Art
Ill-treated
Brian Sewell
FT he doors of the Royal Academy are to be open on Good Friday so that the public may bow the knee, not to a great icon redolent of the sorrows and mysteries of Tenebrae, but to Mammon. Cocooned in the darkness of a close-carpeted pastiche of Mater Ecclesia, spotlit, is the monumental Cimabue Crucifix, at the midpoint of its tour of New York, Paris, Madrid and Munich. Presentation is by courtesy of Olivetti, who at the press conference, without shame or embarrassment, an- nounced that they were shipping it round the world because Leonardo's `Last Sup- per' had proved immovable. That is not quite the non-sequitur that it may seem. Olivetti are paying for the present restora- tion of the Leonardo; progress is slow, the claims of great revelations disputed, and the possibilities of commercial exploitation dis- tant and doubtful; the firm therefore cast about for a suitably portable masterpiece to which the advertising prestige of the work on the Leonardo might be attached, and chose the Cimabue Crucifix wrecked in the catastrophic Arno flood of 1906.
Leonardo is a household name Cimabue is not, and appears unpro- nounceable to those not versed in Italian. By the time of his death in 1302 he had been relegated to near-oblivion by Dante, and only one surviving work is documented. The Crucifix may well not be by him, and it must substantially ante-date the 1295 foun- dation of the Church of Santa Croce with which it has always been associated. Olivet- ti's handsome catalogue glosses over these problems, just as Alan Irvine's specially designed display gives us Byzantine gloom in place of the brilliant daylight of Santa Croce.
Gloom flatters the restoration — if one can call it that. The damage caused by the flood was massive: much of the face of Christ was lost, large areas of ribcage and abdomen, the whole of the left thigh and much of the right, as well as smaller losses to the flanking figures of the Virgin and Saint John, and in the background, decor- ated and gilded fields. These have been fill- ed with burnished gesso, and then toned with an intricate hatching of tiny strokes of colour that produce what the restorer, Pro- fessor Umberto Baldini, calls variously 'col- our vibration', 'surface abstraction', 'col- our abstraction', and 'neutral links' bet- ween the surviving areas of original paint: he claims that with this method 'the fetishism of the fragments is precluded' and that his restoration is in accordance with the precise and unalterable rule of non- imitation and non-competition'.
Whose unalterable rule? The National Gallery's Hobbema of 'The Avenue at Mid-
delharnis' (twelfth in the popularity stakes there, if the sale of postcards is any guide) has had three skies in my lifetime, and before all three the gallery's itinerant lec- turers have paraded their charges to observe the perfect demonstration of aerial perspec- tive. By Professor Baldini's unalterable rule two thirds of the Hobbema should be hat- ched with colour harmonies that resemble Harris tweed — he offers no recipe of brushstrokes to suggest the blue of the sky, other than a colour synthesis of red and green, but gives two that might be used for the clouds, for he believes that white may be obtained with the successive application of strokes of red, green and blue, or, very differently, of cadmium orange, cobalt blue, and carmine red, and it is with such harmonic vibrations that he has restored the Crucifix. Translate this pseudo- scientific gobbledigook to a popular land- scape and the aesthetic arrogance of the restorer is immediately apparent.
The current vogue for scientific purity in conservation places a barrier between the work of art and the spectator. Works of art are not for the sole benefit of art historians and technicians. Better a palimpsest of restorations that enable an icon to retain its purpose, as in this case, or a landscape to take the spectator for a walk, as with the Hobbema, than this intervention with col- our harmonies that cross contours and flat- ten volumes. The Cimabue restoration was shown to a computer (an Olivetti, no doubt) that responded with the message that the harmonies were no more than one per cent astray from neighbouring original paint; the evidence of the naked eye argues an infinitely greater error. The restorer made no attempt to paint blue blue — even though the lapis of the original could have been perfectly matched; gold leaf is gold leaf, but even that he chose to restore with hatchings athwart the mechanical decora- tion of quatrefoils; the simple restoration of these unimportant background areas would have established the outline of the limbs, and assisted the sense of volume within them — as it is, the network of restoration destroys both. Nothing could be more disastrously hostile.
The wisdom of carting a major painting round Europe and America for the pur- poses of advertising is questionable, but the paint and its underlayers are no longer in contact with the timber structure of the Crucifix, which may flex as much as it chooses with changes in humidity and temperature, for a layer of inert fibreglass now separates it from the painting. Fibreglass as a support for canvas enjoyed a brief vogue among restorers a decade ago, and has alreadY been discarded as demonstrably unsympathetic, but in this context it may provide the only solution — that is, if you insist on peripatetics instead of returning the Crucifix to the relatively stable conditions of the church in which it survived intact for seven centuries.
Whether or not the Crucifix is by Cimabue is important only to art historians; whether or not it is the turning point of the Dark Ages into the Renaissance, as most historians since Vasari would have us believe, matters not a jot — it was a great icon, a statement of the sufferings of Christ, an object of awe and an encourage- ment to belief. It was not a suitable case for the Olivetti treatment,
Previous page
