Ignoto bites the dust BOOKS
ROY STRONG
The candles in the chandeliers at Baihl threw a honeyed glow over the acres of whipped cream rococo and the staring ugliness of German eighteenth century prelates pouting to posterity from the walls. Glasses were downed and mag- pie chatter abounded. The eye was sated with the sight of over 500 participants in the Inter- national Council on Museums. 'coat to you, enjoying its triennial junketing in erratic style from Cologne to Munich. For sheer unattrac- tiveness and other tattiness of appearance the museum profession would take the biscuit any day, one meditated. And yet it is these bulbous- faced Americans, these dowdy French women with faces like wet cement, these Scandinavians swathed in polythene by the yard, who spend their lives preserving and cherishing the fast diminishing loveliness of our past. This was the pertinent background against which I read Helmut Ruhemann's The Cleaning of Paintings, Problems and Potentialities (Faber and Faber 126s). Anything about the picture laundry, I thought, is good for the road (as Gwendolen says, one should always have something sensa- tional to read in the train) and, besides, its dust jacket was irresistible, with the Rokeby Venus half-cleaned making the goddess's back and buttocks akin to a zebra crossing.
Let me say at once that this book is for the dedicated. Although presumably written for a lay audience, one needs strong drink or a bottle of aspirin to get through it. None the less it is an important book, the credo of the man who has been responsible for cleaning some of the most famous pictures in the National Gallery, Rubens's Chapeau de Paille and Piero della Francesca's Nativity to name but two. In the first place, the author emerges in an excep- tional light, a man passionate in his conviction that total picture cleaning alone is right, and that timid semi-cleaning is not only wrong but can be positively harmful. For those who have the stamina, this is a rewarding book and one admires the author's courage and determina- tion to get down on paper all he has discovered, putting it in print to confound those who men- tally ally picture restorers to alchemists swab- bing away with heaven knows what over the Giorgione or Augustus Egg.
Since galleries are so often mistakenly viewed as shrines to the religion of art in which man's genius is expressed in paint, it is difficult for most of us to realise that the subjects of our veneration are material things which need ser- vicing in the same way as a car might (ob- viously not in quite the same way). One's first encounter with a major painting out of its frame, plonked down on a work bench, natur- ally comes as something of a shock. It suddenly takes on another facet, as a piece of wood or canvas covered with a prepared •ground over which layers of oil paint have been brushed and which has finally been coated with a pro- tective covering of varnish. At least this is how pictures start their long lives, and this is ideally how one would with them to remain.
But what vicissitudes have overtaken them in the meanwhile? With the Council of Trent taking a dim view of representations of God the Father and being sniffy over nudes, owners regularly sent for the ubiquitous Ignoto and had clouds plastered over the deity or sprouts of greenery and veils made to flutter around the but- tocks, breasts and parts adjacent. Meanwhile, in England, bright pictures of the Holbein-Hil- liard tradition went out of fashion abruptly with Van Dyck, and Ignoto found himself busy ton- ing down with brown paint and filthy varnish the gay portraits of the previous century. And, regardless of period, if you really couldn't stand that portrait of Aunt Maud with a basket of flowers, you could bet Ignoto would be a dab hand at adding a halo and overpainting the posy with a severed head so that the picture could be banished to the chapel as Judith.
All this may sound a madly jolly giggle, but it is not for the gallery director or private col- lector who is faced with decisions as to whether to exhume from beneath the murk, repaint and general botch-up what is left of the artist's original intention. Even before he can embark on this, there is the basic, unsung work of con- servation, the keeping together of a picture in its present state without serious cleaning. In the case of a major gallery with thousands of pictures, the laying of blisters, the fixing of flak- ing paint, the relining of canvases, the treat- ment of worm-eaten and splitting panels is a full-time operation for several people. And it is exacting, serious, highly trained work, de- manding the greatest expertise.
Ruhemann is excellent in the importance he attaches to this work, which slips by without any tribute from the public who are naturally more taken with the spectacular transformation that can occur in the cleaning of a major paint- ing. And here again Ruhemann is right, in that only a gallery with its own expert depart- ment can afford to go in for elaborate cleaning Rubens's 'Chapeau de Paille' during cleaning at the National Gallery.
and restoration. As far as commercial re- storers are concerned, this kind of restoration is often an unprofitable business: few com- mercial restorers can afford to devote a whole year to a single picture; few people outside a gallery can afford to meet the bill this repre- sents.
It is interesting to compare. as Ruhemann does, the problems various countries face over restoration. In America, most pictures originally arrived cleaned from Europe so that the main concern and subject of research there has been how to cope with the effects of the New World climate on acquisitions. In Italy, the major worry at present is air pollution which is fast eroding the world's greatest heritage of frescoes. Unless these supreme masterpieces are got off the walls on to other supports, many of the treasures of Renaissance painting will be lost to us by the end of the century. The Italians are caught up in a desperate battle against lack of time, staff and money. In England, the primary problem concerns the pictures them- selves. since no other country apparently went in for such a lavish use of tinted varnish in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to produce a suitable 'golden glow' or 'gallery tone.' To this one must add the filth and soot-laden atmosphere of the Industrial Revolution.
The shock produced by the removal of this detritus by Eastlake, the National Gallery's first director, in 1846, led to a ferocious row and denunciations that he had ruined Rubens's War and Peace, once `so preeminently rich and harmonious in colour.' now 'almost as remark- ably crude and discordant.' Eight years of squabbles followed. The episode was repeated in 1947 when the National Gallery staged yet another exhibition of cleaned pictures and again there were ferocious letters to The Times by people who claimed that they knew better. And so the struggle has intermittently gone on in high class art journals, where they have been slogging away at each other for years. The trouble is that everyone thinks that he alone knows what a particular picture ought to look like. The anti-cleaning phalanx is, however, bat- ting on a rapidly tottering wicket for the simple reason that, as the scientific aspects of picture restoration develop, it is difficult for someone outside the profession and its jargon to quarrel successfully. Critical dissension is being re- moved from the ranks of the laity to the tech- nically qualified.
Few would deny the real joy of seeing a great masterpiece revealed in its cleaned state. For those who take part in the operation it is an even greater revelation, an aspect admirably caught in the illustrations to this book. I would therefore urge the lay reader to skip the text, which is crammed with technical details and written in Germanic English, and work through the plates and their extended captions: Titian's Noli me tangere with a rectangle cleaned to show how the Magdalene's figure had been narrowed by a third; Rembrandt's A Woman bathing in a stream with the overpainting re- moved to reveal the master's brilliant sketchy right hand; the striptease of Bronzino's Allegory, with leaves and veiling now taken away to abash the prudish. It makes one hope that Mr Ruhemann will produce a paperback on the subject, consisting of nothing but plates with a commentary which would be far more instructive and lucid for the layman. I should add that there is a valuable critical biblio- graphy by Joyce Nesters, full of amusing snip- pets. It includes the earliest account of picture cleaning, in a manuscript from Mount Athos,
which recommends a swift scrub of one's icon with nitric acid. The monk goes on to describe how successful this method has proved in all cases except one, where he was left with only a lump of bald wood. Mr Ruhemann has definitely improved on this approach.
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