Conserving Canvas Real Time: Days 8 & 9
Over these last two days we were given tours of Chateau Versailles and Louvre, both on the days of the week when these museums are closed to the public. While incredible to be inside these places without the shoulder-to-shoulder tourists, the one day per week when these museums close are also the days when film crews are given permits for filming. And it just so happened that while we were at Versailles, season 2 of a French tv drama about Marie Antoinette was being filmed, so we saw about a hundred backgrounders and actors dressed in full Rococo style garb in the chateau. While this added to the feeling of authenticity and let me feel like I was really there in the 1700s, we unfortunately weren't allowed to enter the rooms that were being used for filming, which included the famed Hall of Mirrors (ballroom). We did get to take a close look at a huge painting of Louis the 14th and his family that recently underwent restoration and was being prepared to go back on exhibition in the castle. The restoration was beautiful, both the structural treatment and the meticulous highest-calibre inpainting of losses, which were done in a pointillist style so they were visible upon very close inspection, but your eye blended the dots seamlessly when you stood only 1 metre back. The curators also talked to us about conservation challenges of the castle itself, as many of the rooms have enormous painted ceilings, but they can only close one day per week. Chateau Versailles admits 6,000,000 visitors annually, and any type of extended closure would have to be pre-planned, approved, and disclosed to the public years in advance. For small in situ treatments, scaffolding is set up on Sunday night after closure, the work is done on Monday, and then the scaffolding must come down in time for reopening on Tuesday morning. The huge trompe l'oeil mural in the Salon d'Hercule was treated by conservators around 20 years ago, and it is already discoloured and greyish looking, with inpaints looking mismatched. They are unsure why the treatment did not last, or why it discoloured unevenly. There are so many paintings in France: they could never stay on top of the conservation of everything if they had to keep re-treating the same artworks every 20 years (not to mention the cost)... that treatment from the early 2000s should have lasted longer. It was suggested that maybe the greyness is a result of degrading surfactant residues if the conservators didn't do a thorough rinse after using their cleaning solution.
The next day when we had our Louvre tour, once again, we could not enter a large area (including the gallery that holds the Mona Lisa) due to the filming of a documentary. We did, however, get a wonderful private tour by one of our C2RMF curators that included a huge gallery (gloriously empty of tourists) of giant Rubens paintings where he talked about the history of transfers, linings, re-linings (sometimes up to 4 times) on these particular paintings, and how some 18th century treatments have documentation in the archives. There are some "treatment reports" even from way back then! It was fun because we got look at the paintings really closely on the walls, examining canvas weave patterns and transfer imprints. During a normal opening day at a museum, a security guard would have told us to "step back"!
In the afternoon, we got a tour of the C2RMF conservation science labs, located in multiple sub-basements below the Louvre. It was neat to see all the technical equipment they use for material analysis and research, but of course the highlight was seeing the particle accelerator, which fills a whole huge room, and the only one in the world used solely for cultural heritage research. It's used to identify the chemical make-up of an object, and is able to identify very light elements (other methods like XRF mapping aren't useful for elements below aluminum on the periodic table). Very recently they used the equipment on a tiny sample from the Mona Lisa (a sample the width of a human hair) to identify the presence of lead oxide in the ground layer, giving art historians one more bit of information about Da Vinci's working methods.
After the science labs, we were shown the paintings restoration studios inside the Louvre palace. These "ateliers" were magical, with quite a few masterpieces undergoing treatment, including a Holbein, a Van Eyck, and Arcimboldo's Four Seasons. As a freelance conservator myself, I was fascinated to hear about their bid & tender process for selecting conservators to restore the Louvre's masterpieces. They said that they generally do not select the "lowest bid". If they receive half a dozen bids for a restoration, and one is costed significantly lower than the others, they automatically disqualify that bid. The curators use the multiple bids (which include condition reports) to understand how different conservators would approach the challenge, and then select the candidate who seems to understand the painting and its condition issues most deeply.
All in all, this trip has been deeply educative, but also an incredible privilege to be a part of. I look forward to returning home and beginning research and testing to incorporate elements of these working methods into my own practice. Many many thanks to the Getty Foundation and to C2RMF for this amazing opportunity.
