Velzquez' large portrait of Spanish king, Philip IV has hung in The Metropolitan Museum for almost 70 years. However, over the past several decades, authorities doubted its authenicity-- instead attributing it to a skillful studio apprentice.
Yesterday, our AK Files began to unravel some of the mysteries which surrond this monumental work.
Today ARTKABINETT social network for fine art collectors learns how moder science and restoration technology can authenitcate a previous fake.
The painting had last been cleaned and restored around 1911, when it was in the possession of Joseph Duveen, the legendary dealer who encouraged restorers to tone down paintings to make them look more serious (hence more salable) and to repaint any areas that were worn or damaged. As a result, this painting had decades of yellowed varnish and considerable repainting.
In fact, so much painting had been done over the original that it was impossible to tell what the initial image had been.
“X-rays gave us some clues,” Mr. Gallagher said. “But its true condition was obfuscated by the decades of varnish and the liberal repainting.”
There was another big problem: Philip’s left eye was missing, possibly because of natural flaking or vandalism -- and had been haphazardly repaired (pictured right).
Still, once they began to study the canvas in depth, Mr. Christiansen said he felt the painting “was so altered in its appearance that it was a falsification,” an image so far from its original conception that “if Michael hadn’t proceeded with the restoration, I was going to put it in storage.”
So Mr. Gallagher began to restore the canvas, with extreme caution. The results of the first cleaning test were alarming.
“X-rays showed numerous losses, particularly in the upper part of the composition,” he said. “And a cleaning test on the right-hand side of the canvas, where the table, hat and hand are, revealed that portions of the black had literally been scrubbed away.
As a color, black tends to be more vulnerable to the caustic cleaning materials that were not infrequently used earlier in the 20th century.”
Still, it wasn’t all bad. When the varnish and over-painting were removed for the first time, details in the composition emerged — the delicate hands, the strongly characterized head, the simple white collar, the elaborate gold chain, the draping of the clothes — that had the unmistakable characteristics of the artist.
“The way the light played on the collar: those few deft brushstrokes were identifying traits of Velázquez,” Mr. Christiansen said.
With more discoveries came more questions. X-rays showed that the same composition as the Met’s painting is buried beneath a slightly later full-length portrait of Philip in the Prado in Madrid.
“What happened we don’t know,” Mr. Gallagher said. “It’s peculiar.”
He and Mr. Christiansen said they believed that the image buried in the Prado portrait is likely to have been the official portrait of the king, which was later repainted by Velázquez. The Met’s painting, they believe, is a signed replica of the original Prado picture.
“It was probably an official portrait done for someone associated with the court, since ministers and courtiers were expected to own official portraits of the king,” Mr. Christensen said, explaining that painters like Velázquez would often keep a template or a tracing of a composition like this so they could recycle it.
There is, for instance, a more sophisticated, full-length portrait in the Prado (lower left). The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has a version that scholars all agree is by the artist’s workshop. And in the Meadows Museum in Dallas there is a bust-length portrait of Philip done around the same time as the Met’s painting that proved invaluable to Mr. Gallagher.
By obtaining an acetate tracing of it, he discovered that it matched up perfectly with the Met’s painting — so perfectly that Mr. Gallagher was able to lay the tracing over the Met’s canvas to position and repaint the missing eye correctly, right down to its slight droopiness.
It was the closeness of these two canvases that led both him and Mr. Christiansen to wonder about the Prado’s portrait as well as about the extensive use of tracing in Velázquez’s practice.
So in January 2009 the men went off to Madrid, taking with them a full-length acetate tracing of their painting.
It was there that they learned that their portrait must have been copied from the painting that is visible only through X-rays underneath the Prado’s portrait. Once again the two matched up.
It also helped Mr. Gallagher better understand Velázquez’s intentions as he retouched as gingerly as possible. “It was really a careful knitting together,” he said, “suppressing damage in order to give the artist’s original work precedence.”
“I like to think of the damage as white noise,” Mr. Gallagher added. “And the retouching tunes that out.”
courtesy: Carol Vogel, New York Times
