What to do with a yellowed world?

The painting Susanna and the elders (1610) by Artemisia Gentileschi received a special restoration in 1998 when Kathleen Gilje took over the work. She not only restored, but also added an underlay that can only be seen with X-rays. In that layer you can see what actually happened to Gentileschi when she was raped by her teacher Agostino Tassi. Gentileschi made works in which she felt the similarity with the biblical Susanna: raped by men and witness statements that had to be decisive. Gentileschi said she wanted to defend herself with a knife. Gilje’s ‘underpainting’ shows the defending and screaming Gentileschi, where Gentileschi himself only depicted the biblical scene.

It’s a bit of an extreme example, but actually most seventeenth-century museum pieces have been reworked by restorers. If they had not been retouched or cleaned, you would see peeling, crackled and yellowed works. In his book Veil of time Benjamin Rous examines the many lives of paintings and sculptures. How was a painting made, how was it changed over time, what happened to those adjustments in restorations and what would works look like if we had simply let the ravages of time do its job?

Take the Adoration of the Shepherds (ca. 1510) by Sebastiano del Piombo – it is one of many examples given by Rous. When the work was cleaned in the early twentieth century, it was seen that the overpaints were of very poor quality. “The faces looked coarse and clumsy, as did large parts of the set, especially the sky.” The book shows an image from before the restoration with all the ‘clunky heads’ still on, and the work after it had been cleaned and the overpaint removed. The result looks disastrous, only baby Jesus is still reasonably intact. It begs the question of what to do. That is the question that runs like a red thread through the book.

New techniques unravel the ‘secrets’ of the master and discover the life course of a work of art, but it also raises questions: which version do you restore – and do you always have to restore? It has been a matter of debate for centuries, which flared up again in 1994 when the Sistine Chapel was restored. The sky was suddenly bright blue, Jesus and Mary were illuminated and God appeared in red robes. Not everyone was equally happy: this was no longer Michelangelo, because the essence of his art with the subtle shadow effect had now been removed.

Chaos

However, they also lead to pleasant surprises. The large image of Cupid on Vermeers Girl reading a letter by the window is a recent one with positive result. It was always assumed that Vermeer had done the overpainting himself, but thanks to paint research and more X-rays, it was established that the overpainting had been done after Vermeer’s death.

You can also settle disputes with it. The works of the American Jackson Pollock were sometimes seen as chaotic. “No chaos, Damn it!” Pollock himself told the magazine Time and connoisseurs wrote books full about his method. MA-XRF scans provide evidence rather than interpretation, revealing patterns of how Pollock used “specific properties of the different paints.”

On the other hand, things can go wrong: Rembrandt’s version of the biblical story of Susanna was considerably modified by the eighteenth-century painter Joshua Reynolds, because he felt that the painting could be improved. What to do now that you know? “For example, if you remove all paint that was not applied by yourself, you will be left with a heavily damaged painting, among other things, due to the thorough adjustments. No museum will show a work of art in that condition,” writes Rous.

Why do we show the time when showing antique or non-western art?

On the one hand, we must accept that the original work cannot always be traced. After all, a painting is made through time. On the other hand, as far as Rous is concerned, it also raises the question of why the emphasis on ‘authenticity’ is so culturally determined. Why don’t we feel the need to return non-western or antique art to its original state, and show what time has done? Sometimes we even emphasize that (like in the Japanese kintsugi where broken ceramics are repaired with gold or silver-colored lacquer, so that the fractures are emphasized instead of eliminated).

As far as Rous is concerned, we should place less value on the idea of ​​a romantic ideal – in which the artist is a genius – that stands the test of time by default. Show that art is not static, show not the secret of the original work, but also the secrets of the many hands and circumstances that passed over it afterwards. Time then adds an extra dimension, instead of the ‘veil of time’ obscuring the view of the true work of art.