What Lies Beneath : Old Masters Under the Microscope

Monday, 06 November 2006 11:57

New York Times... THE Picture of Dorian Gray” tells the story of a man whose dissipated life takes a hideous toll on his hidden portrait while his own handsome features remain miraculously unblemished.  What makes this story by Oscar Wilde so uncanny is that it reverses our expectations about life and art: the human body remains perfect and unchanging while the artwork absorbs the scars.  Tests of this 15th-century diptych by Hans Memling, pairing “Virgin and Child” with “Maarten van Nieuwenhove,” a client, showed that the artist painted over his original landscape in the window to Mary’s left to insert the Nieuwenhove coat of arms. 

The reality, however, is that works of art are more mutable than is usually acknowledged.  Like flesh and blood, they are subject to decay, and when the restorer is called in to reverse the process, the results can sometimes be as jarring as anything wrought by the most overzealous plastic surgeon.  Scholars have recently shown us that bumps and bruises are not necessarily a bad thing, given how they testify to the intimate place these precious objects occupied in the lives of their owners, a history crucial to their meaning.  Artworks, like people, are often more interesting after they’ve absorbed the knocks of experience.

What we see in the museum may bear little resemblance to what emerged centuries earlier from the artist’s studio.  This is an underlying theme of “Prayers and Portraits: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych,” an exhibition of 15th- and 16-century paintings by masters of the Northern Renaissance opening on Nov. 12 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.  The culmination of four years of research, the show delves into the kinds of issues normally relegated to fine print or a scholarly appendix. 

In assembling these works for display, a team of investigators, led by Ron Spronk at the Straus Center for Conservation at Harvard University and Catherine A. Metzger of the National Gallery, poked and prodded the centuries-old panels with the attention to detail of a coroner examining a cadaver.  Using advanced imaging and analytical techniques like infrared reflectography, binocular microscopy and dendrochronology, they succeeded in conceptually “marrying” panels that had been thought to be unrelated — and also issuing some “divorces.”

In the hefty catalog every work comes accompanied by its own tell-all biography, as revealing as any Hollywood exposé. (These tales are less in evidence in the exhibition itself, where the curators prefer that visitors appreciate the works without the distraction of lengthy wall texts.)

Probing the surface with X-rays or infrared light or dating the work by dendrochronology — counting the rings in the wooden panel on which the image was painted — can reveal much about how a work was actually made: the struggles endured before an artist settled on a satisfactory composition, the extent to which assistants and apprentices were used to speed up production, and the various market forces that drove those decisions.  Such analysis can also uncover many twists and turns in the long trip from the artist’s studio to the museum wall.  One of the most startling revelations of “Prayers and Portraits” is how many panels now displayed as single works were never intended to be seen together. 

One example is the “Ecce Homo” and “Mater Dolorosa” from the Surmount-Ludwig-Museum in Aachen, Germany, which form the central section of a three-part devotional painting, long attributed to the workshop of Albrecht Bouts.  Infrared reflectography, however, reveals vastly different techniques used in each of the underdrawings, suggesting they were worked on by different hands.  Dendrochronology confirms that the two paintings were made at least 25 years apart. Microscopic examination of the frame and exterior elements suggest that all these components were cobbled together at a much later date, a sort of mix-and-match approach that mocks our prissier attitudes toward authorship and authenticity.

In addition to the divorces, as Mr. Spronk calls such newly discovered separations, the research resulted in some satisfying reunions, as in the case of two panels by Rogier van der Weyden, one of them depicting St. George and the Dragon, the other a Virgin and Child.  While art historians have long suspected a link between the two works, now housed in separate collections, it was not until now that infrared reflectography exposed an identical crack running through each, indicating that they were originally the two sides of a single panel that had been split down the middle.

Of course, in the 15th and 16th centuries, works of art were not the autonomous creations of artists harking only to a muse. Usually there was the nagging voice of a customer looking over the artist’s shoulder and explaining exactly what was required.

Surprisingly, high-tech tools can allow us to listen in on those conversations, laying bare motives ranging from piety to vanity to crass commercialism.  The diptych format that is the focus of this show became popular in northern Europe during the late 15th century as part of a movement known as the Devotio Moderna, which sought out a more intimate relationship between the believer and Jesus.

In response to this spiritual awakening, which prefigured the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, artists created small devotional works suitable for use in the privacy of the home.  Often these consisted of paired images in which the left panel depicted a holy scene while the right showed the patron in a prayerful attitude.  But if the impetus for the renewed popularity of this ancient form was largely spiritual, artists quickly seized on it as a new way to market their talents.

Dendrochronological analysis reveals that the panel with the holy image often predated the patron panel by a number of years, implying that the artist and his studio assistants cranked out multiple versions of these nursing Madonnas and suffering Jesuses — with only minor changes from one to the next — that the client would then purchase “off the rack” to be coupled with his own custom-made portrait.

Advanced imaging techniques can also conjure up the artist at work, brush in hand.  Taking a peek beneath the surface, you see the second thoughts and changes of heart. In Hans Memling’s “Virgin and Child” and “Maarten van Nieuwenhove,” for instance, the infrared reflectogram reveals the difficulty the artist had in constructing the complex perspective in the right-side panel.  Ghostly traces of alternate solutions, elaborate networks of sight lines used in laying out the architectural setting, yield a privileged glimpse of a great artist plying his craft.

Other changes speak less to aesthetic issues than to the relationship between the artist and patron.  Examination of Memling’s left-side “Virgin and Child” panel shows that the Nieuwenhove coat of arms and family motto, inserted into the arched stained glass window above Mary’s right shoulder, were painted over an already completed landscape framed by a rectangular window, indicating a late intervention.  Researchers surmise that this came at the request of the customer who saw nothing incongruous in such a juxtaposition of piety and worldly vanity.

One curious instance that inverts the usual chronology, and indeed the usual selfish motives of such hijackings, involves “Virgin and Child and Joos van der Burch and St. Simon of Jerusalem,” originally commissioned by one Simon van der Burch.  X-rays of the right-side panel reveal that the face of this original donor was replaced at some point by the features of his father, Joos.

Drastic alterations were evidently required to achieve this, including the repainting of the coat of arms on the reverse side and the painting out of the martyred bishop St. Simon of Jerusalem, the original sitter’s patron saint.  Though this overpainting was removed during a 19th-century restoration, traces of the dark pigment remain, testament to a restorer’s diligence in undoing a previous attempt to rewrite history.

The illusion of perfection that is the museum’s usual stock in trade is the first casualty of the tools of science.  But if such revelations tend to strip away some of the aura of the certifiable masterpiece, the loss of dignity is more than made up for by rediscovering an animating pulse in what can too often seem like lifeless remains.

...By MILES UNGER