Some of our best-loved paintings have been ravaged by time,and by restoration“Hour by hour, and week by week, or the thing upon the canvas was growing old …No! The thing is impossible.” In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray,the painter Basil Hallward is dismayed by the catastrophic changes that have wrecked his remarkable portrait. In this eloquent (expressing yourself readily, clearly, effectively) study, the art historian Paul Taylor demonstrates that all artworks undergo countless metamorphoses. Some of them occur over centuries, or all too many in seconds. He shows us why foliage in paintings so often looks brown or blue; why a face has cracked,pocked, blurred or paled in a specific way; why so many artworks are fragments; and why pictures in the National Gallery tend to be brighter and more pristine than those in Italian museums.
Taylor starts by noting how often art historians and art lovers are misled by their ignorance of what we might term the medical history of the works they are looking at. “Literary historians are occasionally faced with corrupt texts; art historians face corrupt paintings every day of their working lives”, and often without being aware of it. Many pictures have been repainted,and here Taylor uses a personal example. He recently asked to see a frequently reproduced portray of a pointing angel from Leonardo’s studio. He was told by the museum where it is housed in Basel that since 1989 the angel had been a John the Baptist, holding a cross. Restoration had revealed that the cross had been painted out, and almost certainly at the behest of the man who gave it to the museum in 1942: he wanted it to become Leonardo’s angel of the annunciation,as described by the painter and historian Giorgio Vasari.
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Source: theguardian.com