Within the series
of the Revelations, conservation-restoration procedures on the painting Saint Anne Teaching Mary to Read by Francesco Fontebasso were presented in November
2022. This time, the focus will be on the procedures for the reconstruction of
the lost image of an angel, and the content of the previous Revelations will
also be briefly summarized.
Due
to the poor legibility of the signature written on a stair in the lower
right-hand part of the canvas, the painting had long been attributed to
different Italian painters. Finally, art
historian Matej Klemenčič, supported by archival studies in Venice, managed to
identify the name of the late-Baroque Venetian painter Francesco
Fontebasso (1707–1769). The motif of Mary’s mother Anne teaching her
daughter to read is not to be found anywhere else in Fontebasso’s oeuvre, so it
is deemed unique in terms of his iconography. The present painting used to
serve as the altarpiece in the chapel of the Škofja Loka (Bischoflack) castle,
whereas after the Second World War it was moved to the Ursuline convent in the
Ajmanov grad (Heimann Mansion/ Ehrenau) at Sveti Duh near Škofja Loka.
In the past, certain interventions
were carried out on the painting but were done inexpertly and did not
correspond with the original style of the execution. They were made at a time when restoration
profession was not as defined as it is nowadays and the quality of repairing
artworks did not exceed the skill and expertise of local masters. We decided to
remove the improper reconstruction of the missing original paint layer and
replace it with a more adequate one.
We initially cleaned the surface dirt
from the painting and removed the secondary varnish, solidified the ground and
the paint layer, under-pasted the original canvas with supportive canvas and replaced
the old unsuitable stretcher with a new functional one.
The method and
extent of the reconstruction of the missing paint layer were determined by
several expert commissions consisting of restorers and art history experts. For
content-related, functional and aesthetic reasons, we decided on a complete
reconstruction in the trateggio technique.
The title “In
Search of the Angel” is not merely a poetical metaphor in this specific case,
since we had to make a number of studies and visual examples before we tackled
the reconstruction of the paint layer on the original. Helpful were the minimum
preserved fragments of the original paint layer, X-rays, and reproductions of
drawings and paintings of similar or comparable images of angels by Francesco
Fontebasso.
To produce a
better idea, we made use of the Photoshop programme to mount virtually the
drawings and painting additions executed in reality into the photograph of the
painting. Certain stages of making the image uniform were carried out solely
with a computer. Despite the use of computer technology, such an approach may
be the last of its kind, as the groundbreaking period of introducing artificial
intelligence tools already promises faster and probably better solutions.
A satisfactory
virtual image of the reconstruction of the angel was the basis for the
reconstruction in reality. We transferred the drawing onto a suitably
structured ground – the filling – and completed the missing parts of the
original with a bright gouache paint. After the painting had been varnished,
the final modelling followed along with the definition of the shapes by means
of synthetic resin-based glaze paints. By applying transparent colour hatches
in the directions that defined the shapes, we linked the added parts and the
remains of the original paint layer into a homogeneous whole.