White Coats v. Bow Ties

Letters

Vol. 15 No. 5 · 11 March 1993

From Michael Daley

Nicholas Penny’s defence of current art restoration techniques is baffling (LRB, 11 February). While admitting that ‘destructive restoration’ was often the responsibility of ‘much-vaunted scientific techniques’, and that ‘something is lost’ in every restoration, he nonetheless claims that better advice is to be had from ‘laboratory scientists and archival historians’ than from artists or ‘today’s “man of taste” ’. It is hard to see why this should be thought to be so. Evidence from a laboratory might tell a curator what a substance is, but not what its purpose was. The archival historian might discover how much a painting cost, or by whom it was commissioned, but not what it looked like. Such gleanings, however interesting, provide no basis for any intervention, let alone for the radical and destructive interventions currently in vogue.

The present dependency culture (of historians on conservation scientists) is proving highly debilitating. Dr Penny says, for example, that he ‘knows few art historians … who believe that a mistake was made in the cleaning of the Sistine Chapel ceiling’. So much the worse for them – one was, and art historians should have been the first to spot it. Numerous shadows applied with glue-size paint have been removed from figures on the ceiling. Without offering any evidence, today’s restorers have claimed that this painting was the work of restorers over a century after the ceiling’s completion. But the now-missing shadows were recorded in copies made by Michelangelo’s contemporaries within a few years of the unveiling and long before any restorers were hired. I have repeatedly drawn attention to this fact in the newspaper and art magazine articles to which Dr Penny refers. No art historian has ever disputed this evidence. Why, then, is its clear import not accepted? Do all historians share Dr Penny’s apparent belief that the ‘evidence of microscopic examination’ cited by the Vatican’s restorers, in defence of their own actions, somehow neutralises the artistic and documentary record of Michelangelo’s peers? Or do they believe that all of Michelangelo’s copyists had decided that his figures were insufficiently sculptural and had accordingly, and in unison, added shadows of their own – shadows, moreover, which somehow anticipated perfectly those now alleged to have been added to the ceiling by later restorers?

Penny claims that polemics against the restoration which appeal to ideas of chiaroscuro are a ‘misunderstanding’. But a misunderstanding of what? The ceiling was praised precisely for its unprecedentedly dramatic chiaroscuro. This is a matter of record – are today’s historians ignorant of this fact? Some of them, like Dr Penny, have, contrarily, praised as ‘revelation’ the newly-emerged ‘colourism’ of the work, for which not a single contemporary corroboration is to be found. What kind of scholarship is this? It purports to be scientific yet ignores profuse artistic and documentary evidence. It accepts without reservation technical evidence that is strikingly at variance with other technical accounts. A recorded examination of the ceiling in the 19th century found that the glue-painting could only have been Michelangelo’s because it had been applied when the ceiling was brand-new and not yet cracked – no glue had run into the cracks, the glue-paint had cracked with the plaster. It is a matter of record that the ceiling had cracked before any restorers were hired. Do historians have any grounds for rejecting the implications of this technical testimony? If not, why do they persist in denigrating critics of the restoration? And why do they continue to support a cleaning long after the restorers themselves have abandoned their controversial methods and substances?

Michael Daley
Artwatch International, East Barnet, Hertfordshire

From Susan Wilsmore

After more than fifty years of the National Gallery authorities denying that the Gallery’s paintings were at risk, and in the face of the latest conservation research findings to the contrary, the National Gallery Renaissance curator Dr Nicholas Penny somewhat nonchalantly admits that ‘something is lost, however much is gained by any intervention – some possibility of interpretation, if not some actual pigment or glaze or polish.’ This should focus our attention back onto the National Gallery’s cleaning methods which, in the meantime, have been exported to other galleries and museums worldwide.

The damaging effects of solvents are reported in the August 1992 edition of Studies in Conservation. Twenty to 30 per cent (sometimes up to 50 per cent) of the substance of oil paint may be ‘leached out’ by solvents. The potential damage to paintings, both immediate and long-term, is of very serious proportions. ‘The immediate result of leaching,’ says the report, ‘is shrinkage of the medium by up to 50 per cent in volume which can lead to cracking … The swelling nature of most solvents is itself a cause for concern. The oil medium will attempt to swell in all directions but can only freely do so outwards … On drying the loss of any soluble material may lead to the formation of inaccessible voids in the film. Such voids near the surface could result in optical problems, e.g. blanching.’ The ultimate danger is spelled out clearly: ‘Solvents can leach out certain components from a dried oil film. These components act as plasticisers … The paint layers will become more prone to cracking and delamination.’

For any particular painting then the question must be: what is gained by intervention (‘cleaning’) to offset the possibility of such high costs? Any acceptable answer must be found by applying satisfactory conservation principles. In Penny’s hands we find no such comfort. The two principles enunciated by Penny, even in their over-simplified formulation, are not applied by him to particular cases when they arise, or if they are applied, it is without due consideration for the consequences of his argument, let alone for his practice at the Gallery. The two principles given are: ‘First, will it [the method of cleaning and conserving a work of art] be good for the work, will it improve its chances of survival? Second, will it enable us to see the work more clearly as the artist intended – will it be closer to its original condition?’ Penny ignores the second principle and invokes familiarity to explain the acceptance of a new nose on an old bust. Yet clearly his question – ‘Do you remove from an ancient Roman marble bust a nose which was given to it in the 18th century?’ – has an affirmative answer according to the second principle of the artist’s intentions. It is not, as he asserts, simply a question of ‘tact and presentation’.

Susan Wilsmore
University of Hertfordshire

Vol. 15 No. 7 · 8 April 1993

From Nicholas Penny

Susan Wilsmore concludes oddly that I would advocate the removal of an 18th-century nose from an antique bust because this would bring the sculpture closer to its original condition and to the artist’s original intentions (Letters, 11 March). I have, in fact, complained in print about the rash removal of old restorations to sculpture. If the nose is well done, I would recommend that it be kept and precisely because the sculptor did intend that there should be a nose. If the nose job changes the character of the face or if the nose (being in plaster) has discoloured, then it may be a different matter. Generally if a nose is removed I would recommend adding a new one, not least because chiselled scars are more distracting than natural breaks. It would be best if it were obvious that any new nose was new, but only on close scrutiny – that is where ‘tact and presentation’ come in. As for ‘familiarity’, it is surely the case, with a collection in which ancient sculpture has not been restored, that we soon get into the habit of adding noses in our imagination, and also true that if we are expecting restoration we learn to look for it.

Ms Wilsmore also repeats claims about solvents used in cleaning oil paint – not a problem addressed in my review. Were it to be established that a solvent used in cleaning destroyed the oil paint to which it was applied, there would be no argument in favour of its use. Mr Daley, in his letter in the same issue, refers to shadows recorded by copyists soon after Michelangelo had finished painting the Sistine ceiling. The copies – they are drawings and prints, not paintings – made of the ceiling in the 16th century are illustrated and discussed in the catalogue of the exhibition Michelangelo e la Sistina held in the Vatican in 1990. Few have survived which were in fact executed soon after the ceiling was finished and not all of those made later constitute reliable evidence, but none of them support the claims Daley makes. I am surprised to learn that it is a ‘matter of record’ that the painting was ‘praised precisely for its unprecedentedly dramatic chiaroscuro’. As for the cracks on the ceiling, one went across the chest of an ignudo and when it was repaired in the 1560s a portion of the original painted plaster was buried within it: this was found to be without trace of the glue-painting which Daley believes to be by Michelangelo. Here, too, the reader is referred to the Vatican catalogue, which records an examination of the ceiling far more profound than any that could have been undertaken in the last century.

Nicholas Penny
London W9