With the eradication of that strategically placed, pictorially functional dark zone, an ungainly thick dark bar has emerged that attaches to neither the horse nor the town but instead floats on the picture surface. In all probability its original function at an early stage of painting had been to serve as a shorthand guide to the artist of the tonal requirement that would later be needed to throw the advancing horse into relief.

Above, Fig. 6: Artdaily does not show photographs of the restored Margaret but an earlier restoration seems apparent in a comparison of the plates in the 1978 and the 1996 editions of José Lopez-Rey’s book. We see in the details above left and below left the painting before its 1968 restoration. The differences between them and their later counterparts are remarkable. No educated eye could equate the differences between these states with a straightforward removal of an overall film of dirt, or discoloured, “veiling” varnishes. The changes are variously too abrupt, too arbitrary and too injurious to the force and strength of the picture. No overall covering could return the washed-out post-1968 restoration state to its former vigour. No discoloured varnish could now “recuperate” the former chestnut of the horse from the succeeding tan colouring, on the one hand, and/or simultaneously restore the wooded valleys of the bottom right to their former vigour and panache. A single, seemingly intractable passage of paint gives the lie to successive treatments of this picture. We see in the tiny recalcitrant dark remnants of trees that still cling to the edge of the side of the second hill down from the horizon, the last corroboration of the values in the original picture that had been matched on the extension canvas. We see them here, as in the aftermath of the 1968 restoration, but will not, presumably, see them again, given the recent “recuperating” removal of this mute information-rich canvas extension.

Above, Fig. 7: the right-hand extension of the “Margaret of Austria on Horseback”, before (left) and after (right) the 1968 restoration.

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24th November 2011

The National Gallery’s £1.5 billion Leonardo Restoration

Two decades after recognising that art restoration “discoveries” and “revelations” had become very big business, we encounter a blockbuster exhibition that required a Government indemnity of £1.5 billion and was specifically launched as a vehicle to celebrate a restoration that had yet to take place: “We started thinking about this five years ago, when we were beginning to plan the restoration of ‘The Virgin of the Rocks’, so an exhibition to celebrate that project seemed like the right thing to do.” So said Luke Syson, the curator of the National Gallery’s “Leonardo da Vinci: Painter of the Court of Milan” exhibition, in a BBC interview.

Museum restorations never take place in vacuums. If you build an exhibition on the proposed restoration of a very famous artist’s work you set certain narrative expectations in motion; create pressures and hopes of big, dramatic results. When the “Virgin of the Rocks” was put back on display after its restoration – and pronounced an entirely autograph Leonardo, even though the restorer had not removed all of his predecessor’s varnish – I was pleased to discuss the then forthcoming Leonardo exhibition with Luke Syson who said that its scholarly focus would be an analysis of the influence that a new type of Leonardo painting had had on his followers. Namely, that during the 15 or so years long gestation of the National Gallery’s version of the “Virgin of the Rocks” which was delivered unfinished in 1508, and the contemporaneous (1492-98) “Last Supper” in Milan, Leonardo’s painting style had become distinctly abstracted, less naturalistic and more metaphysical in character. When I expressed scepticism that this thesis might rest secure on two such different works as the “Virgin of the Rocks”, with its uncertain condition and status (the Gallery admits the picture is “manifestly uneven in finish and execution” and that there has been “a good deal of agreement that Leonardo himself painted little or none of it”), and the degraded, fragmented, many-times restored “Last Supper”, Syson disclosed that the Royal Academy’s full-size copy of the latter by Giampietrino was being borrowed. At this, I asked if the Gallery’s own Giampietrino “Christ carrying his Cross” (which had recently been relegated to the reserve collection – on Syson’s instruction, I learned) would also be included in the exhibition. It would not. This was disappointing – and a lost opportunity to right an ancient wrong.

The “Christ carrying his Cross” had been discussed by Larry Keith, the Gallery’s new head of conservation who has restored the “Virgin of the Rocks”, and Ashok Roy, the Gallery’s head of science, in the Gallery’s 1996 Technical Bulletin under the title “Giampietrino, Boltraffio, and the Influence of Leonardo”. This followed the restoration of two Giampietrinos (his “Christ” and his “Salome”) and Boltraffio’s “Virgin and Child”. A remarkable technical discovery had been made on “Christ carrying his Cross” the ramifications of which seemed not fully to have been appreciated. Keith and Roy did acknowledge that Giampietrino’s Leonardo borrowings were “not restricted to matters of composition alone, but also include other aspects of painting technique”; they granted that the “strong chiaroscuro and dark backgrounds of Giampietrino’s small format panels are clearly an attempt to emulate the more striking pictorial effects that Leonardo had introduced to Milan”; they explicitly acknowledged that Giampietrino’s painting technique was much influenced by Leonardo’s, and that this could be “seen in the sfumato and relief of the National Gallery Christ carrying his Cross” – which painting was “clearly derived from Leonardesque prototypes” and for which “A silver-point study of Christ carrying his Cross by Leonardo [was] clearly the compositional source…” And yet, despite all of this, they seemed at pains to cast Giampietrino as a pronouncedly lesser follower of Leonardo than Boltraffio.

While excluded from the forthcoming show, Giampietrino’s “Christ” has at least been liberated from the reserve collection, making it possible for the picture and its condition to be studied before visiting the Leonardo blockbuster. Not only is it as closely related to Leonardo’s imagery and methods as has been acknowledged, it is arguably the best preserved Renaissance picture in the National Gallery. Its good condition is a byproduct of what the Gallery describes as “an unusual pigmented glaze layer”. After carefully building and modelling his forms with successive layers of paint and glazes to “an illusion of relief”, Giampietrino covered the whole painting with a single “final extremely thin overall toning layer consisting of warm dark pigments and black”. This had had remarkable aesthetic and physical consequences. The layer was contemporary with the painting and, being composed of walnut oil with a little varnish, resistant to the usual varnish stripping solvents. The use of walnut oil further relates this picture to the “Virgin of the Rocks” where that oil had been used throughout.

During the picture cleaning controversies at the National Gallery after the Second World War, the possibility that just such toning overall finishes might exist on old paintings was advanced by Ernst Gombrich. In a letter to the Burlington Magazine in 1950 and in his 1960 book “Art and Illusion”, he cited a famous report by Pliny which described the overall dark veiling finishes that Apelles had applied to his paintings to wondrous effect, and asked “is it conceivable that such famous testimonies would never have induced a master of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries to emulate Apelles and apply a darkening varnish to achieve a more subtle tonal unity?” He then reflected “I do not think it is even claimed that our ‘safe’ cleaning methods could detect such a varnish, let alone that they could preserve it.” This provoked the National Gallery’s restorer Helmut Ruhemann (who had cleaned Leonardo’s “Virgin of the Rocks” in 1948-9 to unfortunate effect – see right) into a vehement dogmatic dismissal: “there is no evidence for anything so inherently improbable as that a great old master should cover his whole picture with a ‘toning down layer’.”

That Leonardo was a learned man and a reader of Pliny is acknowledged by both Syson and Keith in the present exhibition catalogue. In his 1962 Burlington Magazine article (“Dark Varnishes: Variations on a Theme from Pliny”), Gombrich repeated what Pliny had said of Apelles:

“He used to give his pictures when finished a dark coating so thinly spread that, by reflecting, it enhanced the brilliance of the colour while, at the same time, it afforded protection from dust and dirt and was not itself visible except at close quarters. One main purpose was to prevent the brilliance of the colours from offending the eye, since it gave the impression as if the beholder were seeing them through a window of talc, so that he gave from a distance an imperceptible touch of severity to excessively rich colours.”

How could the connection between Apelles’ final “dark coating so thinly spread” and Giampietrino’s “final, extremely thin overall toning layer [with] warm dark pigments and black” have passed without comment? The cleaning controversy of the 1960s had hardly faded from memory: as recently as 1985 it had been described by a subsequent director of the National Gallery, Neil MacGregor, as “one of the most celebrated jousts” in the Burlington Magazine. In the current National Gallery Technical Bulletin, (Vol. 32) Larry Keith, Ashok Roy, Rachel Morrison and Peter Schade, say of the restoration of the “Virgin of the Rocks” that while its practical intent was “primarily aesthetic” it also served to provide an example of the gallery’s interdisciplinary approach: “Whenever possible, major restorations are intended as the hub of a wide range of research activity that sees curators, scientists and restorers working together – increasingly alongside colleagues from other institutions”. Our criticsms of the Gallery’s customary use of restorations as effective “laboratory test cases” for conducting multidisciplinary research with an input from curators are longstanding, but what makes this unusual and pronounced “non-singing” of such a very important finding all the more perplexing is the fact that this discovery may be the tip of a scholarly iceberg. Tucked in footnote 24 of the 1996 Keith/Roy account is a disclosure that such overall toning layers are “quite rare in Italian painting of the period” and that they “may be confined to Milanese technique”. Did this mean that other instances had been found at the Gallery? Or even, given the Milanese locus, that Leonardo himself might have been the instigator or a user of such applications? (Kenneth Clark had earlier attributed disparities of finish in the “Virgin of the Rocks” precisely to damaged glazes – see right.)

When Larry Keith writes in the current catalogue that Leonardo exploited oil paint in the “Virgin of the Rocks” for its “subtle transitions and distinctions within the deepest tones, all of which were carefully orchestrated within a system of unified lighting”, he might as appropriately be describing the well-preserved effects of Giampietrino’s “Christ” as those in the “Virgin of the Rocks” where, despite the picture’s acknowledged “inconsistencies” of finish, Leonardo is said to have created a “new and remarkable unified coherence…by a carefully considered manipulation of lighting, colour and tonal values”.

Whatever the merits of Giampietrino as an artist, no Renaissance work in the Gallery shows a more tightly and subtly controlled overall development of forms, tones, colours, and expressively purposive lighting, than his “Christ”. It was unjust if not perverse when Keith/Roy, gave the laurel to Boltraffio, in part as “an artist capable of a more subtle understanding of Leonardo” but also as one who had been working in Leonardo’s studio “by 1491”, as opposed to Giampietrino of whom “it is not certain how much direct contact [he] would have had with Leonardo’s actual painting methods, and it would be misleading to assume that the imitation of Leonardo’s effects required direct reproduction of his techniques.” Under what circumstances and on whose authority other than Leonardo’s, might someone have made a full sized, exactly matching, oil-painted copy of the “Last Supper”? Besides which, in the current catalogue, Minna Moore Ede, when describing Giampietrino’s copy of Leonardo’s “Last Supper” as being with its “great clarity and three-dimensionality” the most faithful and accurate record of all, discloses that Giampietrino, just like Boltraffio, is now understood to have been a live-in apprentice who joined Leonardo’s workshop in the mid 1490s.

In the Technical Bulletin Keith/Roy saw “differences of palette” between the “more highly saturated local colour” of Giampietrino’s copy of Leonardo’s “Last Supper” and a “pictorial unity produced by a tightly controlled, restricted range of tone and value” in the work itself. That reading has been dropped: Keith now sees (Leonardo exhibition catalogue entry, p. 70) that the “Last Supper” was, as Giampietrino’s copy had testified, executed in a “higher-keyed, lighter palette” than that of the London “Virgin of the Rocks”.

Even if Giampietrino’s work had been “essentially imitative, showing more of an attempted simulation of the painted appearance of Leonardo’s works than an understanding of his ideas”, as opposed to Boltraffio’s “more sophisticated” grasp, it might for that very reason leave him the more reliable guide to the original appearances of Leonardo’s paintings than Boltraffio in his more ambitious attempts to think and compose in the manner of his master and superior. In their 1996 account, Keith and Roy undermine their own slur that Giampietrino’s overall toning layer attempted a spurious impression of a Leonardesque suppressed colourism by explaining how, in his “Christ”, Giampietrino had covered his white gesso ground with “a stiffly brushed, rather opaque imprimiture of a light brownish grey”, while for his “deep red” draperies he had first applied “an unusual strongly coloured dense red-brown underpaint consisting of vermilion, red earth and black, with an increased proportion of black used under the shadow of the folds.” Those passages of painting were further reinforced with “dark red glazes”. Taken together, it was precisely admitted that (- and quite remarkably Apelles-like), “The overall effect is restrained in spite of the intensity of colour and creates a more naturalistic effect.”

The late-discovered existence of Giampietrino’s dark toning layer constituted a repudiation of the Gallery’s former head of science, Joyce Plesters, who (in the Burlington Magazine in 1962 – “Dark Varnishes – Some Further Comments”) had parodied the very idea as a “crude device of indiscriminately deadening all the colours by the application of an overall yellow, brown, or blackish varnish”. In 1996 Plesters was then still alive (as was a long-serving trustee of the National Gallery, Denis Mahon, who had joined her in attacks on Gombrich in the 1962 Burlington Magazine – “Miscellanea for the Cleaning Controversy” ). In 1996 I asked Gombrich if the Gallery had informed him of its discovery of an overall toning layer of “warm dark pigments and black in a medium essentially of walnut oil, with a little resin”. He said not but that he was pleased to learn of the Gallery’s “final conversion to an obvious truth”. We published our first account of this episode thirteen years ago (“The Unvarnished Truth”, Art Review, November 1998). Could it be that a continuing institutional desire to spare the posthumous blushes of departed Gallery players who bungled in spectacular fashion is permanently to blight an interesting artist’s reputation, retard the gallery’s own (in many respects admirable and generously shared) scholarship and thwart full recognition of the achievements of one of the most distinguished art historians to have made home in this country?

Michael Daley

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Photographs by courtesy of the National Gallery (For Figs. 1-4, see the National Gallery Technical Bulletin, Vol. 17, 1996.)

Above, Fig. 1: “Christ carrying his Cross” by Giampietrino. NG 3097, c.1510-30. Poplar, 60 x 47 cm.

Above, Fig. 2: “Christ carrying his Cross”, by Giampietrino, detail.

Above, Fig. 3: “Christ carrying his Cross”, NG 3097, greyscale. It is shown in Technical Bulletin 17 that the National Gallery version above is one of a number of replicas. The version below has been shown to have used the same cartoon as the NG picture – which makes the differences the more intriguing. The most striking of these concern the orchestration of tonal values: those in the NG picture are greatly more integrated and unified – melded “in space”, as it were. In the Budapest picture, the component parts (cross;figure;drapery) are individually modelled but remain pictorially/conceptually discrete. The implicit light source in the London picture is remarkably focussed and theatrically directed to expressive ends, with the brightest lights falling on Christ’s shoulder, wrist/hand, and right brow. The gradations of tone in the figure are superbly nuanced, and run off into darkness in every direction as the eye moves away from the triangulated intensely local highlights. As a result of these (essentially) tonal variations, Christ advances more from the background, and even from the cross, into a more movingly, affectingly intimate relationship with us. Tones matter. That the so-striking and charged differences between the two versions arise in works made from the same drawing, poses a number of questions: Were the paintings wholly executed by the same artist? Did the Budapest version ever have the same refinements of modelling and the same, effectively, proto-Caravaggesque lighting? If so, had these been injured or removed in restorations? (We saw in our post of January 27th how the Giampietrino “Salome”, which was restored along with his “Christ” – but which did not have a super-imposed ancient walnut oil covering – suffered serious degradations in its tonal manipulations.) Do any of the other versions have overall toning layers, or fragmentary evidence of such former layers? If not, what accounts for the very high tonal sophistication and fluency of the London picture?

Above, Fig. 4: “Christ carrying his Cross”, by Giampietrino, Budapest, Szepmuveszeti Muzeum.

Above, Fig. 5: The Virgin’s head from the London National Gallery “The Virgin of the Rocks”, about 1491 – 1508, oil on wood, as shown in Kenneth Clark’s 1938 book “One Hundred Details from Pictures in the National Gallery”. In 1990 the Gallery republished Clark’s book but with new photographs in colour. Fig. 6, below, is the same detail as in Fig. 5 (here converted to greyscale). The differences are striking.

Above, Fig. 6: The Virgin’s head as seen in the 1990 edition of Clark’s book and in which Clark remarked:

“There is no longer any doubt that our Virgin of the Rocks is a second version of the subject, undertaken by Leonardo some twenty years after the picture in the Louvre…”

On the faces of the Virgin and the angel (Figs. 7 & 8 below), he reflected:

“It is uncertain how much of this replica he painted with his own hand, and this head of the Virgin is the most difficult part of the problem. It is too heavy and lifeless for Leonardo and the actual type is un-Leonardesque; yet it seems to be painted in exactly the same technique as the angel’s head in the same picture…”

Of the angel, he wrote:

“This is the one part of our Virgin of the Rocks where the evidence of Leonardo’s hand seems undeniable, not only in the full, simple modelling, but in the drawing of the hair. The curls round the shoulder have exactly the same movement as Leonardo’s drawings of swirling water.”

Even so, he added:

“Beautiful though it is, this angel lacks the enchantment of the lighter, more Gothic angel in the Paris version. It embodies the result of Leonardo’s later researches in which ideal beauty and classic regularity of chiaroscuro were combined, with a certain loss in freshness, but with an expressive power which almost hypnotised his contemporaries.”

In the 1990 re-issue, this note was added to Clark’s comments on the heads:

“As a result of the cleaning of the altarpiece in 1949 the differences between the heads are rather less apparent.”

It would be nice to take this as an official confession of a restoration injury within the Gallery (Clark had concluded that “A pupil did the main work of drawing and modelling, and before his paint was dry Leonardo put in the finishing touches. Most of these have been removed from the Virgin’s face but remain in the angel’s, where perhaps they were always more numerous.”) Consider, then, this account from a privileged art critic who was, so to speak, embedded in the Gallery’s conservation department during the recent, blockbuster-launching restoration, the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones:

“For a long time, the National has believed its Leonardo to be mostly the work of assistants, with only the basic design and some perfect parts – above all, that angel – recognisable as his handiwork. What a difference a cleaning can make. In its official statement yesterday, the gallery was naturally cautious (‘it now seems possible that Leonardo painted all the picture himself’); but talking to me over several weeks in the workshop, in front of the painting, the National’s experts made it clear they believe this to be a pure and unsullied painting by Leonardo’s own hand. ‘We now have a picture which I believe is entirely by Leonardo,’ said Luke Syson, curator of Italian Renaissance paintings and the man who has spearheaded this restoration. If he is right, this is a Leonardo to rank alongside The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa.”

Yes, if he is right – but what counts as “right” in matters of attribution? And in what sense do we “now have” a different picture? The restorer has claimed not to have removed all of his predecessor’s varnish, so nothing can have been seen that was not visisible in 1948-9. During this last restoration Syson claimed that “every age invents its own Leonardo.” Such art critical relativism might be taken as an innocuous socio-cultural observation were it not tied to the work of restorers who claim individual interpretive “rights”. The Gallery’s handbook “Conservation of Paintings” acknowledges that pictures are now “changed primarily for aesthetic reasons” (p. 53) and (p. 45) that restorations are carried out on the “aesthetic objectives of those responsible for the cleaning”. Moreover, (p. 53) although the “different aesthetic decisions” taken by individual restorers produce results that “may look very different”, all of such different outcomes are “equally valid”, provided they have been carried out “safely”.

In matters of aesthetic and artistic integrity, the “safety” or otherwise of the cleaning materials is a red herring – if pictures end up looking different, they are different, and these differences are material and irreversible. It is therefore vital that there be the fullest possible disclosure of the changes that are made – especially those made with the retouching brush.

Above, Fig. 7: The Angel’s head from the “Virgin of the Rocks”, as seen in 1938.

Above, Fig. 8: The Angel’s from the “Virgin of the Rocks”, as seen in 1990.

Click on the images above for larger versions. NOTE: zooming requires the Adobe Flash Plug-in.

29th October 2011

Makeovers, Sleepovers and Martyrs ~
Is St Paul’s Cathedral fit for purpose?

In a bizarre and now fast-escalating sequence of events over the past two weeks, “Health and Safety” has shut the public out of St Paul’s Cathedral for what is, contrary to press claims, the second, not the first time since the war. The first time was in connection with the exposure of staff members to injurious and sometimes illegal levels of sprayed-on stone cleaning chemicals during the recent restoration of the cathedral’s interior. This time it has been a consequence of the cathedral’s invitation to global anti-capitalist protesters to set up a camp of indefinite “occupation” when prevented from occupying the London Stock Exchange. As a result of that (apparently unilateral) initial decision by the Canon Chancellor, the Rev Dr Giles Fraser, the Cathedral closed its doors to the public on October 22nd because of (claimed) perceived risks to “life and limb” from the occupying protesters and their tent city. After losing admission charges (at £14.50 a head) that totalled £120,000 in six days, the cathedral’s dean, the Rt Rev Graeme Knowles, invited the protesters to “leave the site peacefully”, adding that while “we reiterate our basic belief in the right to protest”, should the protesters not leave, “We have been and continue to take legal advice on a range of options including court action.” On October 26th, the Guardian reported that the Bishop of London, the Rt Rev Richard Chartres, the third most senior cleric in the Church of England, said that it was now “time for them to leave” and that the camp’s presence was threatening “to eclipse entirely the issues it was set up address”. On October 27th the Canon Chancellor resigned (on Twitter) “because I believe the Chapter has set on a course of action that could mean that there will be violence in the name of the Church”. A television news reporter said that this resignation would make it harder for the police to “use violence” against the demonstrators. That had hardly seemed a likely prospect, given that London’s police officers could not stir themselves to deploy force even against teenage hoodlums who loot and burn down entire blocks of historic buildings, but the merest anticipations of “police brutality” can prove self-fulfilling high-octane energisers of protest and provocative confrontation. The Bishop of London offered to meet the protesters in a debate inside the cathedral if they first agreed to leave the camp. A less emollient Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, called for new laws to prevent tent cities erupting “like boils” and urged the protestors themselves “In the name of God and Mammon” to go. The prime minister, who may see the mayor as something of a political rival, echoed these sentiments in Australia, saying “Of course we need the right to protest but these tents – whether in Parliament Square or whether in St Paul’s – I don’t think is the right way forward, and I do think we need to look at this whole area and I’m very keen that we do.” In the occupied St Paul’s precinct it emerged that the encamped protest had something of a phantom quality; that most (i.e. a reported 90%) of the demonstrators were not sleeping overnight in their tents. A spokesperson for “Occupy the London Stock Exchange” insisted that thermal imaging was unreliable: “This is simply not the case. While it is quite possible that not every tent is occupied every night, we try to keep vacancy to a minimum and occupy a sign-in/sign-out system to help ensure this happens.” A letter writer in the Evening Standard testified to the gentility of the occupation forces: “Clearly there are lots of tents but the site is very well organized, calm, interesting and inspiring. The people I spoke to were welcoming and very well informed.” Patrick Kingsley in the Guardian spoke to one demonstrator, a besuited, tea cup holding 28-year-old who works in music PR and and who said: “I know it’s hard for people to get their heads around the fact that we’re in work but if there are tents here that aren’t always used, it means people are balancing other responsibilities, like child care, jobs or college. I do have to leave because I can’t always do my job through the internet.” Opinion polls conducted by the Guardian and the Telegraph showed that more than 80% of the public believe that the protesters (who claim to represent 99% of the population) should leave. The managers of nearby small businesses report 40-45% losses of trade – and the cathedral’s own lucrative café-in-the-crypt had lost 100% of its business. Adding to an already widespread general hilarity (there has been fun with “loose canons”, “canons to the left of them…” etc.) clerics and commentators couldn’t resist joining this very British ecclesiastical – in a very real sense – bun-fight.

Libby Purves in the Times nicely caught the public scepticism and impatience with the protesters: “it is, basically, a tented tantrum. A nylon-roofed, media-savvy, Twitterati, festival-inspired, Glasto-generation sulk.” The Guardian’s normally un-bellicose Simon Jenkins advised the protesters that successful uprisings must carry “the threat of violence”. An affronted reader/demonstrator wrote that this was no ordinary, common or garden occupation: “The people who have joined occupations are not just ‘squatters’ or ‘homeless looking for soup’. Indeed Occupy Wall Street’s working group on Alternative Banking includes bankers, a professor of financial law, the heads of various credit unions, and a quant trader.” At the Telegraph’s website, Brendan O’Neill, the editor of Spiked, noted a “warped class dynamic” in the camp, where “the majority of the occupiers are middle-class and well-spoken [with] lots of time on their hands”, while “many of the men and women in suits making their way to offices or trading floors in the City are working class”, and Damian Thomson saw that “Anglican Lefties have a new martyr in their midst – ex-Canon Giles Fraser…who has become a hero to the tent-dwellers of Occupy London Stock Exchange (OSLX), whose cause he supports. Indeed, a Facebook page celebrating his heroic witness has already been set up…Let his followers respect his wish for silence and restrict themselves to lighting a discreet candle on the steps of St Paul’s in commemoration of his noble sacrifice.” In a long-distance letter to the Guardian, the Rev Christopher Craig Brittain of Aberdeen thrilled “It is one of those rare occasions that leaders in the contemporary church long for: to be at the heart of the action. In a society with little interest in organized Christianity, suddenly St Paul’s cathedral finds itself at the epicenter of the Occupy London movement. Rather than serving as a museum to the past, it has become a site of public contestation.” In London, from the neighboring St Michael’s Cornhill, the perhaps better informed Rev Peter Mullen said the Dean and Chapter must be “ruing the day” they welcomed the activists: “It was a nice gesture but St Paul’s has to recognize that it lives in the capitalist world. In fact I would argue it is a bastion of capitalism. Why else does it charge £14.50 entry and take an immense amount of money from the City? It has just been given £40 million to renovate its stonework.” In the Telegraph, (October 28th) Damian Thompson, saw as one of the ironies in the St Paul’s saga, the fact that “Dr Fraser, who sided with the Occupy LSX campaigners against corporate greed, has employed his charm to encourage the City to support the restoration of St Paul’s.” As we have pointed out before, the entire £10.8 million cost of cleaning the cathedral’s interior was met not out of ticketed visitor income but by the generosity of the Scottish banker Robin Fleming and his immediate family. Damian Thomson’s quick attribution of martyrdom status to the welcoming canon has proved prescient: on the 29th of October the Daily Telegraph disclosed that another senior figure at St Paul’s, Canon Mark Oakley, may also consider his position untenable. Having already voted against going to court to evict the demonstrators, Canon Oakley said “I couldn’t vote for any course of action that might lead at some point to violent behaviour.” Adding to St Paul’s’ management miseries, a second cleric, Rev Dyer, curate at St Peter De Beauvoir Town in east London, who worked part time at St Paul’s, has aleady resigned online, saying: “I do not relish the prospect of having to defend the cathedral’s position in the face of the inevitable questions that visitors to St Paul’s will pose in the coming weeks and months, particularly if we are to see protesters forcibly removed by police at the Dean and Chapter’s behest.” This clearly media-savvy cleric added: “I am sorry that the story has become one about the Church and not about the City.” Well – whose fault was that? Who invited whom? And how long now before demands to “Reinstate the St Paul’s Three” inflame the protesters who have so swiftly forgotten the object of their own campaign? Arrests have already been made at St Paul’s for public order offences, possession of drugs and a knife and an assault on a police officer. The management shortcomings at St Paul’s are leaving the Church of England itself looking increasingly ragged as bishops go head-to-head on the conflict, while the Arch Bishop keeps his head under the duvet. In contradiction of the Bishop of London, the Bishop of Buckingham, Alan Wilson, has condemned the managers of St Paul’s for their “hysterical overreaction” in shutting the cathedral, and urged them to join “the real world”. The bishop, who would seem to be something of a class-warrior, explicitly questioned the cathedral’s management judgements and capacities: “Do they have the stomach to engage in the real world at the crest of a tidal race between people, money and power, or are they just overgrown public schoolboys playing indoor games in their own self-important Tourist Disneyland?” That the Church is now so publicly groaning under the weight of its own politicised contradictions, could draw less genteel protestors into the fray at a time when capitalism’s self-rewarding captains, ladling money over themselves in the midst of a profound and intense crisis, are presenting the plumpest target that has been seen for many years. That the retiring “Loose Canon” had been about to publish a report that is critical of bankers will further burnish his martyr’s image. Eight Christian organisations have backed the occupying protesters who now plan a three months long siege, assisted by Bindmans whose lawyers have claimed that yesterday’s reopening undermines the cathedral’s claim that the protest camp obstructs worship.

In the contemplative calm of the (excellent) Summer 2011 issue of The British Art Journal, Florence Hallett discusses the confusions of past and recent restorations at St Paul’s Cathedral (“Restoring St Paul’s Cathedral”). Because of what the journal’s editor, Robin Simon, sees as “the staggering fee now charged for entrance to St Paul’s Cathedral”, he had felt it appropriate to “place this account in the ‘Exhibition Reviews’.” We are very grateful to him for allowing us to add this study to our coverage of June 1st and July 5th.

Florence Hallett writes:

When The Evening Standard described the recently completed cleaning of St Paul’s Cathedral as a “makeover”, it highlighted something about the collective mindset of our age. Lauded as revealing, for the first time, “the interior as Wren intended it” [Endnote 1], this cleaning project is the latest attempt to resolve Wren’s unfinished magnum opus, but could well tell us more about the aesthetic sensibilities of the early twenty-first century than it does about a so-called “authentic” Wren interior. The last time a similarly comprehensive programme of cleaning and decoration was undertaken, it was informed by a well-meant, but nevertheless contemporary interpretation of Wren’s intentions for the building, resulting in the uncompromisingly Victorian mosaics extant in the choir.

From the moment St Paul’s was pronounced complete in 1711, there was dissatisfaction with the interior, giving rise to any number of proposals to decorate it in a way Wren might have approved of. That the siren call of authenticity, long abandoned by most academic art historians, exerts such a seductive influence at St Paul’s, must at least partially be due to its design and completion under a single architect. The myth of a clear authorial voice, frustrated by Wren’s few and apparently contradictory instructions for the interior finish, combine with his famously troubled relationship with the church commissioners to suggest that Wren’s vision for the building was thwarted in a way that can and ought to be put right.

To further muddy the waters, the only part of St Paul’s to be decorated before Wren fell out with the commissioners was the rather splendid choir, which together with the possibility that he may have favoured mosaic in the dome contrasts markedly with the restrained interiors associated with his city churches. Faced with such a range of possible treatments, it seems inevitable that, however genuine the desire for authenticity, ideas on how to finish the interior of St Paul’s have been coloured by the prevailing aesthetic of the time. Thus, it comes as no surprise that in the nineteenth century, when decoration was de rigueur, the strongest voices were in favour of painted and mosaic schemes. A pamphlet written in 1876, implored: “Do not leave the walls and flooring repulsively cold and unreal, like an ice surface.” [2] Some thirty years later, the author of a cathedral guidebook asserted that Wren had been forced to leave the building in a: “naked, unornamented state” [3], adding: “that he intended mural decoration to be applied to the interior is an unquestionable fact”, and of the domes: “his idea was to finish them with mosaic decorations.” [4] Nevertheless, it was suggested at the time that personal taste, rather than scholarship drove the Victorian restoration. One critic mocked: “The Dean desires to add colour to the Church … The Decorative Committee consists of several gentlemen of alleged refinement and reputed cultivation, of which the Dean is chairman.” [5]

With over a century between that and the recent restoration, there are surprising similarities between the two projects, notably the claims made by both to be carrying out work that Wren would have approved of. In light of this, it is ironic that both restorations have seen fit to remove the stone-coloured oil paint Wren himself applied to the interior, with the added twist that today’s restorers have given greater consideration to the botched nineteenth-century effort to remove the paint, than to Wren’s reasons for applying it in the first place. Martin Stancliffe, current Surveyor to the Fabric, suggests the paint was either merely a preparatory layer for a decorative scheme, or an attempt to mask uneven-coloured or dirty stone, arguing against restoring Wren’s paint on the grounds that, “it would result in a finish which, to modern eyes, would seem bland and perhaps inappropriate, and would undo the work so carefully and laboriously executed in the 1870s to strip Wren’s paintwork.” [6] The rather weak complaint that prior to being cleaned the interior was “shabby and dirty” [7], suggests that as in the nineteenth century, subjective taste has played a considerable part in today’s restoration.

Just as the Victorians left their mark in the form of glittering mosaics, today’s “makeover” culture has reaped its own results. Interviewed in The Times in 2004, Martin Stancliffe said: “when we started cleaning, the Dean and Chapter became gripped by the results, and said ‘we must do this faster’.” [8] A method of spraying on the cleaning product was developed to allow application over large areas of stonework, and the project, initially predicted to take twenty-five years, has been completed in fifteen. In an age that covets both the “wow factor” and value for money, the “miraculous transformation” [9] at St Paul’s is, for now at least, enough to persuade visitors to pay the £14.50 entrance fee.

ENDNOTES:
1 Statement by Nina Anstee, director of the St Paul’s Cathedral Foundation; Valentine Low, “£40m clean-up will show St Paul’s as it has never been seen”, The Evening Standard, 12 February 2002.
2 Anonymous, St Pauls Cathedral: the impression and the remedy, Reprint of pamphlet originally published London, Hardwicke & Bogue, 1876, p13.
3 George Clinch, St Paul’s Cathedral, London, London, Methuen & Co., 1906, p160.
4 Ibid., p160.
5 Samuel Howe, “The Spoiling of St Paul’s”, Fortnightly Review, 65 new series, April 1899, p635.
6 Martin Stancliffe, “The Cathedral Church of St Paul, London: proposals for cleaning the interior of the cathedral”, unpublished document, September 1999, p14.
7 Ibid., p3.

Florence Hallett

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Above, Fig. 1: Canon Giles Fraser, who has resigned from St Paul’s Cathedral in protest at the decision to close the building. Shortly after his resignation the cathedral re-opened but Dr Fraser has acquired saint-like status in the eyes of the Occupy London Stock Exchange (OSLX) tent-dwelling protesters.

Above, Fig. 2: A member of the Occupy London Stock Exchange protests at the West Front of St Paul’s Cathedral – but this is not exactly the storming of the Winter Palace, one commentator has remarked, adding that claims to be carrying out a “breach of the status quo” and launching a “seismic event” do not normally win the effusive backing of priests.

Above, Fig. 3: Protesters, some with small children, taking part in the carnival-like jolly “Occupy Wall Street” that has triggered copycats in London and around the world. These protesters had given a lot of thought to clothes-for-the-day for themselves and their offspring – as the New York Times was quick to report (Photo: AFP).

Above, Fig 4: A protester at the St Paul’s camp photographed by Carl Court for a pro-demonstration article in the Guardian, (G2 October 26, “A full-time occupation?”).

Above, Fig. 5: The anti-capitalist demonstrators’ encampment at St Paul’s Cathedral (Photo: Reuters)

Above Fig. 6: Thermal imaging photographs that sparked a controversy. Taken by the Daily Telegraph, they were said to show that most tents were unoccupied after midnight (“Amid the ‘dark’ tents, protesters’ mood turns black”) October 26. In the Guardian (G2 October 26, “A full-time occupation?”) the same photographs were said “seemingly to show that many tents are empty.” The newspaper cited an unidentified “military scientist” who claimed that the camera “probably a hand-held FLIR thermal imager” would not detect bodies inside tents. When the Telegraph reporter attempted to check whether the seemingly unoccupied tents were occupied, he was ejected from the camp by three “grim-faced” men who demanded identification and claimed to be “from security.” Support for the Telegraph’s photographs came in the Times of October 29 in an article “Tent images did not lie” in defence of the newspaper’s own thermal photographs which had shown that the tents had a night-time rate of 90% un-occupancy: Richard Wallace, the head of Thermal Imaging said that the images (taken at ThermaCam P60 costing about £25,000) “reasonably suggested that most of these tents had no sources of heat inside them that would raise the external surface temperature.”

Above, Fig. 7: Sir Christopher Wren, architect of St Paul’s Cathedral. Bust by Edward Pearce, circa 1673.

Above, Fig. 8: The West Front of St Paul’s Cathedral as engraved in 1702 by S. Gribelin.

Above, Fig. 9: The interior of the Choir at St Paul’s Cathedral, as seen on December 31, 1706 and recorded in an engraving by R. Trevitt. The occasion was a Service of Thanksgiving attended by the Queen and both Houses of Parliament. This section had been fully decorated according to the wishes of Sir Christopher Wren.

Above, Fig. 10: The view from the west end of St Paul’s Cathedral, looking north-east, as engraved by R. Trevitt and showing the the Morning Prayer Chapel on the left.

Above, Fig. 11: A view across the dome space at St Paul’s Cathedral, looking north-west and as recorded in an acquatint by T. Malton. The nave is seen left centre and north transept on the right.

Above, Fig. 12: The original interior decoration of St Paul’s Cathedral as recorded in an undated but apparently 18th century painting that is owned by The Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths.

Above, Fig. 13: The Nave of St Paul’s Cathedral, looking towards the Dome and the High Altar, as seen circa 1990.

Above, Fig. 14: A Martin Stancliffe chandelier in action, as seen from under the Dome of St Paul’s Cathedral and as published in a programme for a Choral Evensong service on June 1 2005 in honour of the donors to the cathedral’s 300th anniversary appeal.

Above, Fig. 15: A section of carving on the south transept of St Paul’s Cathedral after being cleaned with the controversial Arte Mundit sprayed-latex solution method used to remove the last traces of Wren’s original oil painted surfaces. David Odgers, the head of Nimbus Conservation, the firm that carried out the cleaning, admitted “Of course, cleaning stone reveals all the blemishes on the surface” and that this had meant “A great deal of time has been spent in trying to reduce the visual impact of imperfections, and this has involved pointing, stone repairs and removal of grout spills.“

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12th October 2011

Applying recreated authenticity to historic buildings in the name of their conservation

Simon Jenkins’ apologia for heritage industry “Disneyfication” (- as discussed in our last post) was echoed by Simon Thurley, the Chief Executive of English Heritage, in last weekend’s Financial Times (“Disneyland with footnotes or ancient skills revived”). Thurley claimed that at Stirling Castle, Historic Scotland has “recreated Queen Mary’s Lodgings with a fearsome degree of authenticity”, even though it had almost no surviving interior material to go on, other than “a few chimney pieces and a couple of doors”. Such an oxymoronic combining of the terms “re-creation” and “authenticity” merits examination. Current attempts to remake history are occuring in a distinctly complacent and insufficiently examined cultural/bureaucratic context.

The peg for Thurley’s article was the payment by Historic Scotland of one of those nicely rounded restoration bills (£25m) queried by the Daily Telegraph blogger, Andrew Brown in response to a public appeal for a neat half a million pounds to “conserve” Roald Dahl’s writing hut by moving its contents to the nearby Roald Dahl museum as a “major new interactive exhibit” for school groups and “thousands of visitors a year”.

The Royal Palace at Stirling Castle was built in the late 1530s for King James V and his wife Mary of Guise but it had been used as a barracks for nearly 300 years. £12m was spent “putting the interiors of the palace to rights” (Fig. 1) and £2m alone was spent copying the (authentic) Unicorn Tapestries in the Cloisters Museum, New York (Fig. 2). Thurley cites as an antecedent for this kind of hypothetical “recreation”, the Governor’s House in Williamsburg, Virginia, which having been burned to the ground in 1781 was rebuilt as new in the 1930s (Figs. 3 & 4). Although Thurley sniffs “This was not restoration; it was a recreation” he seems untroubled that the original authentic contents of the Stirling Castle interiors had been lost before the Governor’s House was first built. While noting that although the Williamsburg rebuilding was judged by some American academics and most European curators to be “Disneyland with footnotes” when just such recreations were later made on this continent in the wake of the devastation of the Second World War, Thurley misses the fact that frankly declared attempts to recreate historically and architecturally important buildings on the basis of surviving visual and documentary evidence are of a different order from Britain’s heavily bureaucratised drive to convert old buildings, by means of speculative, “interactive“, historical enactments and vulgar websites that dangle Reality TV style soap operas as history, into tourism moneypots.

English Heritage explicitly states that the conservation movement has evolved from a “reactive process” that prevents change into a “flexible process” that recognizes the best way to save a building is “to find a new use for it.” It further admits that to achieve this more “constructive” end, “we work collaboratively with architects and developers at early pre-application stages”. Such collaborations spawn increasingly patronising and crass marketing campaigns.

At Stirling, a truck decorated with the castle’s Unicorn emblem constitutes “The Stirling Castle Road Show” which tours Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee offering city centre shoppers the chance to discover what is on offer at the castle for “a great day out”. Marketing Executive Nicola McCrae masterminds this “new way to promote the castle and visitor experience”. The visitor experience includes a deceiving invitation to: “step into the astonishing richness of royal life in the 1500s” by presenting James the Fifth’s palace as “one of the finest and best-preserved Renaissance buildings in Great Britain”. The claimed “crowning achievement” of this supposedly best-preserved palace is the banqueting hall (Figs. 5 & 6) where the original roof, which was removed in the late 1700s, has been replaced with a replica of an original roof that survives at Edinburgh Castle’s Great Hall. Replications and hypothetical reconstructions now abound at the castle.

In the King’s Inner Hall the ceiling-mounted brightly coloured roundels known as the Stirling Heads are facsimilies made from surviving original heads after their “painstaking conservation” (Fig. 7). On the basis of surviving scraps of colour on the carved wooden originals (which, mercifully, are exhibited in a separate gallery within the castle), the facsimilies have been speculatively painted in the “bright colours” that were “almost certainly” used originally. Colour looms large throughout these reconstructed interiors on the belief that they “would have been overwhelmingly colourful, rich and elaborate [because] James and his French wife Mary of Guise aimed to present themselves as wealthy, learned and sophisticated.” The visitor will learn that “royalty ate well and entertained lavishly” but less of what their learning and their beliefs consisted.

The Palace contains a Chapel Royal that was one of the first Protestant churches in Scotland and retains authentic 17th century murals (Fig. 10). It was taken over by the army and became a dining hall, schoolroom and storerooms. Today, it can be hired for weddings and/or wedding receptions: “Stirling Castle’s Chapel Royal offers a spectacular area for a wedding ceremony, wedding reception, or pre-dinner drinks for those dining in the Great Hall.”

Speculative reconstructions reach their apotheosis with old bones (Fig. 8). In the Great Kitchen, visitors are invited to “Rub shoulders with the busy kitchen staff preparing food and drink for a royal banquet” – the said staff members being the ubiquitous heritage industry tableau dummies (Fig. 9): “This bustling scene has been re-created for visitors, with a soundtrack to help create the atmosphere.” A soundtrack from the 16th century? For such deceptive absurdities, visitors are charged £13 a head (£10 for “concessions”, £6.50 for children).

With a staff of 4,300 and comprising Europe’s largest conservation charity, the National Trust similarly hopes to achieve its seeming goal of preserving and protecting everything that doesn’t move by “encouraging millions of people to visit and enjoy their national heritage”. Keeping children – even small unruly ones – happy is seen as the key to maximising Heritage Income. The National Trust’s chairman, Simon Jenkins, concedes that although you cannot have blazing sun on a medieval tapestry, or children bouncing on an ancient bed, “it is jolly nice to have a bed they can bounce on somewhere.” To the charge of “Disneyfication” he responds “If it means making our properties more popular, then I am totally unrepentant.” There are other ways of presenting history. For those repelled by crassly commercial exploitations, we would commend the delightfully kept, privately-owned, magically tranquil ruins of Jervaulx Abbey in North Yorkshire.

Michael Daley

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Above, Fig. 1: One of the main rooms at James V’s Palace at Stirling which is said to be “much as it may have looked on completion around 1545″.

Above, Fig. 2: A detail of one of the copies of the Unicorn tapestries in the Cloisters Museum, New York.

Above, Fig. 3: The front of the Governor’s House in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Above, Fig. 4: The back of the Governor’s House in Williamsburg, as photographed around 1935 by Frances Benjamin Johnston, one of America’s earliest female photographers.

Above and below, Figs. 5 & 6: The Banqueting Hall, Stirling Castle, which can be hired for corporate seminars, formal banquets or ceremonies.

Above, Fig. 7: Some of the surviving original Stirling Heads, as exhibited in the castle museum.

Above, Fig. 8: A facial reconstruction of skeleton made for the Castle Exhibition where visitors can study a “cold case investigation of the injuries suffered by a man killed at Stirling about 1300.“

Above, Fig. 9: One of the Great Kitchen scenes, as re-created for visitors, with an accompanying soundtrack.

Above, Fig. 10: The Chapel Royal. On Scottish gala evenings “Following in the footsteps of kings and queens of centuries past… guests are welcomed by a piper for a drinks reception in the Chapel Royal.”

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5th October 2011

Sir’s not always right

Sir Simon Jenkins says a Tate Gallery restorer’s repainting of one third of John Martin’s flood-damaged “The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum” (from a Photoshop composite of an old photograph and another version of Martin’s painting) is brilliant. He says that the ruins of Pompeii itself, having been largely destroyed when bombed by the RAF “as part of its casual assault on European civilisation” should now be reconstructed according to our idea of how they might have been originally. He says that we should no longer fret about making mistakes when reconstructing the past because “seeking to re-interpet, even reconstruct, some works of the past no longer need attract jeers of ‘Disneyfication’, and that too is preferable to terminal decay.” Given that Sir Simon is chairman of the National Trust, these sentiments are alarming as well as wrong-headed: the past, or what remains of it, is not ours to remake on modern prejudices and fancies – and with an eye on the tourist trade. There have been signs enough that the commercial exploitation of history and its surviving artefacts is gaining the upperhand over an appropriate respect for the integrity and authenticity of what has survived – not to mention evidence of a declining recognition of our own cultural limitations in these matters.

Michael Daley

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Above: Sir Simon Jenkins in the Guardian.

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22 September 2011

A conservation appeal too far: Sophie Dahl’s public relations disaster

We had to laugh – and exult a little: for once in the museum world, Conservation PR was not King. When Sophie Dahl launched an appeal on the BBC’s Today programme for a cool half million pounds to “conserve” the shed in which her grandfather, Roald, wrote his best-selling children’s books, it backfired to an extraordinary degree: in a Guardian opinion poll, 89 per cent thought that Ms Dahl should “stump up for it herself”.

The debacle was encapsulated by the 2009 winner of the Roald Dahl Funny Prize, Philip Ardagh, in the Guardian Review:

“So when the Roald Dahl Day came round again on Tuesday [September 13th] there was the annual challenge to be newsworthy. And what better way than by announcing the plans to restore ‘the hut’ and to move it to the museum in a specially designed gallery? Only, of course, it was a PR disaster. Never mind the details, the Dahl family’s contribution, the corporate sponsorship, the charity work. The message that came through loud and clear was that the model and writer Sophie Dahl, Roald’s granddaughter, was asking people to cough up £500,000 to do up an old shed. Today programme listeners didn’t know whether to roar with laughter or outrage, but they knew how to tweet. Then came the bloggers. All else was forgotten. £500,000 for a shed? That was a bit steep wasn’t it? This isn’t a golden typewriter or a villa on a Greek island. It’s a shed. Many of us have sheds. We know how much they’re worth. So that became the story.”

The Daily Mail reported that arts journalist Matthew Sweet had joined the chorus of criticism, saying: “Have I got this wrong? The international model and TV star Sophie Dahl is asking US for money to restore a shed?” The idea to move the shed to the museum had come from the author’s grandson, Luke Kelly, who was inspired by relocation of Francis Bacon’s studio to the Hugh Lane gallery in Dublin.

The Daily Telegraph’s Anita Singh pointed out that Ms Dahl is a millionairess who is married to a millionaire, and the Telegraph’s blogger, Andrew Brown asked “did they just dream up a neat round number?” It was a good question. Neat numbers are common in the conservation business: for restoring the interior of a cathedral, £10m; for restoring an entire cathedral, £40m, for restoring a church off Trafalgar Square, £25m. Sometimes, with very high profile restorations, rich individuals or image-building corporations stump up all the money that is needed, but, on this occasion, the well-heeled Dahl family are looking to “grant-making trusts” to raise money for the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre.

This family museum in Great Missenden is both a registered charity and a limited company. Its entry charges are £6 for adults and £4 for the disabled and for children between 5 and 18. Online visitors are advised not to confound the museum with the Roald Dahl Children’s Gallery in Aylesbury which is run by Buckinghamshire County Council – and which also charges £6 for adults and £4 for children.

After seeing the “fun and fact-packed biographical galleries” at the Great Missenden Museum and its “fantabulous interactive” Story Centre, visitors can shed more money in the Café Twit and the museum shop.

The purposes of the charitable museum are “to further the education of the public in the art of literature by the provision and maintenance of a museum and literature centre based on the works of Roald Dahl.” The purposes of the limited company (Dahl and Dahl Ltd) are to manage Roald Dahl’s copyrights throughout the world and to maintain the official Roald Dahl website. The literary estate made an operating profit of almost £300,000 last year on a turnover of just under £1m. The estate gives 10 per cent of those profits, after expenses, to the museum and to the Dahl family’s charity. As Stephen Bates put it in the Guardian:

“It may have been a bit optimistic of Roald Dahl’s relatives to expect an outbreak of public philanthropy when they launched an appeal to raise £500,000 to renovate the contents of the author’s dilapidated Buckinghamshire garden shed, when the books he wrote there continue to sell at the rate of 12 a minute every day.”

Responding to public outrage, the chairman of the Roald Dahl Museum, Amanda Conquy (who is also the chairman of the limited company Dahl and Dahl), told the Guardian:

“It seems like a lot of money but filleting and removing the contents and renovating them to put on display is almost a forensic exercise.” Ms Conquy added, “I know it is only a small room but, to put it in context, recreating Francis Bacon’s studio in Dublin cost £4m.”

A snip, then, but the Times’ Carol Midgley noted:

“There is never a good time for a millionaire model who is married to a millionaire singer and whose grandad’s wondrous books have sold in their millions to ask the public to spare some change, please, for a family shed. But to do it on a day when it emerged that UK inflation has hit 4.5 per cent and that our teen unemployment is worse than Slovenia’s was unfortunate.”

This deluge of opprobrium and ridicule was achieved for… what end? The official website resorts to museum-speak:

“Moving the hut’s interior – item by item – to its new home will be quite a challenge and just the first phase of what we have planned. Once installed in the Museum, a major new interactive exhibit will set the hut in context for school groups and all our visitors. We are thrilled at the prospect of our new gallery which will allow thousands of visitors a year to experience these important historical artefacts.”

The Guardian’s Mark Lawson seemed far from thrilled at the prospect of “interactive” relations with visitors by the thousands and that pox on all places of contemplation, school parties:

“For me this goes against the spirit of studying the writers’ studies.”

Indeed it does – and perhaps especially so with an author for whom, as his close collaborator, the illustrator, Quentin Blake, recalled: “the whole point of it as far as Roald was concerned was that it was private, a sanctuary where he could work where no one interrupted him.”

Michael Daley

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Above, Fig. 1: Sophie Dahl.

Above, Fig. 2: Sophie Dahl and her husband, the jazz star, Jamie Cullum.

Above, Fig. 3: Roald Dahl, who in 1988 (two years before his death) told a family friend, Todd McCormack, “I have worked all my life in a small hut up in our orchard. It is a quiet private place and no one has been permitted to pry in there.”

Above, Fig 4: The hut in which Roald Dahl wrote. The Week’s website, The First Post, reported the former supermodel, Sophie Dahl’s comparison of the 1950s-built hut to a decaying tomb: “It’s in a bit of a state, poor little hut, it needs help. Half-a-million sounds like a lot of money to move the interior of a little hut, but it’s quite a process. It’s got to be done very carefully, step-by-step, almost in an archaeological way and by archivists”.
In its campaign to save and transfer the hut (or just its contents?), the museum writes: “Built in the late 1950s from a single layer of bricks, insulated with polystyrene, the writing hut wasn’t made to last. Roald Dahl was a highly disciplined writer and ensconced himself in the hut – which sits in the garden of his home Gipsy House in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire – every day for thirty years. During his lifetime, he was the only person to go in and out of the hut. Since Roald Dahl’s death in 1990, it has remained a private place – entered only by friends, family and visitors to Gipsy House. Now, that is poised to change and for the first time the public at large will be able to experience its magic.“

Above, Fig. 5: a corner of Roald Dahl’s writing hut.

Above, Fig. 6: Roald Dahl at work in his hut.

Above, Fig 7: Roald Dahl’s “The Twits”

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8 September 2011

The Controversial Treatments of the Wallace Collection Watteaus

Restorers who blunder often present their dramatically altered works as miraculous “recoveries” or “discoveries”. Sometimes they (or their curators) park their handiwork in dark corners pending re-restorations (see the Phillips Collection restoration of Renoir’s “The Luncheon of the Boating Party” and the Louvre’s multi-restoration of Veronese’s “The Pilgrims of Emmaüs”). Here, Dr Selby Whittingham, the Secretary-General of the Watteau Society (and the 2011 winner of ArtWatch International’s Frank Mason Prize – see below), discusses the controversial restorations of Watteau paintings at the Wallace Collection and calls for greater transparency and accountability in the treatment of old masters.

Selby Whittingham writes:

The Watteau exhibitions held in London 12 March – 5 June 2011 prompted much comment, but little about the condition of the oils at the Wallace Collection [- see endnote 1]. Exceptionally Brian Sewell mentioned their poor state: “both overcleaned and undercleaned, victims of cleaners with Brillo pads and restorers with a taste for gravy.” [2] This was a bit sweeping, but had some justification.

In the Watteau Society Bulletin 1985 Sarah Walden contrasted the recent restorations at the Wallace Collection with those at the Louvre and the different philosophies behind them [3]. The report on the cleaning of “Les Charmes de la vie” at the Wallace by Herbert Lank in 1980, she wrote, did not discuss “whether to touch the varnish at all…and if so how far it should be lightened and removed.” By contrast the Louvre report on cleaning “L’Embarquement pour l’isle de Cythère” centred “on the ethical and perceptual problems of thinning the varnish.”

If the results were far more satisfying at the Louvre, a defence might be that its picture was in better condition to start with than the Wallace one. In his 1989 catalogue of the Watteau pictures John Ingamells said that “Les Charmes de la vie” was described as “much injured” in 1895, and that in 1980 several areas of retouching were uncovered [4]. That might explain the loss of paint suffered on the face of the girl in the centre, but this glaring defect was only made all the more obvious by cleaning, to disguise which the picture was at first hung in a dark corner and then was retouched by Lank again in 1987. [For Ingamells' and Lank's discussions of the restoration in the Burlington Magazine, December 1983, see below, right.] However the scrubbed appearance of the picture overall with subtle transitions in the landscape lost (- see Figs. 1 – 7.) cannot be explained by partial losses of paint earlier.

In 1984 Lee cleaned “Pour nous prouver que cette belle” at the Wallace (- see Figs. 10 & 11). It had already been cleaned by Lord Hertford’s factotum Mawson in 1856, when Hertford acquired it and its pendant, “Arlequin, Pierrot et Scapin”, at the sale of Samuel Rogers, before which they had belonged to Sir Joshua Reynolds. In 1989 Ingamells de-attributed the picture, whereas now Dr Christoph Vogtherr re-attributes it (surely rightly) to the master. This is ironical, as an excuse for cleaning is that sometimes it leads to the uncovering of an original, whereas the opposite happened in this case. Though the painting now has the same scraped appearance as “Les Charmes de la vie”, this has not altogether obliterated Watteau’s touch and the quality of the faces and other details. It was a pity that Waddesdon had not lent for comparison the pendant (the attribution of which to Watteau was also once questioned – by Ellis Waterhouse – probably unjustifiably) [5].

In 1975 the two large oils at the Wallace, “Divertissements champêtres” and “Rendez-vous de chasse” were cleaned by Vallance. The result was generally considered disappointing. Part of the blame for this was laid at the door of Watteau, who was charged with painting mechanically, the first being an enlarged version of the much more pleasing “Les Champs Elisées”, also at the Wallace. The two big pictures were not painted as pendants, but made into such at an early date, thus necessitating, to make them the same size, the addition of strips at the left and bottom of “Rendez-vous de chasse”, thereby seriously slackening the tautness of its composition. This provides another irony. A merit of restoration is said to be that it returns works to their original state as near as maybe, but here deliberately that has not been done. Paint by a later hand and extensions are retained to the detriment of the overall effect contrary to what the artist intended.

Two loans were added to the main display upstairs. They were “Le Défillé”, an early battle scene from York, and another early work, “L’Accordée de village”, from the Soane Museum. These may be interesting to the specialist, but for most merely diminished the display, considerably helping justify Sewell’s sweeping castigation. The second in particular has long been recognised to be a wreck. Was it when Soane acquired it in 1802? We are not told. Admittedly Dr Vogtherr has not set out to produce another catalogue raisonné and exhibition labels never say anything about condition, but surely they should?

Downstairs in the exhibition devoted to Watteau’s great promoter, Jean de Jullienne, hung “Fêtes vénitiennes” from Edinburgh, which is generally acknowledged to be in good condition. Critics often blame the condition of Watteau’s oils on his poor and hasty technique. Why, then, are some of his pictures in a so much better state than others? Is this a case of curators and restorers trying to shift the blame?

Watteau provides an excellent subject for the consideration of such questions. As he often evolved compositions as he painted, x-rays are frequently informative. Jean de Jullienne by having most of his paintings engraved provides a valuable check on their original appearance, supplemented by the numerous painted copies made in 18th century. (The pair of “Arlequin, Pierrot et Scapin” and “Pour nous prouver que cette belle” were in fact engraved by L. Surugue in Watteau’s lifetime almost immediately after they were painted, showing that the extensions in that case were Watteau’s own). In 1986 there was such an exhibition at Brussels, to which the Louvre and Wallace (in the person of John Ingamells) contributed. [6] But no British curator (including Dr Nicholas Penny) was interested in transferring it to Britain. This short changed the British public, as does the continuing failure to make conservation history a routine element in any exhibition of old masters.

ENDNOTES

1 Watteau at the Wallace Collection, by Christoph Martin Vogtherr, 2011; Jean de Jullienne: Collector & Connoisseur, by Christoph Martin Vogtherr and Jennifer Tonkovich, 2011.

2 “Top Drawer,” Evening Standard, 24 March 2011.

3 “A Tale of Two Watteaus,” pp, 9-11. She has since restored the strange and almost unknown “Le Rêve de l’artiste”, the attribution to Watteau doubted by Donald Posner in 1984, a doubt apparently removed for some after cleaning.

4 The Wallace Collection Catalogue of Pictures, III, French before 1815, 1989. These catalogues were inexplicably remaindered off by the museum a few years ago.

5 Selby Whittingham, “Watteaus and ‘Watteaus’ in Britain c.1780-1851,” in Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) le peintre, son temps et sa légende, ed.François Moureau and Margaret Morgan Grasselli, 1987, pp.271-2.

6 Watteau, technique picturale et problèmes de restauration, ed. Catherine Périer-D’Ieteren, Université Libre de Bruxelles, 1986. Dr Martin Eidelberg pointed out the catastrophe of cleaning when the restorer failed to realise that a painting might be a collaboration between Watteau and another artist (Lecture at the 1999 ArtWatch UK Annual Meeting).

Selby Whittingham

The 2011 ArtWatch International Frank Mason Prize

The 2011 ArtWatch International Frank Mason Prize was awarded to Dr Selby Whittingham on June 8th, on the occasion of the annual Professor James Beck Memorial Lecture given at the Society of Antiquaries of London, Burlington House, by Professor Charles Hope on the subject of cleaning controversies at the National Gallery. Artwatch UK director Michael Daley paid the following tribute:

“In Britain, one of the doughtiest, longest-standing opponents of a sometimes self-regarding fine art establishment has been the art historian Selby Whittingham. Dr Whittingham, a student of medieval art and a devotee of both Watteau and Turner – two of the most restoration-vulnerable painters – started a campaign in 1975 for the creation of a proper and fitting Turner Gallery to house Turner’s great bequest. Some here may remember what a very fashionable cause this had been – enjoying the support of Henry Moore, Hugh Casson, Kenneth Clark, and John Betjeman among many others. But art establishments can look after themselves and sometimes prove accomplished practitioners of the principle Divide and Misrule.

“A case in point might be seen in the curator T. J. Honeyman who, in the 1940s, supported critics of the National Gallery’s cleaning policies in a letter to the Times. Merely for observing that the then failure of the gallery’s trustees’ to respond to their critics might suggest a certain “cynical aloofness”, he was, he later disclosed, “severely ticked off” by the trustees’ Chairman, Lord Crawford. It was only many years later that he was, as he put it, “restored to favour in high places” when he made it clear in an article in the Studio that he was now entirely convinced that “our National treasures were in the keeping of qualified responsible people”.

“Far from recanting, Dr Whittingham has never flinched and, over the last 35 years, has mastered the art of writing the letter you might hope never to receive – and would only deserve to receive if you were, say, the head an Academy that had mislaid both Turner’s death mask and the substantial funds that he had provided for a generous award and medal in his name to practicing landscape painters – or, if you were the head of a gallery that had lost two Turner paintings to what a government minister described as “a particularly nasty gang of Serbs”, after announcing that the pictures would not be accompanied by a courier when loaned to a foreign museum.

“It gives me very great pleasure therefore to award the 2011 ArtWatch International Frank Mason Prize to Selby Whittingham and to invite Dr Whittingham to say a few words about the current state of his campaigning – and I should add that we do so with a great sense of organisational indebtedness to this most widely-read recipient who, over the years, has generously supplied us with countless citations of restoration practices and abuses – Ladies and gentlemen, the Secretary-General of the Watteau Society, the Secretary of The Real Turner Society, and the Secretary-General of Donor-Watch, Dr Selby Whittingham.

Selby Whittingham’s acceptance:

“I would like to pay tribute to Art Watch, which, by challenging the restoration and attribution of works of art, additionally makes people scrutinise them more carefully. Sir David Piper, whom I knew at the National Portrait Gallery, welcomed the National Gallery controversy over picture cleaning ‘as furthering a continual extension of knowledge and of alertness’.

“Piper realised that for the enjoyment of art many things are requisite, and that one needs also to consider the psychology and the conditions of viewing art. I once asked Sir Trenchard Cox what the attitude of the National Gallery was when he was a curator there in the early 1930s. He said that display was regarded as a very ‘deuxième’ matter.

“Today museum curators regard everything as secondary to getting as many visitors as possible and their own researches published. Hence the vogue for museum blockbusters with their ponderous catalogues and the concomitant damage to exhibits and frustration for viewers.

“Of course such shows go back at least to the 1857 Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition. But now museums hold them, resulting in the devaluation of their permanent collections and sometimes, through their eagerness to lend in order to borrow, the breaking faith with donors, something increasingly prevalent more generally, as seen in the attempt to overturn the founding aims of the Warburg Institute. Granting powers to lend were fought against by the grandfather of the present Lord Crawford, when a trustee of the National Gallery, as he knew just where that would end.

“Sir Maurice Bowra, when charged with betraying his principles by accepting honours, said in justification that ‘they gave pain to academic enemies whose influence he had fought all his life; and, secondly, they recognised his campaigns …’ Through this prize I am very happy to be associated with Art Watch, whose leaders have, while many in the art world merely mutter their discontents in private, been bold enough to put their heads repeatedly above the parapet.

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watteau File.pdf

 

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

Above, Fig. 1: “Les charmes de la vie”, (reversed) engraving by Pierre Aveline, after Antoine Watteau, the British Museum, London.

Above, Fig. 2: Watteau’s “Les charmes de la vie” as reproduced in the Wallace Collection’s 1960 volume of illustrations of pictures and drawings to accompany the Catalogue of Pictures and Drawings.

Above, Fig. 3: Watteau’s “Les charmes de la vie” as reproduced in the catalogue to the 2011 “Watteau at the Wallace Collection” exhibition.

Above, Fig. 4: a detail of Watteau’s “Les charmes de la vie” as reproduced in the 1947 Lund Humphries “The Gallery Books No. 14, Antoine Watteau, Les charmes de la Vie”.

Above, Fig. 5: a detail of Watteau’s “Les charmes de la vie” as reproduced in the catalogue to 2011 “Watteau at the Wallace Collection” exhibition.

Above, Fig. 6: a detail of Watteau’s “Les charmes de la vie” as reproduced in the 1960 Wallace Collection catalogue

Above, Fig. 7: a detail of Watteau’s “Les charmes de la vie” as reproduced in the catalogue to the 2011 “Watteau at the Wallace Collection” exhibition.

Above, Fig. 8: Watteau’s “Fete galante with a lute player and a bust of Bacchus” at Sansosouci, Potsdam, as reproduced in the 1947 Lund Humphries “The Gallery Books No. 14, Antoine Watteau, Les charmes de la Vie”.

Above, Fig. 9: Watteau’s “Fete galante with a lute player and a bust of Bacchus” at sanssouci, Potsdam and as reproduced in the 2011 “Watteau at the Wallace Collection” exhibition.

Above, Fig. 10: Watteau’s “Pour nous prouver que cette belle”, as shown in the Wallace’s 1960 catalogue volume of illustrations.

Above, Fig. 11: Watteau’s “Pour nous prouver que cette belle”, as shown in the catalogue to the 2011 “Watteau at the Wallace Collection” exhibition.

Above, Fig. 12: Dr Selby Whittingham’s acceptance of the 2011 ArtWatch International Frank Mason Prize on June 8th at the Society of the Antiquaries of london, Burlington House.

Dr WHITTINGHAM’S LONG STRUGGLE to protect the surving integrity of Watteau’s work, makes him a most fitting recipient of a prize in honour of Frank Mason who (in ArtWatch UK Journal 14) deftly explicated the intrinsic vulnerability of paintings:

“As artists, we know that a fine oil painting does not possess a hard, impermeable surface, but that it is comprised of layers of fine ground pigments suspended in elastic films of various oils and varnishes, which are superimposed, interwoven,and melting into each other in a way which not even the artist can accurately map. In spite of what conservators would have us believe, science cannot objectively scrutinise a painting and accurately enumerate all of its components in in any meaningful way; a plain chemical analysis is too crude a tool to measure the ineffable.”

Given the great vulnerability of paintings to restorers’ interventions, it is essential that proper means of evaluation and criticism be in place. Remedying this methodological lacuna is a core objective of ArtWatch’s campaigning. There is no mystery about how it might be achieved. Those who alter paintings should be required make comprehensive visual records of their interventions. Photographic records provide an indispensable working basis for making comparisons and, therefore, informed appraisals. In an age of digital photography this would neither difficult nor expensive.

Restorations expunge paintings’ previous conditions and create new ones. To evaluate change, like must be compared with like. In the absence of earlier states, photographic records provide the only means of making comparisons and comparisons are of the essence in appraisal. Because earlier, pre-restorations records are in black and white, we here publish greyscale versions of more recent colour photographs to facilitate direct comparisons. With Watteau’s “Les charmes de la vie”, after its 1980 restoration, we see a net loss of pictorial vivacity. Had varnishes and disfiguring repaints alone been removed, we would expect the opposite with the darks being darker and the lights lighter. The landscape behind the figures has been rendered flatter, shallower, less effective as a foil for the foreground action. The two sets of foliage that abut the composition’s flanking columns were darker where closest to the architecture (thereby throwing the building and its figures into relief) and lighter when advancing into the landscape and towards the sky. Such artistically distinct and purposive relationships are never accidental by-products discoloured varnishes.

In the above-mentioned Burlington Magazine accounts, photographs are used not to disclose the treatment but to illustrate difficulties encountered. A photograph of the cleaned but not-yet repainted picture sits above an x-ray photograph of the painting and no fewer than three details of the post-cleaning, pre-restoration state are shown in support of claims that the picture was badly constructed by the artist and much damaged by previous restorers. The curator, Ingamells, speaking of Watteau’s numerous changes notes that “all seem primarily concerned with the problem of relating the foreground figures to the architectural setting and to the landscape beyond.” As if in exculpation of his own debilitation of that crucial relationship, Lank, the restorer, begins his account with the observation “Watteau’s approach to the composition and execution of a painting presents the restorer with many problems.” But such problems only present themselves on physical/chemical/abrasive interventions. If an artist really is notoriously careless in his working method, we might expect a restorer’s conscientious reluctance to intervene at all. Lank, even as he evokes initial problems for restorers that would have been generated by Watteau’s working method, states that “as soon as the natural resin varnish originally applied has yellowed, cleaning becomes desirable”. But, of course, it does not. It only becomes desirable to those who cannot endure the signs of age in a painting; to those who would seek (vainly – and repeatedly) to return a painting to its fullest original chromatic luminosity every thirty years or so, no matter how vulnerable the work might be to interventions. Lank himself concedes that “unless this work is done with care, the paint lying on the top will be easily abraded over areas of impasto in the previous painting”. That being so, how urgent was it in 1980 for Lank to remove (and then redo) “discoloured varnishes, extensive repaint and toning”? Lank characterises his own actions as minimal when they consisted of such interventions as repainting (in “easily removable tempera washes”) a group of Watteau’s figures on the authority of an enlarged photograph of the reversed engraving by Aveline here shown in Fig. 1. On Lank’s own recognition, his actions were such as to “invite criticism when the painting is viewed in a harsh light.” It was vainly hoped that the subdued light of “the present hang in Hertford House” might prevent negative appraisals of the newly “restored” picture.

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