Raphael, Madonna del cardellino (1507)

As objects, works of the visual arts not only must survive, they also need to be seen, touched, entered into, and, in every respect, experienced in their physical dimension. The instant we gaze on a painting, examine a sculpture, or enter an architectural space, the issue of conservation arises, posing a multitude of questions, whether we are aware of them or not. How much of what is before us is original? To what degree of later manipulation has the object been subjected? Has there been deterioration in the constituent materials, and, if so, was this due to natural or man-made causes? Are we looking at a fragment or at the whole? The list goes on. Conservation, in a very real sense, is the arbiter of our artistic patrimony—of its substance and our understanding of it.

Indeed, conservation problems are just one of the many factors affecting our perception of virtually every art object. Or, put another way, any experience of an art object is perforce conditioned by a multitude of variables, some of which are self-evident: light (its quality and intensity), perspective (position and viewing angle), proximity (or distance), and other environmental factors. Conservation is yet another factor, and it is often the most critical. The reason is simple: unlike the literary and musical arts, the visual arts are defined by substantive, three-dimensional properties—works of art exist as objects, physical and tactile. Consider an extreme event: the art object’s disappearance. Without a physical presence, a painting or monument’s artistic significance evaporates or, at best, is diminished to the level of an image indistinctly surviving in a photo or in memory. The tragic destruction, during the last war, of Luca Signorelli’s great Pan, God of Life and Music (it was one of the treasures of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin) has deprived us of the possibility of experiencing it in the here-and-now. The painting has, in a very real sense, forever lost its status as a work of art. Although the image may still occupy a place in art history, the painting itself has ceased to play a role in the continuing dialogue that still surrounds, say, the Portrait of a Man, also by Signorelli, that survived and might once have hung next to it.

One of the earliest recorded conservation projects in the history of Western art began in 1506. While digging a foundation on Rome’s Esquiline Hill, workers made a momentous discovery: a gigantic marble sculpture representing the Trojan hero Laocoön and his sons battling sea-serpents sent by Minerva. Installed by Pope Julius II in the Vatican’s newly built Belvedere Palace, the late Hellenistic group instantly became a wellspring of inspiration for Renaissance artists (most importantly, Michelangelo). Like almost all survivors of antiquity, however, the Laocoön was recovered in pieces, some of which were never found. As a result, at least three different images have emerged over time as to what the sculpture might have originally looked like, with two talented sixteenth-century artists—Baccio Bandinelli and Giovanni Montorsoli—vying to come up with the ideal solution for the reconstruction. They can be counted as our culture’s proto-conservators, engaged not only in preserving an artifact but also in attempting to place it in proper artistic and historical context. They may well have been outdone by their near-contemporary Benvenuto Cellini. Starting with a much-mutilated classical torso of a young man, the flamboyant Cellini “restored” it into the exquisitely finished Ganymede we admire today in Florence’s Bargello Museum.

The same year that Laocoön was unearthed in Rome proved to be, artistically, even more bountiful in Florence. Visualizing what the streets there might have looked like is not too difficult; unlike in Rome, they have not changed much these last five hundred years. What is not so easy to imagine is that, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the likes of Raphael, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Botticelli, Perugino, Andrea del Sarto, Fra Bartolomeo—not to mention a legion of lesser known, painters, sculptors, goldsmiths, and architects—would have routinely crossed paths in those streets. At one time or another, they had all spent time in the basilica of Santa Croce or the Brancacci Chapel studying the frescoes of their great predecessors, Giotto and Masaccio.

The twenty-one-year-old Raphael, recently arrived from Urbino, put to good use what he saw all around him. During the four years (1504–1508) he spent in Florence, the young artist was principally engaged in exploring new solutions for an all-too-familiar theme: the Virgin and Child. Several remarkable paintings and a quantity of drawings have survived in which the artist reinvented the subject in daring new ways, no doubt the result of the attention he paid primarily to Leonardo and Michelangelo. The cartoons they had produced for the celebrated battle scenes in the Grand Council hall of Palazzo Vecchio became material of compulsory study for a generation of artists, although the projected frescoes were never completed.

The principal feature of Raphael’s Florentine Madonnas is the inclusion of Saint John the Baptist, patron of Florence, in the dialogue between mother and child. This, in itself, was not a startling innovation since Leonardo, in the so-called Virgin of the Rocks, had composed a similar grouping twenty years earlier. Raphael’s paintings, however, place Saint John in far more significant and psychologically compelling rapport with the slightly younger Christ Child and with the Virgin. The three figures become a tightly knit, intertwined cluster while the poses of both infants are both dynamic and spirited, yet natural. By virtue of the artist’s superb draftsmanship, these inherently arduous and spatially complex compositions are made to appear effortless and completely convincing.

Raphael’s Madonna of the Goldfinch (Madonna del Cardellino) is perhaps the best known and surely one of the most admired versions of the Mother, Child, and Saint John theme dating from the artist’s years in Florence. Painted in 1506 and now in the Uffizi, it was the artist’s wedding gift to a close friend, the wealthy merchant Lorenzo Nasi. Sadly, in 1547, the Nasi house, which was perched on a steep incline, steps from the Ponte Vecchio, came crashing down, taking with it the lives of two occupants—and the precious Raphael Madonna. Lorenzo’s son, Battista, spared no effort, scavenging in the rubble, to retrieve what was left of the picture that had been so dear to his father. Except for a large section of the bottom left corner, most of the panel was found in five pieces that had split apart along the vertical grain of the wood. One can only imagine Battista’s frustration at not being able to locate the missing fragment!

Although the subsequent restoration is not documented, there is good reason to believe that the task was entrusted to Ridolfo del Ghirlandajo, an artist who was an exact contemporary of Raphael and had been his close friend. If, indeed, Ridolfo did the job, it was intelligently carried out. Over the ensuing centuries, the picture became a beloved icon in the Uffizi’s sanctum sanctorum, the octagonal Tribuna.

And so it was that conserving the past got its start in the sixteenth century: with great enthusiasm and abundant artistic license. But, in time, a specific discipline began to emerge. We witness one of its first manifestations in the painstaking consolidation, carried out under the direction of Carlo Fontana, of the famous ceiling by Annibale Carracci in Palazzo Farnese in Rome. This exemplary project was undertaken in 1693—less than a century after Carracci completed the frescoes—in effect, saving them for posterity. At about the same time, on the other side of the Tiber at the lovely Farnesina, the painter Carlo Maratta and his pupils were at work on the Raphael frescoes in the villa’s open loggia. In a remarkable feat of conservation, the space was enclosed, the plaster consolidated, and the damages suffered by the painted surfaces prudently retouched: a classicist artist paying homage to the greatest of his classicist predecessors. What is interesting is that these early undertakings were thoughtfully commented upon by Maratta’s admirer, the writer and antiquarian Giovanni Pietro Bellori. An aspect of these restorations to which Bellori paid particular attention was the importance of the “courtesy” a conservator should pay to the art of the past. It was an early recognition of the dignity and significance of the restorer’s task, which, as Bellori perceptively pointed out, requires not only technical skills but intellectual awareness and artistic sensibility. It was Bellori’s view that a restorer’s intervention should blend seamlessly into the original image.

Rome, in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, had become the point of departure for the first modern attitudes towards conservation—easy enough to understand, considering the inescapable presence of the past in the Eternal City’s classical ruins. By 1650, conservation efforts were reinforced by another phenomenon underway in Europe: the consolidation of absolutist power in the great princely courts. Vast palaces were being built, becoming the visual expression of these regimes’ power. Whereas in earlier centuries, works of art had predominantly been the object of religious veneration, they now became valuable assets, inevitably attracting increased attention, envy, and, eventually, care.

New professions emerged as a result. Chroniclers such as Vasari and Bellori were followed, in the nineteenth century, by art-historians who not only theorized about art but sought documentary verification for their opinions. Curators pursued parallel paths in the rational stewardship of the great princely collections, which eventually became public museums or were dispersed into the private hands of a new industrial elite. The art trade blossomed. By the beginning of the last century, conservation was just one of the many specialty fields serving the public and private art establishment. Tools and techniques specific to the profession were developed and refined. Academic programs were designed to train practitioners at ever higher levels of proficiency. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that today, after over a century of this steady evolution, the issue of conservation is inescapable. It appears in museum labels, catalogue entries, guide-book descriptions, and every manner of art-history literature.

In the Uffizi Tribuna, time inevitably took its toll on the Madonna of the Goldfinch; ever so slowly, the resin varnish layers, the ancient restorations, and the panel support began to deteriorate. By the 1980s, the painting’s surface had become impossibly dark, opaque, and uneven, a fact that had bothered art historians long before then. It was as if a filter had formed, separating the viewer from Raphael’s work of art. Much like the painting’s early disastrous mishap, an obvious conservation problem was at hand—not as traumatic, but serious all the same.

Late last year, Raphael’s masterpiece finally reemerged after a truly contemporary conservation campaign—“contemporary” having, in this instance, not only a temporal but also a philosophical connotation. The restoration lasted almost a decade, and the results were on view in a special exhibition at the Palazzo Riccardi in Florence.[1] The time employed for work on the restoration, which must constitute some kind of record, was due, we are told, to the complexities and problems posed by the project. One suspects that some serious misgivings about its progress may also have been a factor. The result is a telling example of how substantially a painting’s aesthetic fruition can be affected by its state of conservation. Equally revealing is the interpretative role the conservator assumes when performing his task.

In an effort to allay any doubt that Raphael’s troubled masterpiece has received the very last word in diagnostic, technical, and conceptual expertise at the conservator’s disposal, the organizers of the exhibit filled two rooms with text and photographs that precede the gallery where the painting can actually be seen. This vast array of documentary material, comprising every possible image and description of the x-ray, infra-red, ultra-violet, raking light, and microscopy investigation has the curious effect of nullifying what should, by all rights, be the joyous experience of seeing Raphael’s masterpiece refurbished and reborn. Such, alas, is the current attitude toward the role of conservation in many of the world’s most prestigious cultural institutions. A full about-face has been described: from the reverent, if uninhibited, approach of preserving the artist’s intent as practiced by Ridolfo del Ghirlandajo and Carlo Maratta to the seemingly arrogant posture of today’s conservator, displaying for all the world to see his sophisticated tools and techniques.

It is a far cry from the sound principles practiced as late as the 1870s in Bergamo, a city that had become a teeming beehive of restoration activity. Here, an extraordinarily perceptive text was written that still ranks as a classic in the early literature of conservation. In his restorer’s manual, the Bergamasque nobleman Giovanni Secco Suardo memorably observed: “the best intervention [conservation] is the one less seen.” By this, he meant not that the faking-up of damaged works should be so skillfully done as to be invisible, but rather that the restorer’s hand should hide behind that of the artist—the act of courtesy which Bellori had envisioned two centuries earlier.

Unfortunately, this measured and eminently sensible approach did not become the guiding principle of conservation practice during much of the “positivist” twentieth century. By the 1930s, advances had undeniably been achieved in the development of diagnostic tools and in the study of materials. The operating principles of the conservation profession were guided, however, less by aesthetic imperatives and more by reductive, purely technical considerations. In two notorious undertakings of the 1950s—on the fresco cycles of the True Cross by Piero della Francesca in Arezzo and The Life of St. Francis by Giotto in the Bardi Chapel of Santa Croce in Florence—large losses that had been previously stitched together to accompany the original pictorial concept were left entirely blank and finished in a so-called neutral color. The result was an appalling loss of coherence in the compositional integrity and narrative structure of the images—not to mention their hugely diminished aesthetic appeal. Then, about the same time, came the shock of seeing the state to which the early Italian paintings of the Jarves Collection at the Yale University Art Gallery were reduced after a mindless cleaning campaign: an absolute nadir in the annals of conservation.

The most influential, intelligent, and culturally prepared observer of these sad events was an Italian art-historian called Cesare Brandi, at that time director of Rome’s Central Institute of Restoration. He knew well enough that truth, if it can be said to exist in the visual arts, is not to be found in the starkly empirical acceptance of only what time and human vicissitudes have left us—the quasi-archeological approach to conservation then in vogue. With this hard-line concept, our artistic patrimony would inevitably be reduced to an accumulation of fragments admired simply (and mistakenly) for their purity. As part of the Institute’s mission, Brandi set about to develop a philosophy of conservation based on an innovative technique: the restoration of damages by a careful matching of colors and forms, yet executed in such a way that, at medium range, their presence could still be detected. He understood, on the basis of sound optical theory, that images only maintained an aesthetic valence if their actual or, at least, potential integrity were easily perceived. Institute restorers, using delicate, discrete linear strokes of primary colors, closed pictorial losses without attempting to replicate the original surrounding surfaces: an elegant procedure that, in time, was adopted in many of the world’s leading conservation studios. In Italy, this so-called rigatino or tratteggio (literally, “small line”) technique became a standard. One of its earliest and most successful applications was in the Institute’s restoration of Duccio’s monumental Maestà altarpiece in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Siena.

In Florence, however, Brandi’s “Roman” invention was progressively modified—the centuries-old tradition of local rivalries still alive and well. It was as if the reasonable and effective original compromise had become uncomfortable. Perhaps this had something to do with the fact that Florence had been, after all, home to generations of highly sophisticated and talented restorers for whom hiding was a specialty. Whatever the reasons, the rigatino, or versions thereof, has progressively given way to techniques that seem to strive to imitate the fully invisible restorations of the late nineteenth century without wanting to admit it. Whereas the rigatino established, at medium range, a clear distinction between the restoration and the original, the losses on the Raphael’s surface reveal a new approach. They are treated in a curious, mini-pointillist technique which, intriguingly, is dubbed “chromatic selection”—whatever that is meant to signify. The loss almost disappears, but not quite. It now blends in a foggy mist with the original and is visible only at very close range or with the aid of magnification.

Here, then, is the uncomfortable paradox: while striving mightily to become invisible, the “Opificio” restorers at the Uffizi remain, nonetheless, everywhere in plain sight: in the laboriously executed structural and pictorial restoration and, of course, in the panoply of photographic documentation that dominates the proceedings. Given the huge investment in time and care that such an intervention required, the obvious and legitimate question is: What’s the point? Why not simply proceed to a full restoration, one the likes of which Secco Suardo might have approved? Far more importantly, this old-fashioned approach would have allowed the conservators to pay greater attention to other, better preserved, paintings by Raphael. They could have—or should have—noticed how those images actually function, visually. Following these criteria, a restoration could have correctly emphasized the linear precision and pictorial definition that constitute such an essential feature of the forms, both human and inanimate, created by Raphael.

With this one project, the Uffizi restorers have, coincidentally, marked a point in a historical cycle begun in 1547 with the first restoration of the Madonna of the Goldfinch; a cycle that, in a sense, encompasses the development of modern conservation from its very beginning. They have also made clear how conspicuously the discipline has moved to the front and center of our discourse on the visual arts—how the fruition of our cultural patrimony must now, inevitably, be accompanied by a heightened awareness of the art object’s physical characteristics. Visiting the Palazzo Riccardi exhibition may even induce a bit of nostalgia for the time, long ago, when such considerations were less urgently felt and, surely, interfered less.

Notes
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1. “Love, Art and Grace—Raphael: the Madonna of the Goldfinch Restored” was on view at the Palazzo Riccardi in Florence, Italy, from November 23, 2008 through March 1, 2009. Go back to the text.