Detective's art
ART PAUL GRINKE
Art history has never been the same since the discovery of X-rays, and the exhibition of paintings and photographs, laudably produced by the Burlington Magazine at Messrs Agnews, shows all too clearly that radiography can be a Pandora's box for the unwary. The inter- pretation and judgment of Old Master paint- ings has moved from purely aesthetic criteria to an alliance of iconography and historical data within the last half-century. The use of X-rays adds an entirely new dimension to art history and puts up as many hares as- it has already elucidated old problems.
The paintings in the show span the fourteenth to the twentieth centuries. In the earliest in- stance, a diptych of the Spanish school, c. 1300; the problems arising from an X-ray study are virtually insoluble in their complexity but, in the case of Van Gogh's Thatched Cottage with Peasant Woman, c. 1885 (recently discovered in romantic circumstances by Dr Luigi Grosso),
the use of X-rays has revealed a painting of a man with an ox and a plough which con- forms to an already authenticated drawing. Thus firmly attributing a painting which would previously have depended, to borrow flying saucer terminology, on visual siting alone, Dr Grosso must be delighted at science coming to his rescue.
In most cases, though, X-rays reveal only insignificant pentimenti, or the use of a totally uninteresting earlier canvas by an impoverished or merely prudent artist. But in some instances they do throw revealing light on the artist's earliest thoughts and major changes in the scheme of his work. Given time and the greater availability of equipment, it seems likely that most of the works of the great masters will be subjected to the penetrating criticism of X-rays. Their use has already reinforced that seren- dipity which is the art historian's greatest asset.
Dr Carl Nordenfalk has discovered two panels overpainted by Watteau which originally made up an armorial coach door. One of them, better known as L'Accord Parfait, is in the present exhibition and proposes the interest- ing conjecture that the door itself may have been the work of Watteau at a time when he was working for Claude Adran. The marriage of the two panels, one ih New York and the other in an English private collection, through radiography is remarkable in itself, and a further Watteau coach door has been dis- covered in Stockholm under The Love Lesson.- Apart from the revelation of paint loss, the hand of early restorers and the possibilities of studying brushwork in detail without the distractions of colour and tone, X-rays have turned up a number of unexpected bonuses. The Titian triple portrait from the Royal Col- lection is a case in paint. The imbalance of the composition might have led one to suspect a third head but, as the work was catalogued in Charles l's time as a 'double portrait, the existence of the third portrait was for a long time pure conjecture. Similarly, the Saint Sebastian attributed to Francesco Francia may have looked slightly askew to the discerning eye, but no one could have guessed that the head was facing in a different direction to the artist's original intention and must be the work of a later hand.
Sometimes the evidence of radiography con- firms the accounts of earlier historians and fills out the details in a most satisfying way. Caravaggio's Martyrdom of St Matthew, com- missioned for a church in Rome. was reported by the art historian Bellori back in the 1670s tooltave been worked over and revised several times, and now one can actually see the different versions superimposed. Another curiosity revealed by X-rays is a fragment of a view of Rome underneath one of the few surviving remains of Poussin's Adoration of the Golden Calf, painted about 1627 and dis- Membered in Masaniello's revolt at Naples in 1647- 'When one gets into the twentieth century the problems arising from radiography are as complex as the attribution of early paintings. A canvas of L'Eglise du Village, formerly attributed to Cezanne, has revealed the in- disputable signature of Antoine-Fortune Marion, a close friend of Ckzanne who profited from a long association with the master to paint a number of excellent works in his style. X-rays may not be of much assistance in sort- ing out Marion from azanne's supervisory tuition in this case, but at least one knows where to start looking. Lady Aberconway's
Picasso of a Child Holding a Dove has what appears to be a woman accompanying the child in the radiograph, but fortunately Picasso remembers the painting and that the two com- positions are entirely unrelated. It is always easy to jump to conclusions with radiographs but, like most photographs, they are subject to as many interpretations as one cares to place on them.
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